Grace Majors Boswell - Spane's Great Grandmother
Grace was the daughter of Monroe Alpheus Majors and Georgia Green. She had a younger half sister, Margaret Bonds.
My grandmother, Grace Majors Boswell, told me this story when I was just a little girl, and it bears repeating. It is almost a parabel. I am not sure exactly what year this happened, but from what I can piece together, it had to be sometime between 1960 and 1963 - so I am going for 1960.
The Black Naugahyde Couch
My grandfather, Warren A. Boswell really liked to listen to the baseball game on the radio. He especially liked yelling at his home team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. When the ball game was on the radio, my grandfather did not want to be bothered by anything.
My grandmother, Grace Majors Boswell, had ordered a black naugahyde couch from Sears Roebuck. Sears was the place where you ordered your furniture if you wanted to save money, and with a family of five, saving money was important. Although the children were all gone by then, they still visited a lot, and old habits die hard.
The couch finally arrived, packed in a large cardboard box. My grandmother was very excited to have her couch, and wanted to see it right away, so she went to ask my grandfather if he would please open the box.
It might have been that the Dodgers were trying for the World Series ( they won a pennant in 1960 ), and Papu ( pronouced Pop poo ) was having nothing to do with it. He said "Grace, I'll open the box after the game is over!", and calmly turned the radio up a notch. He must have been losing his hearing by then, because he would sit with his ear to the radio so he didn't miss anything. For some reason, he never wanted to watch the game on television.
Well, grandmother had a very sharp, very long chef's knife, and she decided to open the box herself. In cutting the fastenings off, she managed to cut through the box itself. I think she stopped at that point and waited for her husband to help her.
When Papu finally came to help her, and got the sofa out of the box, they discovered that not only had the knife come through the box, it had also made a big slash on the front of the couch, about 12 inches long.
Papu said that they would not try to return the couch, that it would serve as a lesson for everyone who sat on it to have patience. It did not go into the livingroom as planned, it went into the family room.
As Papu had said, everyone who sat on that couch heard the story. I heard it, and I was actually the last person to have that couch. The picture of the black naugahyde sofa on this page is not the actual sofa in question - just one that looks similar to the one in the story. It finally got too old to fix or save, and it went out on the curb. But the lesson was learned, as I pass it on to Spane.
