To be honest, I did not enjoy hanging around my grandfather as a child or a teen. He was tough and felt somewhat rigid and emotionally distant. Like many older men in the 90s, he was a staunch republican, but surely you would call him a right-leaning centrist in today's world.
Yet, he was a much more complex man than I ever realized. I knew he wrote an autobiography in the 90's. I watched his wife, my step-grandmother, key the pages of handwritten text onto a primitive digital word processor when I would visit. I can remember the dot matrix printer churning out pages in their living room. I remember reading a few pages of it in my late teens/early 20s and being fascinated by how rough they had it growing up. I couldn't yet comprehend how rough it was, indeed, until I borrowed a copy of it and digitized the whole thing using OCR.
It was indeed very rough for him growing up in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s. Where they lived, there was no electricity. The wires did run down the main street, but they were farming a small rented plot of land closer to the river, along the railroad. No electric heat, or lights, telephone, or anything. The two oldest siblings died in infancy, their deaths due to diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid fever. My grandfather suffered from scarlet fever but recovered.
The writing has changed my opinion of him. At my age, I could have been friends with both of my grandfathers; unfortunately, my inexperience as a youth created conflicts with both. Although I do recall making inroads as I aged. And I have fond memories of both.
With that, I'll leave this passage, written by my grandfather, about a serious but funny situation he landed himself in, likely in the 1930's.
The P&LE R.R. in front of the house was a busy line, transporting coal, coke, and mill products. To warn engineers of other trains on the tracks, torpedoes were used. This was a lead foil wrapped packet of explosive fastened to the rails and was set off by the wheels of engines passing over it. One day, I removed a torpedo, took it into the cellar of our house, put it on a rock, and hit it with a hammer. It almost lifted the house off it's foundation and left me a deafened, shocked boy, scared but not seriously injured by some miracle. The shrapnel of the lead wrapper peppered me, but fortunately didn't hit an eye or artery. My parents were angry, thankful, and grateful that worse didn't happen.