More Ruthie Rumbles: Going to the Show?

Ruthie is at it again. She pulled one of her famous stunts on one of the nurses yesterday, one that we all got stung by many times growing up here at 3535.
She was at the nurse’s station when she observed one of the nurses comin’ ‘round the bend tugging at her hind quarters trying to loosen her scrubs which were sticking to her skin. Ruthie saw this and gave her once familiar quip, "You going to the show?"


The nurse (since this is a public blog, I won’t mention her by name, just say she’s the red head) stood in front of Mom totally nonplussed. "What! What are you talking about? What show? I’m not going to any show." And then Ruthie layed on the punchline, "Well, you’re picking your seat."

As all my family members well know, this is a very old Howard joke which Mom played on us all through our childhoods and which her mother played on her and all the other Howard children growing up in Ann Arbor during the Great Depression. Picking your seat. Evidently, none of these nurses had ever heard this joke before. They all stood there for a few moments thinking about it, thinking about what it could possibly mean – then eureka! It hit them all, and all at once. And they all practically collapsed laughing. When I came in late in the afternoon, I was accosted. The whole staff could not wait to tell me the story of how Ruthie had gotten them all.

I sat with her for dinner and we exchanged more humorous stories and I told her all about the Japanese Konami Ensemble at the Tuesday Musicale which I will be writing about in more detail soon. It’s when I complained to her about having grabbed a quick burger at Wendy’s on my way to the appointment I had right after the Musicale, and I was surprised that a single at Wendy’s now costs nearly four dollars, that she came up with her next humorous story of growing up in A2. "You know my grandfather Charlie Merrell used to complain about the price of hamburgers too. Refused to pay 35 cents for a burger, instead came to our house and ate my mother out of house and home." She said they always thought that was funny. Here Charlie Merrell was one of the weatlthiest men in Ypsi and he wouldn’t pay 35 cents for a burger and instead burdened a mother with nine children. I said that 35 cents was probably a lot of money for a burger in the 1920s. I remember being a boy in the 1960s and paying 25 cents for a burger. Remember the Red Barn? We all thought that was such a bargain because their burgers were only a dime. And that was the 1960s. So I would imagine that in the 1920s, it had to be a heck of great burger for 35 cents.

I said, "Now Mom, is this the same Charlie Merrell that had his chance to be the first stockholder in an upstart little company called Ford Motor, and turned it down because he didn’t believe there was any future for these new-fangled horseless carriages." "Yep, one and the same. If Charlie had invested a thousand dollars when he had the chance, we’d all be millionaires."

So I guess the Howards got it from both ends. On the Merrell side, they turned down the chance to be the founding investors of Ford. On the Howard side, they refused to take a train ride to Syracuse to check out an inheritance that had been left them by a millionaire who had named our great-grandfather John Howard in her will in 1927.