A Story About My Mom
In the Bygone Years column, there is a paragraph about The Katzenjammer Kids coming to the Osmond city hall 100 years ago, so I did a little research. I thought they looked very similar to the characters in the Max and Moritz stories and books my mom had told me about, which are well known in Germany. Turns out the Katzenjammer Kids is based on Max and Moritz.
This led me to reminisce about one of the Max and Moritz pranks, and the story Mom told us many times when my sisters and I were kids – just one of the many stories she told us and which I finally ended up putting into a book for her shortly before she passed away.
Anyway, the prank they pulled was this: The boys collect bags full of “May bugs,” (Mai Kafer, more like a beetle), which they promptly deposit in their Uncle Fritz’s bed. Uncle is nearly asleep when he feels the bugs walking on his nose. Horrified, he goes into a frenzy, killing them all before going back to sleep.
My mom, when she was a teenager living in East Germany, and her friends decided to pull a similar prank. They gathered bags full of the May bugs, then climbed up a pole to the second floor of a teacher's home and put the bugs in his bed.
The teacher and his wife ended up coming upstairs before the kids were done, so they quickly scurried out the window and down the pole, and then waited. . .
It didn’t take long before the wife apparently got into bed, and the kids soon heard her shrieking! They must have laughed, and the teacher looked out and saw some of them, because he came to my mom’s house and spoke with her father, yelling “It’s not funny! They were crawling up her nighty!” Fortunately for my mom, her father was kind of a rebel as well and thought it was funny!
That was my mom!
By The Way. . .
Just a note on a different subject: With the veteran’s story about Elmer Schlangen in last week’s Osmond Republican, I have concluded my stories on the World War I veterans — as far as I know. I will now start on the stories of the veterans of World War II.
