Saginaw Soil
The greenhouses are gone now, the ones young Ted and his father, Otto, fought to save from destruction during a storm so ferocious that it emptied the Saginaw River of its water. In the poem "Big Blow," Roethke wrote of working "all night,/ Stuffing the holes with burlap;/ in the rose-house,/ Where the worst wind was,/ Creaking the cypress window-frames,/ Cracking so much thin glass." The Roethke nurseries were about the most famous in Michigan-more than 25 acres, with 250,000 square feet under glass. A significant number of Roethke's poems were rooted in those gardens.

Otto Roethke was a baby in 1872 when his father, Wilhelm (later William), the former chief forester to German Chancellor Bismarck's sister in East Prussia, left with his wife, Bertha, and five children for Saginaw and established the Wm. Roethke Floral Co. Two of the sons, Karl (later Charles) and Otto, joined the business and built houses nearby.

Courtesy Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation Otto and Helen Huebner Roethke

Otto was the plantsman, the one who worked with his hands; Charles, who lived next door, was the bookkeeper and manager. In 1906, when Otto was 34, he married Saginaw native Helen Huebner, 25. On May 25, 1908, Theodore Huebner Roethke (who was always called Ted) was born and, five years later, his sister Helen June. June would become one of the poet's mainstays as he returned to Saginaw over and over again to regain strength, to live cheaply or to appropriate her typing skills. Because June, who became a 9th grade English teacher, never married and lived in the family house until her death in 1997, Ted was always able to go home again.

Photo by Linda Robinson Walker Childhood home, built c. 1909, preserved thanks to the efforts of cousin Mary Ellen Roethke, Annie Ransford '67 MA and other Saginaw residents.

Otto and Helen had the children baptized privately at home when they were 11 and 6, but not in the Lutheran church, just as they did not teach their children to speak German. They chose a Presbyterian church, whose minister, Henry W. Fischer, was one of the two references Roethke used as a student in Michigan.

It is not surprising that Roethke's poetry displays a technician's knowledge of horticulture and focuses as much on the work required to raise them as on the flowers themselves. Allan Seager '28, who was a U-M English professor and Roethke's principal biographer (The Glass House, 1968; reissued by U-M Press, 1991) recounted the time that Roethke scoured a Vermont mountain to get a flower not because it was pretty, but because it was of professional interest.

Photo by Linda Robinson Walker When the Roethke home was put up for sale in 1998, his cousin Mary Ellen Roethke (l.), and Annie Ransford stepped in and bought it, allowing the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation to begin to raise money to purchase and restore it. The house is the center for a variety of readings, tours, poetry workshops and other cultural activities. Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, 1805 Gratiot Ave., Saginaw, MI 48602, (517) 846-6435.

Indeed, a poem like "Root Cellar" dashes flowery sentiment: "And what a congress of stinks!—/ Roots ripe as old bait,/ Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,/ Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks."

Roethke told the Saginaw News during a visit in 1949 that he had been lucky to come from Saginaw, where he could draw on "a whole field of imagery which has not been worked over" and, explaining the persistent motif of his father's greenhouses, said, "Any serious writer uses the imagery he saw and heard and felt about him as a youth. This is the imagery most vivid to him. It becomes symbolic."

The Face Lost in a Maze of Water
On April 29, 1923, less than a month before Ted's 15th birthday, his father died at 52. Otto had first sickened in October 1922, shortly after he and his brother Charles had a falling out and sold the greenhouses that month for between $50,000 and $100,000. On January 25, 1923, Charles Roethke fatally shot himself. Otto, finally diagnosed with cancer, died painfully and horribly, with Ted and June hovering in the hallway.

Roethke wrote over and over again about losing his father, remembering in "The Premonition," for instance, the river throwing back his father's reflection: "But when he stood up, that face/ Was lost in a maze of water." As a high school sophomore, Roethke had in six months lost the greenhouses, his uncle and his father. Seager said that he didn't grieve outwardly, but on the night of the funeral, "he took his father's place at the head of the table and he sat there from that day on."

What was Otto Roethke like? Above all he was an iconoclast. His son wrote that Otto had hated the Prussian "poop-arse aristocrats" who "fed their families into the army." It was to spare his sons the draft that Otto's father had fled Prussia. Roethke depicted his father as stern and short-tempered, but also a teacher whose sometimes-slow pupil, Ted himself, may have annoyed him. Some poems express the agony of a son bereft of a father whom he'd often been angry with and whose authority intimidated him. A son who felt that death had come before father and son could forgive each other. A son regretful that his father hadn't lived long enough to approve the man he'd become.