Back in April I did a little bit of reminiscing about one of my Grandpas. At that time, I promised an open session for Grandpa reminiscing.
It is understood that Grandpas are or were not perfect, but each one is a story. A better story than those of parents, because the grandparent stories reach further into the past.
Sometimes I feel like I am an unsettled, unhomogenized mix of both of my Grandpas.
For example, my other Grandpa was the opposite of the warm, fun-loving one I posted about. This guy was a stern, dignified, laconic, unsociable, never smiling, morally-rigid GP and cardiologist who made house calls into his 80s. He totalled his car making a house call on one Christmas night in a blizzard. Cops took him to his house call with his big black leather bag, then back home, where he arrived bloodied but unbowed.
He worked 7 days/wk. Had zero tolerance for foolishness of any sort, and the only times I ever saw a smile was when he was holding a baby. He was not about "fun," and was a serious man who took life seriously. He had a dry Milton or Shakespeare quote for any occasion, and he liked a Scotch or two in the evening, neat. Smoked corn-cob pipes at work and at home. (It is only recently that one could not smoke in hospitals.) Osler was his hero, and he had nothing but contempt for FDR and Lyndon Johnson.
When he opened his medical practice, the scourges in CT were malaria, syphilis, puerperal fever, and TB and other infectious diseases - plus all the diseases we still have. Few people were "healthy," as we view it, in the 1920s and 30s: just imagine everybody today with a new hip or knee hobbling around painfully on canes, or stuck in chairs, or everybody today with a bypass or stent or heart meds, bedridden and slowly dying of heart failure. Not to mention untreatable Depression.
He grew up on a farm in northern CT in a hamlet named after his (and my) family name. Worked his way through college and medical school (in Baltimore), mostly as a cook during the summers at lumber camps in Maine and NH. (I never saw him even boil an egg - he always had a cook in the house. My Dad tells me that he did know how to cook pancakes.)
His first wife died of leukemia before she could have kids. He had been her doctor. He did not remarry until his 40s. Both of my grandpas lost young wives to illness. It wasn't rare at all, two generations ago.
Like most docs of the past, he was not much of a vacation-taker until his later 60s, but was known to enjoy fly fishing at his favorite getaway spot, Mohonk. He also liked the old resort hotels in Watch Hill, where he met his second wife. She was a summer hotel waitress there, but her main job was as a Brooklyn grammar school teacher, teaching new Jewish and Italian immigrant kids. Her parents were a farm family in Norwalk, CT., and I have no idea why or how she ended up in Brooklyn. She once told me she had to check the kids for lice daily.
Her Mom lived with them until she died aged 107. She had been a nurse while being a farm wife too. She did jigsaw puzzles, and looked like an Indian (she had plenty of Indian blood, I am told, but was not happy about that, I suspect).
Grandpa's garage shelves were piled with hearts and brains and kidneys in jars with formaldehyde or alcohol or whatever. Cool for a kid. As I recall, my Dad burned them - along with all of his old wooden file cabinets of medical records, when the old guy died at 86 or 87.
This is him at my aunt's wedding. My Dad's sister was a beauty and a Physical Therapist for the Army until she had kids, but she is now gone too:
His patients loved him but eventually he outlived most of them. Many paid him with farm produce, and the poor paid him with labor at his house - chopping wood, painting, cleaning up the grounds, etc. I remember stopping by and seeing a bushel basket of fresh-dug potatoes left on the back porch, and a basket of sweet corn another time. He had a good-sized vegetable garden down in the back, which he tended himself. Lots of wax beans, as I recall. I do like them too.
He had the first EKG machine in CT. We still have that German machine in its splendid mahogany case. It still works. I need to take a photo of it when I remember. I think my Dad intends to donate it to the Yale Medical School museum.
I'll welcome more Grandpa thumbnail sketches in the comments.
