My Grandfather’s Influence
My grandfather would have been 126 when I started writing this on his birthday. He died in 1988 of old age. His only wife, my grandmother lived to almost 104.
He was born on July 29, 1895. I still remember him very well. By the time he died, he was mostly blind, suffered from mild dementia, yet he’d still walk at least two miles a day, even when he couldn’t see. Knowing his limitations, and shortly before he died, he’d walk around the block again and again. He fought in two world wars, was a product developer an inventor, and he’d build anything he needed.
What I remember about him the most was his passion for understanding technology. He read every Popular Mechanics magazine cover to cover, and he’d add notes and tabs to articles that meant something to him. He would often build something he found in the pages of the magazine and he was forever delighted with breakthroughs in science.
As kids, if we wanted something, he’d build it. He even dug his own basement under his family house, all by hand. Imagine moving that much dirt with nothing but a shovel and a wheelbarrow. I don’t remember him every complaining about much, but I do remember his constant positive attitude about everything.
One of his best days was when he was seeing himself for the first time on video. He’d never seen anything like it, and sat giggling over the images of himself. Of course, he wanted to understand how everything worked. He had a fascination with transistors and how electronics worked as if all of it was magic to him. It was his delight in everything new that made a huge impression on me.
He never talked about his hardships in the sense of how difficult life was for him growing up, but instead how nice life had become. It was only after he died that we learned from his relatives that when he was a boy on the family farm, if they didn’t have enough food stored for winter and spring, they didn’t eat.
He lived on a farm near Spalding, Michigan in a tiny farmhouse with a large family. I don’t recall how many siblings, but I know upper Michigan winters were brutal, and there was no plumbing or electricity, so that had to be tough living in a small house. I can’t imagine what that must have been like to tend to a farm in the middle of winter and hope to not run out of food.
His attitude his entire life still makes an impression on me, that things can be better, you just have to keep working at something. You have to keep solving the problem. It’s easy to write such simple messages, but watching him live it every day is what sticks with me all these years.