Uncle Leonard (actually my Great Uncle) was my Grandfather Arendt's brother, and is the man on the right in this photo. I didn't know Leonard, and only met him once by accident. My brother and I spent a great deal of time at my Grandparent's house due the fact that both our parents worked. Their house backed up to Houghton Park, with a yard was filled with my Grandfather's roses.
One summer day my brother and I were in the back yard when a man came up to the fence and motioned us to come to the fence that separated they yard from the park. Before we got to the fence my Grandmother came storming out of the house and yelled for us to get indoors. She went to the fence, spoke briefly with the man and he went away. "Don't ever talk to that man again", my Grandmother warned, "he's a bum."
We knew all about bums. Bums were men who lived by the railroad tracks at the far end of the park. They did horrible things to little boys who wandered in to their wild domain of overgrown weeds and trees. We would get all sorts of dire warnings from my Grandmother. We couldn't go to bathroom when she took us to the movies in downtown Buffalo. Her reasoning was that black boys lurked in the bathroom and would cut the "pee pees" off little white boys. I'm always amazed how much of my childhood revolved around the terrible horrors that lurked in the shadows and would befall unsuspecting little boys.
Needless to say we never saw the bum again. The truth to his identity would not be revealed until I started family history research. Leonard was a happy guy by all accounts. When he came home from military service in World War II he was a changed man. He turned to alcohol in what today would be considered a classic symptom of self-medication for PTSD. Leonard was not a bum who lived in the mythic hobo village that existed to scare little children. He lived with various relatives and friends around Kaisertown. My grandparents fed him and gave him money. He would show up at the fence for hand-outs periodically. We happened to be in the yard when he made one of his visits.
Leonard died in 1966 and there was never any mention in the family about his death. I don't know if anyone from our part of the family attended the funeral. He was not among the collection of mass cards my mother kept of family members who passed. My mother, who claims to remember very little about family history, doesn't have much to say about him. My family is full of mysteries and conveniently forgotten stories about the people who came before me. Much of the information I have gleaned has come from other relatives outside of my immediate family.
I often envy people who have kept intimate records of their family's history and can trace their lineage back for many generations. In our family, forgetting the past seems to be like a band-aid put over the wounds of painful memories.
