Replies

Your grandfather was alive when Geronimo was, and in his mid 20s when Wyatt Earp died, and there you were watching John Travolta movies in LA where Madonna lives, and talking to that man.

I was very fortunate to have spent enough quality time with my granddad to have heard some the most interesting stories of his life. And there were many.

He loved technology, and was what we call today, a 'first adopter'. He was always the first person I knew to have any groundbreaking gadget. He was a contractor, and owned every modern tool of the building trades, but he also owned (and had used) all of the old manual tools in his day.

I believe my uncle still has all of his old carpentry tools from the 30s and 40s. Granddad taught my brothers and I how to use them all when we were kids.

He didn't have a lot of fond remembrances of his youth. Those were hardscrabble years that tested his ability to survive. He left home at 12, and rode the rails with the hobos until he got old enough to get steady work. He bootstrapped his way up in the building trades, eventually becoming a licensed contractor in California, but in the interim, he lived a whole lot of life on the edge, including a stint on a chain gang in Nevada, from which he escaped.

The man lived an amazing life, and thankfully, my dad has put most of it down in a biography that he plans on publishing.

I think that the level of excitement is that it is like being inside of a sci-fi movie, time travel.

I remember as a teen selling Charlie Chips on my route, and I was in a nice home, and asked about something, I forget if it was a photo, or a bugle, or a Pancho Villa picture, or what, but the old man (to me), sitting next to his wife, proceeded to tell me that as a teen, he had played the bugle for Pancho Villa’s group. With old people, there are many such stories.

When we are talking to someone who was there 50 or 70 years behind our own years, the connection can be powerful to those who are empathic.

In early 1914, my grandfather, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, sent his wife and baby son to America to live with her brother who had emigrated a few years before. My grandmother was Jewish, from Russia, and her family had emigrated to the UK around 1900 to escape the many pogroms against Jews there.

She got a job as a singer in British Vaudeville, a kind of sordid career in those days. Her family basically disowned her, except for her brother who went on to New York. My Scots Grandpa was somewhat of a cad and showman himself and met, fell in love and married her against the wishes of the family.

My Grandpa, now disowned by his family for marrying a Jew, had to stay behind and work in a bakery to get enough money to come over. But in August of 1914, just as he got enough, the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo and WWI begin. He had actually bought his ticket when his regiment was called up. Instead of reporting to duty, he made the trip to New York.

Because of the massive attack of German submarines, his ship sailed to Buenos Aries rather than New York. Somewhere in the South Atlantic, his ship was boarded by the British Navy and he was arrested. The Navy turned him over to a British merchantman bound for New York and then Portsmouth, UK.

As a showman, he told jokes and put on various performances for the crew. They really liked him. He told them his story and why he fled. Everyone felt he got a raw deal. When they got to New York he told he would like nothing better than to at least have a drink with them in America before going back and facing a firing squad. They agreed, and took him to some dive in Brooklyn. While they were all drinking, he snuck out the bathroom window and walked to the Bowery where my grandma was living. He never went back to Scotland. My Dad was born to them years later; the baby of the family.