I had skated alongside my Grandfather Link’s home, made the turn at the backside of the house, and coasted to the doorway of his shop.
He was standing inside at his anvil, tapping a metal plate to the bottom heel of my Grandmother’s shoe.
The shop fascinated me and I did not often see the inside because during the week the door was closed while he was at work out Crittenden Drive at the Wood Mosaic Plant where he was a blacksmith.
Jacob Link was apprenticed during his teenage years when horses and carriages were the means of transportation. After horses moved out to farmlands and carriages were shuttered in barns, his skills found a new direction being much needed by organizations that required toolmakers who could invent as well as create. He could do both.
But this was a Sunday afternoon and we had returned from Mass at Saint Leo’s Catholic Church, had lunch and I was free to skate mostly along the sidewalk along the front of the house.
Jacob Link looked up from his anvil and saw me standing in the doorway. Giving me a quick smile he said, “You run along and play.”
I was glad to be spending some summer vacation time with my Grandparents at 4435 Crittenden Drive in Highland Park. You can’t find that address now. It was leveled with other houses when progress brought a highway exit to the Drive. Not much of Highland Park is left. Mohawk Drugstore is no longer there or St. Leo’s School, Rectory, Church, or Highland Theater.
Long gone are Wampum and Ottawa Streets where Aunt Gertie, Uncle Jess, Aunt Annie, and Uncle Clarence lived. Aunt Gertie’s organ is not there and neither is Aunt Annie’s large shell with its ocean’s sound. Uncle Clarence’s side yard rose garden went away. Jean has their windup record player-Victrola that amused us when we listened to “Big Rock Candy Mountain”.
Grandmother Link taught me to embroider, which she called, “fancy work”. I learned how to make a “French knot” and how to pull my purple printed material taught on my embroidery hoop before I began to stitch.
In the afternoon I would sit on the front porch with her and help break the tips off green beans while watching the cars driving along the road from the morning shift of workers at International Harvester.
Later, Grandfather Link would arrive from work, pulling into the yard on his bicycle with a black domed lunchbox perched in the handlebar basket.
He would spend time in his garden until supper was ready. In the years when homeowners grew “Victory Gardens”, Grandfather Link grew plants for them to start in their garden.
He began in January with seeds kept from the previous season. Under his cold frames, the seedlings grew to become the sturdy plants that he sold after his “Plants For Sale” sign was staked at the edge of the front yard.
In later years. Jacob F. Link showed me his desk in the kitchen and told me that he had earned money from selling plants to buy it. And in later years, he lent me $300.00 as a down payment on the Ford Fairlane 500 1957 car that we bought in North Carolina.
But- today I was the child who stood frozen in the doorway of his shop, inhaling the strange smells of oil and old lumber. The walls were lined with tools I did not recognize as useful but I knew he was comfortable with handling. After all, he had made an addition to the back of the home and built a Smoke House in the backyard.
Quite often I think of him turning to me and saying “You run along and play.”
I returned to my playtime but that snapshot moment of him standing in his shop comes back whenever I smell oil or old lumber. I am certain my belief that I could do anything comes from watching Jacob Francis Link, working at his anvil, because he could and did.