It is also the midwife of tradition and ultimately, the grandmother of family memory.
Hazel Fern Baker mixed all that together into one dish she made for her six children, most of them born in the Depression, and later her grandchildren.
At a memento-making party June 27 at her granddaughter Cindy Gatten’s home on Old Mill Road, Mrs. Baker’s surviving children and grandchildren all mentioned that favorite dish: potato noodles.
Just as those outside the family call one of Hazel’s sons Chuck instead of Charles or Charlie, some of them call the dish “potato with noodles.”
The cook was from Pedrow, a town family members generously describe as a suburb of Ironton. She married Chillicothe-born Robert Davis. After he worked a stint at Crowell-Collier, he worked for the Springfield Transit Company.
Because she didn’t work outside the home, Hazel and Bob raised their six children on a busman’s salary.
On that budget, Hazel managed to make other memorable foods: sugar cookies with chocolate icing, custard pie, raisin pie and a special chocolate cocoa cake. Family members said Charlie always ate the first piece of that cake.
Although grandchildren remember something called “float,” a chocolate dessert akin to a pudding or mousse, it’s the potato noodles — made without the expense of meat — that the family remember most.
The dish contained Hazel’s homemade noodles and a broth made of well-cooked potatoes.
The potatoes thickened the broth and with seasoning, made homemade noodles into a family delicacy.
Loving perfectionist
When the grandchildren visited the house to have those noodles, they didn’t just sit around. They did their share of work and learned grandma’s ways.
“Everything had to be perfect, everything had to be just so,” Gatten said.
“I cut the grass and trimmed those bushes to the nubs,” she said. “Not only that, the weeds had to be removed from between the bricks of the front sidewalk.
“And when we put that mower back on the back porch, it had to go on a rug a certain way and be covered by a rug,” she said.
Standards were equally precise inside.
“It was spotless, absolutely spotless. There was never any dust,” Gatten said. “There were never any dishes in the sink. Everything was in its place.”
And when Gatten was older, when her grandmother’s house was straightened up, “she’d come to my house and do the same thing to mine.”
The demand for neatness did not discourage people from coming over, said daughter-in-law Barbara Davis.
“Her house was always open. You always felt welcome.”
Barbara got a memorable lesson about hospitality on her wedding night.
The wedding suite
They may have felt as though they were on their own, but Charles and Barbara Davis were among many young people who traveled south to elope in Kentucky in the late 1940s.
Both 17 at the time, “we took the Greyhound bus from Springfield to Cincinnati, and then we had to take a cab over to Kentucky,” Barbara said.
“We had to call home and got permission from our parents,” Charles said. “So they wired permission. Needless to say, (Barbara’s) mother wasn’t too happy with me.”
With little money and without the benefit of a wedding planner, they weren’t sure where they’d stay for their wedding night.
Her place was definitely out.
“But my mother took us in,” Charles said, “and things were all right after that.”
His mother-in-law came around and although his parents “thought we were a little young,” they offered encouragement, Charles said.
“I remember my dad said at the time, ‘If anybody’s going to make a go of it, Charlie is.’ ”
Sixty one years later, Charles and Barbara are still married.
A free ride
If Bob Davis wasn’t Ralph Cramden, the bus driver played by Jackie Gleason in the “Honeymooners,” he was a character nonetheless.
Everyone remembers Grandpa Davis — at 6 feet, a foot taller than his wife — with a cup of coffee in his hand, a pack of Camels rolled up in his sleeve and a bus driver’s cap in his lap.
Because of his work, he seemed to know everybody.
“Dad was a hard working guy,” Charles said. “He drank a bit, but nothing excessive. My two brothers and I, he’d always take us out in the driveway and use the garage as a backstop and hit pepper to us.
“He’d go to our games. We had (a) sandlot then. He’d umpire some or the games, but he was always interested.”
Charles still remembers the day he was a senior in high school and the Springfield team was facing Hamilton and their ace pitcher, future Reds star Joe Nuxhall.
“I struck out, and I heard a big voice from the stands: ‘You can’t hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder.’ ”
And just as he offered his brand of encouragement that day, Bob helped out when Charlie and Barbara were starting to raise kids in a former stable that had been converted into apartments.
“In those days, we never had any money, we didn’t have a car,” Barbara said. “And for entertainment, we would get on the bus and ride from one end of town to the other” — without charge, of course.
Grandson Jim Davis also remembers his grandfather’s spot in the chair just to the right, inside the front door.
It’s from that spot “he’d grab you and give you a Dutch rub.”
Carrying on
On April 9, 1963, Robert H. Davis died in a bus accident.
His passing at 58 was sudden and shocking. But it didn’t stop the tradition of gathering at the Davis home. Sunday afternoon dinners were still held.
So was the Christmas gathering, which had another tradition, as Hazel’s youngest, Ginger Bobst, recalls.
“If I wasn’t an hour early,” her mother would start fussing about the arrival of the turkey, saying “I just don’t know where that Ginger is.”
For a time, that same kind of anxiety led for the family “to be our own scanner,” said Hazel’s granddaughter, Pam Sine.
Sine’s father and Hazel’s son, Bob, was on the fire department, and “she made us follow the squad all the time” — sometimes in a car, Sine said.
Grandma had other charming attributes.
Sine remembers that when she stayed the night, Grandma Davis would let them stay up until the TV test patterns came on.
Jim Davis recalls grandma watching professional wrestling and getting so beside herself, she’d throw her slipper at the TV.
Years later, the story emerged about an Army recruiter making a cold call, thinking that because her two older sons had been in the service, she’d be happy to have Charlie go.
“She threw him out,” Charles said. “She actually never mentioned that to me until years afterwards. She just kept things like that to herself.”
She’d also keep radishes in the refrigerator in a glass of water because he liked them and bologna and cheese around in case Charles stopped by and wanted to have a sandwich on the back porch swing.
In memory of her, Charles keeps a bottle of Tab in his refrigerator, just as she always did, complete with the sign that reads “don’t touch.”
He also has that old porch swing.
Memory rebar
Because the house had been out of the family for years and the wrought iron railing had salvage value, the Davis family wasn’t able to claim it.
But when Cindy Gatten got the idea of having the family assemble stepping stone mementos of Grandma and Grandpa Davis’ house, she was able to get the bricks from the sidewalk she’d cleared of weeds in her childhood.
She had a friend slice them, then she bought a brick and tile cutter and made them into smaller pieces so they could be part of the stepping stones. They were joined by a picture of the Grant Street home and the sort of trinkets Grandma would collect from gumball machines and put on her refrigerator.
Gatten, who makes mementos, was excited about the project, but surprised when 28 family members said they were interested.
All that interest may be the result of what kept everyone going back to Grandma Davis’ house for Sunday dinner.
“It was important to grandma, and nobody wanted to let her down,” Gatten said.
Like the little pieces of rebar Gatten had prepared to strengthen the stepping stones, Hazel Davis’ expectations helped hold her family together — expectations reinforced with something more powerful than rebar: potato noodles.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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