By Bob Batz, Jr.
Pittsburgh Post-GazetteFrank Wildauer's nearly 50-year love affair with his lawn has been beautiful, but not perfect.
He made early mistakes.
He was green.
The relationship started in 1954. Wildauer and his wife Audrey moved from their apartment into a new stone house her parents bought on in Churchill, Pa.. Suddenly he had a huge new responsibility: 8,000 square feet of grass.
Wildauer didn't know anything about lawns but did fine with his learn-as-you-mow approach.
When his grass started to look sick in the summer of '62, he bought some newfangled fertilizer. The manufacturer advised that it could be applied once a month or once a year, so Wildauer went the latter route, thinking it'd be easier.
"Burned the whole front yard out," he recalls. Not a blade survived.
So, starting around Labor Day that year, he dug it all up by hand and worked in seven tons of sand. Audrey and he spent weeks picking out stones, standing on boards so as not to compact the new, improved soil.
He seeded and fertilized with a different brand, Scotts.
The results were so thick, so lush, so green that he sent a photograph of his lawn to the Scotts Co. in Marysville, Ohio. And in 1967, the company published it in its newsletter, "LawnCare." Wildauer got a check for $25. He used it to buy Scotts Turf Builder.
"I do like the yard nice," says Wildauer, which is like Monet saying he likes the paint pretty.
Self-taught from reading pamphlets and watching his neighbors' gardens, Wildauer grew into a master. Everything around him turned green, including his neighbors — with envy.
He was a strong proponent of Scotts fertilizers, crabgrass halter, weed and grub killers, but what he really poured into that lawn was time — 18 hours a week. As he puts it, "I used to work my rear end off."
He could mow it in two hours, not that he tried to do it fast. He says, "I only took half cuts" — that is, half the mower's width each pass. He always alternated directions — cutting up and down one week, across the next.
To keep his cuts even cleaner, he sharpened the blade of his mower — always a Lawn-Boy — once a month, meticulously filing the edges so the blade was perfectly balanced.
What really took time was the trimming, all of it — along the walk and wall, even along the streets — by hand. His edging had to be vertical.
"People thought I was crazy. Even my wife said I was." But he made no apologies. "It was worth it to me to make it look nice."
If a dandelion (he hates them) dared rear so much as a leaf, Wildauer would dig it up and, for a coup de grass, use an oil can to squirt Weed-B-Gon into the hole.
As they got older, keeping up with it all got too hot, too hard. He never liked lawn services ("They just cut and leave") but in 2000 he hired a guy a friend recommended, and he likes him. "He's not just a grass cutter, he's a gardener."
Audrey died in March, just before the gardener did the early raking and fertilizing for another season. The yard's not the same without her, but Wildauer is keeping it up. Even at age 81, he keeps a hand in — watering, trimming the bushes, patrolling for dandelions. Leading a tour over sod as soft as padded carpet, he says the yard never felt like work.
In January 2002, Scotts asked them to send in a new photo, and printed it and the original one in this spring's "Lawn and Garden Care" that was sent to 9 million homes. The headline: "Lawn-gevity!" This time, the company sent him $100. Wildauer plowed that back into the lawn, too.
Last winter was a tough one: Road salt killed 3-foot-wide strips on the perimeter that he had his gardener dig up and replant. You can be sure the borough heard about it.
"It bothers me if it goes bad," he fumes. "It really bothers me."
He's hopeful his grass will bounce back, and he's very likely not the only one.
"When it's beautiful," he says, "it's a joy to see."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
)
