A Family Tradition

This has me a little floored.

I spent some time out in the back yard this morning, pruning shrubbery with my bullwhips. When I came in, my Dad asked me about my whips. I, of course, waxed rhapsodic about the joys of cracking whips.

Dad told me that when he was little, his (and my) Uncle Bill (career army, never married, spent his retirement visiting children at a children's hospital, left me something in his will as he was always fond of me) came back from some trip abroad and gave my grandfather the gift of a bullwhip. So my grandfather had a new hobby. He would set up beer cans on a shelf in the basement and take target practice with them with his bullwhip which my Uncle Bill showed him how to use. My grandmother hated this. She would order my Dad and his two brothers to stay outside or upstairs when my grandfather was throwing his whips.

My grandparents used something that my father described as a 'cat of nine tails' for punishment. Dad described it as nine lengths of braided leather. (Uh... that's a cat alright.) When they would do something 'bad,' my grandfather would be greeted at the door after a long day at work with "Edward gets two with the cat," or "Howard gets three with the cat" from my grandmother. (My grandfather later told my Dad he hated this. When he got home from work, he wanted to spend time with his three young sons, not take down their pants and whoop them with the cat o' nine tails.)

Anyway, once my Dad and his brothers did something that my grandparents decided was really really really bad. My grandfather said that it was so bad that he might have to use the bullwhip on them. Hearing this, my grandmother got the bullwhip, took it down to the cellar, and consigned it to the flames of the coal furnace. My grandfather was heartbroken. "You didn't really think," he said, "that I'd use that whip on one of our boys, did you? That was just bluster."

So not only was my grandfather a whipsmen, but he was an early innovator of the precepts of Safe Sane and Consensual. Kind of.

Longtime readers will know that my grandfather and I were very close. We were born the same day, same hour, exactly sixty years apart. He introduced me to the joys of baseball. (And I've been watching the Phillies, not the Yankees, since I've been here in Bucks County, so I've been thinking about him a lot.) It's a shame that we never had the opportunity to throw whips together in the back yard, pruning the trees and shrubbery.

And I wonder what ever happened to that cat o' nine tails?

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