Lew in his fedora and zip up sweater is a big man shrunken by age, but you can still tell he was a working man and strong. He stands a bit apart from the others.

Fay is holding Thelma’s baby Butch and stands between Lew and Mabel. He’s newly in uniform complete with cap and sports cool aviator sunglasses. He’s thin and the only one trying to smile.

Like in so many family photos, Mabel stands close to Fay, touching him with her arm around his back. She clutches her purse in the other hand. She’s well put together, decked out in a floral suit, hair primped just so, with earrings and a bracelet.

Thelma stands next to her mother, stylish, holding on to some kind of sack. Fay is holding her son Butch. She’s looking down, pursing her lips. One could imagine that she’d rather be elsewhere.

Young Mabel in northern Michigan

The Story goes that Mabel was a lonely girl born before the turn of the century. Her mother died when she was eight and her father abandoned her at a lumber camp when she was 14. By the time she was 16, she was pregnant and ended up marrying Lewis Roderick who was nine years older than her. In 1906, she gave birth to her only child Thelma.

She was hard on them both for the rest of her life.

You just know she is *doomed and beyond repair.*

In reality, the camps were pretty organized at the end of the 19^th century and there were probably a number of other women working in the kitchen and serving the men. They were real camps with bunkhouses and kitchen buildings. By the time these girls were 14, they were pretty tough too, otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted. It wasn’t a good or easy life, but it wasn’t dire.

Mabel might have lived beyond the rules of propriety, but her man married her and that was as good as it was going to get.

They never owned a home, never owned a car, never had more children. Mabel took in laundry, cooked and waited on tables. She was never idle, driven by a need to be seen as better, respectable. They ended up in Boyne City, the house where the photo was taken.

Scrubbing off Mabel's taint of disappointments

When Fay entered the lives of the Rodericks, Mabel was still young, not much over 30. Her husband had always felt like an old man, but now at over 40 he seemed ancient. He was still drinking and carousing and causing her shame, but she ruled their home and Lew paid a high price for his behavior.
Both of them worked hard at menial jobs, but she was neat and the house was always spotless and orderly. She believed in class distinctions and she presented herself and her daughter as better than most despite history to the contrary. In photos, her daughter Thelma is always well turned out and had a reputation as a spoiled child.
Mabel set the rules, but Lew let Thelma do whatever she wanted. That tension ended only when Lew stopped talking much when he reached his 60s.

Lew was a quiet man by the time I met him. Dressed impeccably, always in a dress shirt and tie with suspenders holding up his pants. He often wore a fedora. He smelled good. He was an affectionate great grandfather, taking my younger sister and me on his lap, letting us play with the watch and fob that were looped by small chains into his vest pockets.

Inside the pocket watch was a photo of my mother and Aunt Shirley when they were young girls. We were fascinated by this quiet and gentle man.

My mother always spoke of her grandfather with great affection as well. She had few kind words to describe Mabel, but she felt she and Lew were often in the same boat when it came to being under the burden of Mabel’s harsh rules of propriety.
The story of Lew always starts with him being a lumberjack and a drunk. It’s clear that he was a hard working man, a laborer with skills having spent time lumbering, working at a tannery, fixing some of the first cars in the only garage in town. I don’t know how my mother knew he was a drinking man, if she witnessed his behavior or was only told about it. 

It’s hard to imagine the great grandfather I knew as someone who imbibed at all.

The only other story my mother told was that Lew’s mother Helen and Mabel didn't get along. A single portrait I have of Helen shows a woman in her best clothes with a grim demeanor. The family tree indicates that she had a daughter at 21, but didn't marry Lew’s father until she was 23. Maybe Helen and Mabel had more in common than they liked to think. Or maybe they knew each other’s secrets too well. Helen was taken during the 1918 flu epidemic so her influence was somewhat short-lived.

Thelma at 8

Thelma at 10

Thelma at 15

But she was the only child of two lonely people who married because they had to and she was the princess of her realm for a relatively long reign. Lew doted on his precious Thelma and worked hard to make sure they had a roof over their heads and food on the table. He was permissive and, possibly, even loving toward his little girl. Thelma acted like a spoiled child when I knew her as my grandmother and she came by it naturally. 

Two years after Etta died, Fay was boarding in a house with his father Alfred and older brother Roy in Lansing, the state’s capitol and 1½ hours south of Remus. Oddly, Alfred owned a pool hall and Roy was working there, while Fay was enrolled in school.