I’m always thinking about history. Its immediate connections seem to lie just below the surface of everything. Driving across Upstate New York on New Year’s Day, the recent Tsunami reports on the radio with their echoes of the 1883 eruption of Krakatora sent me thinking backwards in time. Almost one hundred and twenty years ago, my great grandmother was just settling into her new life in Wichita, Kansas. Her name was Helen but she was called Lenchen by those who knew her well and she had only recently arrived with her husband and small son from Germany. For years to come, that Indonesian volcano and its ensuing Tsunami launched not only news reports but also climatic changes that reached around the world. Did my great grandmother even know of that disaster?

Almost immediately after the young family arrived in that cattle town, another son was born. Lenchen was not familiar with the weather of the Great Plains and she might not have noticed on her own the unusual draught that stuck the land in the ensuing years. Her days were busy ones. Soon, a daughter was born and the family moved to Texas. Raising small children in a foreign land, my great grandmother might not have paid much attention to the ongoing news of the Krakatoa disaster, although its far reaching effects were literally at her doorstep. In 1886, the year my grandmother was born in El Paso blizzards rocked the Great Plains. The distance of Krakatoa and the closeness of its repercussions perhaps seemed quite slim to my great grandmother in comparison to the birth of her fourth child.

With history always running through my head, I wasn’t surprised to find myself thinking of my father, as my husband and I were getting ready to watch the Rose Bowl game on a large color T.V. in a small hotel room in Buffalo, New York on January 1, 2005. We were on our way back home to Ann Arbor, Michigan from Lake Placid, New York. After 6 days of partaking in all the exuberance that my three generational family affords, we were quite content with the coziness of each other’s company. Neither one of us is young anymore: I will turn 57 in just two weeks.

I have no idea what the Rose Bowl meant to my father on New Year’s Day in 1948. There is nothing tangible that connects me to him and that day. I can imagine thought that since my father had spent some time in Ann Arbor as a student and because he was in the music business, he must have been very interested in the national fanfare that his close friend Bill Rivelli and his Michigan Marching Band were helping to stir up that day in Pasadena. Just three years earlier, my dad had verified his allegiance to the University of Michigan by establishing a small music scholarship there. If for no other reason than to listen to the parade of instruments playing in the warm California sun, my father I’m sure stayed close to the radio that first day of January in 1948.

But that probably wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Earlier that morning, freezing rain hit Chicago along with wind gusts of 50-60 miles an hour. Airports were closed and many radio towers were down. The New York Times reported that mechanical difficulties interrupted the broadcasts of many radio stations. Even the WNBC station which was broadcasting the game starting at 3:45 Chicago time had difficulties. Soon after the broadcast began, the rain stopped and a “baby blizzard” began dropping five inches of snow on the Windy City. This rollicking January 1, was to be my father’s last New Year’s Day, just eight months earlier he had been diagnosed with cancer.

There was a hopefulness sharing the airwaves with the Michigan Marching Band that day in our family’s Chicago apartment. As my dad listened to the radio, he was also keenly aware that in just two weeks a new baby was due to arrive in his young family. My mother’s always excellent health and my parents’ always optimistic spirit would have made this expectation of new life the focus of the holiday season. There were already two young daughters and a toddler son in their budding family. The holidays had kept everyone’s spirits high. On that cold Chicago day, which had so little natural light, the children’s antics played along side Bill Rivelli’s Marching Band. Together, they enlivened the sound waves emanating from our ground floor Chicago apartment.

In 1948, it had been 46 years since Michigan played in its last Rose Bowl game. Their last appearance was in the very first Rose Bowl of 1902. Then, the Wolverines beat the Trojans by an astounding 49-0. Amazingly, they repeated that exact score in their second Rose Bowl appearance in 1948. The announcers must have gone wild and my father would have listened delightedly to history repeating itself. Michigan has appeared in many rose Bowl games since then, so this game in 2005 wasn’t such a rarity for of Michigan fans of our generation. But it was the first time that the Texas Long Horns had played in Pasadena. Thoughts of my grandmother and the pride she took in her Texas birthplace settled into the game with me. She was the only one of her four siblings to be born in Texas and it pleased her immensely.

In our Buffalo hotel room, the T.V. announcers spent some time talking about the impending rain in Pasadena. Its nearness threatened to dampen this traditionally sunny extravaganza. Its menace paled however, against the thoughts of the recent Tsunami whose images were in everyone’s mind. In Buffalo oddly enough, there was no snow on the ground which was very strange for this time of year. Instead, it had been raining on and off all day as David and I drove west across Upper New York State. We felt lucky for the rain and were glad that it wasn’t snow. We didn’t even worry about the baby crib that is well wrapped in the bed of our truck. We carried this for Mary who flew with her parents from Chicago to be the youngest member of our Lake Placid party.

Just after the game started David’s cell phone rang announcing a call from his daughter on the west coast. Effortlessly, Seattle reached into our hotel room and we are ushered into the private world that Jenny and her husband are fashioning there. Without the tether of wires, Jenny’s husband shares a secret with Jenny’s dad; the whisper of a coming new baby.

The Rose Bowl game, although fun to watch lost much of its splendor with this Seattle disclosure. Graceful, invisible and uninterrupted by weather some connections continue to unite us no matter how far we travel away from each other.

Poste Posthumously 2/17/2026