Letter to My Sons About Their Grandfather

Dear Sons,

Here are some things that I want you to know about my father.  I'm so sorry you never knew him.  You would have loved him so much, and he would have loved and been so very proud of you.  He died too young.

• Your Grandpa was highly intelligent and very curious about new things, especially new technologies.  He loved learning new things.  
• Your Grandpa was a very religious man and read his Bible every single day.  I can still see him sitting on our front porch in the evening after dinner reading his Bible.  
• Your Grandpa loved telling Bible stories.  Daniel in the lion's den was one of his favorites.  All six of his children knew all the Bible stories well before we were old enough to read.  Your Grandpa was an excellent storyteller!
• Your Grandpa loved to read.  His favorite books were the Zane Grey westerns.  He read them all more than once!
• Your Grandpa owned several businesses over the course of his lifetime.  A restaurant, a furniture store, and a radio/television fix-it and retail store, which is the store he owned when I was little.  He could fix anything electronic to the amazement of most people at the time.
• Your Grandpa LOVED the mountains.  We would often drive up to Grandfather's Mountain or Franklin or other such North Carolina mountain spots to visit family or just to picnic on Sundays after church.  He thought cool clean mountain well water was like candy and always asked for a big glass as soon as we arrived at our destination.
• Your Grandpa was a sharp dresser.  He always wore button-up shirts, slacks, and dress shoes, tied neatly, and shined to a glow.  Everything was ironed and perfect.  His hair, which was black and never turned grey, was always slicked back with  Brylcreem (a little dab'll do ya), and he plucked the grey hair out of his eyebrows.  
• Your Grandpa was always clean and smelled good.
• Your Grandpa had a little bald spot in the back of his head.   He used to comb his hair over it, and if I asked him about it, he'd tell me the wildest tales.  My favorite of his bald spot tales was the one where he told about a crow that landed on his head and pecked the hair out of that spot.  -grin-  (I'm afraid my son, Marcus, is very much like my father.)
• Your Grandpa was a hard worker, and he didn't believe in taking charity.  He also did not believe in life or health insurance.  He called insurance "blood money" and refused to have any part of it, which is how we lost everything to medical bills and funeral expenses when he had to spend months in the hospital before he died (plus the only person working, which was Daddy, missed nearly a year of work due to his heart and lung problems, so there was no money at all), but that is another story.
• Your Grandpa did not believe in women working.  It was okay for them to raise six children.  Do washing with an old wringer washing machine.  Cook and clean and take in sewing for extra money. Do yard work and garden.  Nurse everyone when they were sick, and basically never take a break from sun-up to sun-down every single day of their lives, but it was never okay for them to "work."  (NOTE: Raising children and doing gardening, house and yard work 24/7 is the hardest job in the world.  Unfortunately, if you are not being paid to do it, you have not "worked.")
• Your Grandpa was so very proud of his children and bragged on all of us very often.
• Your Grandpa had a lot of men friends who visited and we would visit them.  
• Your Grandpa loved to gossip!  He would not have called it gossiping, but I'm not sure what else to call it when the men all gathered at the barber shop and traded stories about everyone else in town.  -grin-
• Everyone loved your Grandpa.  He laughed often and made friends at the drop of a hat.  
• Your Grandpa's stores were always open to everyone: black, white, red, yellow, green, orange or purple.  Other businessmen in town, whose businesses were "whites only" back in the 1950s and 60s, used to sometimes complain to my Daddy.  His answer was always the same, "As long as their money is green, I don't care what they look like.  Why, I'd even sell YOU a TV."  They would laugh.  Daddy could get away with most anything because everyone loved him so.  (NOTE: My son, Marcus, is a LOT like my Daddy.)
• Your Grandpa had friends from all walks of life.  Literally.  Daddy used to tell me, "Alice, NOBODY on this Earth is any better than you, and YOU are NO BETTER than anybody else on this Earth.  Remember that.  We all put our pants on one leg at a time."  He lived by those words and treated everyone the same.  Your Grandpa believed in the Golden Rule.
• One of the most important things your Grandpa ever told me was, "Alice, the MOST IMPORTANT thing you will ever own is your name.  Guard it well and keep it clean."  I didn't know what he meant for a long time, but I finally figured it out. 
  
  Your name is how people recognize you.  They associate you, your family, your friends, everything about your life, with your name.  If you hear the name "George Washington," you automatically think, "Leader.  Truthful.  Honest."  If you hear the names, "Bonnie and Clyde," you automatically think, "Criminals.  Murderers. Dishonest."
  
  Isn't that amazing?  I'm betting you never met George Washington nor Bonnie and Clyde, but their names mean something.
  
  YOUR name is like that too.  If you are a good, honest, trustworthy person, then when someone hears your name they will think, "Good, honest, and trustworthy."  If you are a bad person, when someone hears your name, they will think, "Trouble." 
  
  See?  My Daddy was right.  Your name can either open doors for you or have the doors slammed in your face.  Keep your name clean.  Guard it well.
• Your Grandpa also loved telling me, "Alice, if you don't stop making that face, it's going to freeze like that."
  
  I didn't know what he meant for a very long time, but I sure know now.  When you are old, the lines in your face will reflect the faces you made when you were young.  If in youth you laughed all the time, you will have laugh lines in old age.  If in youth you frowned all the time, you will have frown lines in old age. 
  
  Please decide now how you want to look when you are older and adjust your disposition to match the face you want. 
  
  See?  My Daddy was right again.  He was a very wise man.
• Your Grandpa had false teeth!  I never knew him when he had his real teeth. 
• Your Grandpa always peeled his apples before eating them.  He'd see if he could peel the whole thing in one big spiral and often did!
• Your Grandpa LOVED watermelon, he especially loved eating fresh cut watermelon with salt.  
• Your Grandpa always carried a pocket knife, and it was always as sharp as could be.  I remember watching him sharpen his knives using his whet rock.  He sharpened his knife everytime he used it.
• Your Grandpa had a BIG gun collection that he kept locked in a gun cabinet in our living room, which was also kept locked.  When each child turned six years old, Daddy would take us out and teach us about guns.  He would teach us how to shoot and also how to clean and respect a gun.  The respecting was emphasized.  (NOTE: My younger sister never learned this.  She was only four when Daddy died and missed her gun lessons.)
• Your Grandpa would eat anything and especially loved vegetables.  He also loved salt and hated when they made him stop eating it after his first major heart attack in 1957.
• Your Grandpa was a smoker.  He used his shiny silver Zippo lighter to light his cigarettes.  I used to love playing with that lighter and got myself in trouble more than once doing just that.
• Your Grandpa LOVED licorice.  I HATED licorice, so he would send me to the grocery store a few doors up from his store to buy it for him.  He knew I wouldn't eat it on the way back.  Chocolate was never safe around me though.  
• Your Grandpa looked exactly like your Uncle Tom and Uncle Howard.  The best way to describe him is he was neat and clean and proper like your Uncle Howard, full of mischief like your Uncle Tom, with the mind and basic personality of Marcus.  Yes.  That's about as close as I can come to describing my father.  It is a fairly accurate description.
• Your Grandpa had trouble with his feet.  The skin would just peel off his feet for no apparent reason.  It wasn't athlete's foot.  Not read or infected.  The skin just peeled off!  It started after that first heart attack.  Very strange.  (Wow.  I haven't thought about this in years.)
• Your Grandpa LOVED eating liver and onions.
• Your Grandpa was a good cook, but he seldom cooked.  It was always such a treat to see him at the stove or at the fireplace with meat to cook.  YUM!  Daddy's favorite thing to cook in the kitchen was salmon stew.  It was absolutely delicious.  He would use an old white cup to scoop it out of the pot for me.  I can still see him doing that in my mind's eye, so clearly!  Those were the best nights of all.  
• Your Grandpa always cooked "streaked meat" over the fire in the fireplace in the living room on Christmas Eve.  The streaked meat was served in Mama's homemade biscuits, and was the BEST tasting thing I can remember eating when I was little.  (NOTE: Streaked meat is fatback with meat attached to it.  YUM!) 

Streaked Meat

Now I am hungry, so I am going to stop. There are many many many more things about my Daddy, your Grandpa, that I want you to know, so expect me to write more another day. 

This is my gift to you.  I never knew either of my grandfathers, as they both died before I was born, and now there is no one left to tell me tales of them.  I wish my parents or aunts or uncles would have written me a letter like this before they passed away, so I am doing this for you because I love you and want you to know your Grandpa as much as you can.

Love,

Mama