"There's Our Little Grey Home in the West"--Words from My Father

When my parents moved from Hiram, Ohio--where they'd lived between 1956-1966--to Des Moines, Iowa (where they both would teach at Drake University), they decided to "downsize" and live in an apartment building on Americana Court downtown.  The building was a sort of high-rise, grey on the outside, new at the time (I recall).

The first time I visited them there--during spring break of my first year of teaching in Aurora (spring 1967)--I flew for the first time in my life.  I was 22 years old, and--with great improbability--on my flight from Cleveland to Chicago was Nan Dimity, the girls' phys ed instructor at Aurora Middle School.  We sat together--and she calmed my first-time-flyer fears.  (To me, every groan and rumble was the soundtrack of imminent disaster.)

My parents picked me up at the airport and drove me to their new place downtown--and as the building came into view, my dad sighed, "There's our little grey home in the west."

I thought that was a little odd--but Dad was full of odd sayings (after a meal: I feel like I swallowed something; it's raining: lingle-lingle-lingle outside; a cat: a trownitz--an onomatopoetic word; so on), so I didn't really think anything of it.  Not that initial time, not the other 10,000 times he said it before, tiring of apartment life, they bought a home on the north side of town where they lived until they retired and moved out to Oregon.  I never again heard him say "little grey home in the west"--even though their new place in Oregon was actually grey (weathered cedar shingles) and was about as far west as you can get in the continental United States--perched on a cliff near Ecola State Park above the Pacific Ocean in Cannon Beach!

Then--just last week--I was reading a book I'm reviewing, and the author mentioned that he'd bought a "little grey home in the west."  What ... ?

That sent me immediately to Google, where I quickly (of course) found that "Little Grey Home in the West" was a popular and very sentimental song during World War I.  Here are the lyrics:

LITTLE GREY HOME IN THE WEST

When the golden sun sinks in the hills

And the toil of a long day is o'er

Though the road may be long, in the lilt of a song

I forget I was weary before

Far ahead, where the blue shadows fall

I shall come to contentment and rest

And the toils of the day will be all charmed away

In my little grey home of the west

There are hands that will welcome me in

There are lips I am burning to kiss

There are two eyes that shine just because they are mine

And a thousand things other men miss

It's a corner of heaven itself

Though it's only a tumble-down nest

But with love brooding there, why no place can compare

With my little grey home in the west.

And here is a YouTube recording of a performance of the song: Link

And here's another link to a long-ago audio recording: Link

And here's a link to the sheet music: Link--copyright 1911, music by Hermann Löhr and lyrics by D. Eardley-Wilmot.

 Is the Internet amazing?  All this I discovered in a matter of moments while sitting with my laptop, sipping coffee (I was sipping, not the laptop).

I also discovered a set of printed cards with song lyrics--cards that showed a WW I soldier in positions of repose and reflection, presumably thinking of the words, hearing the music in his imagination and memory.

Next--I hopped on eBay, typed in the key words, and found and bought an old 78 rpm recording of the song performed by Irish tenor John McCormack, one of my father's favorite tenors.  (Here's a Link to McCormack singing on YouTube.)  As I write these words, the recording has not yet arrived from the seller, but I want it here--now.  I want to hear that Irish voice I heard soaring from the hi-fi's in our house all those years of my boyhood.  I want to hear my own father's voice--he was a fine tenor as well--singing along with McCormack's.  I want to be in that car, coming from the Des Moines airport in the spring of 1967.  I want to hear my father, as he sees the building, saying, "There's our little grey home in the west."  I want to tell my father a hundred thousand things I neglected to tell him.  And I want to do it all to music.