Saturday, August 02, 2003

Somehow at lunch today, my Dad’s dad came up in conversation. He died when I was 10, so I never really got a chance to know him since I had spent most of my childhood up to that point either on the west coast or in England. I have a few specific memories of him - he was a diehard Redskins fan, he loved ice cream, he was gruff but kind, he was quiet.

Over the years my Dad would occasionally talk about him. I learned that he was in the Navy during World War 2, he played baseball, he put himself through college. Today I learned some stuff I had never heard before and it was mind-boggling. So the following is a little history lesson on my family. Dad can correct any of my errors in retelling it in the comments.

1. His first job was at a papermill. I can’t explain his exact job quickly here, but the guy who worked across from him in the assembly line had lost the tips of his fingers in that job. My grandfather decided he wanted to keep his fingers and applied to the Richmond Police Academy.

WHAT? My grandfather was a cop?

2. Yep. He was accepted to the Richmond PD where he walked a beat and later drove a car. Apparently my grandfather (we called him Pop) was shot when he and his partner responded to a bank robbery. The bank was on the second floor. He went in the door and was on his way up the stairs when the robber started down. There was plate glass between them. When the robber saw Pop, he fired his double barrel shotgun. The shot shattered the glass and then hit Pop’s leather jacket. He didn’t have a scratch. Pop shot the robber, who died.

Dad also told of the baseball games the Richmond PD would play with the bootleggers (this was during the Depression). Whoever won the game, won a case of whiskey. Somehow the PD always won. Imagine that…

3. When Pop went into the Navy during WWII, he was a shore patrolman. I knew that. What I didn’t know was that he played craps and won enough money to buy my grandmother’s engagement ring.

4. After the war, Pop became a gate guard at CIA. WHAT? This was news to me...it gets even better. After a while, he was moved “inside” where he worked in a secure room with a phone, notepad, and pen. He was to answer the phone, write down whatever was said, and at the end of the day turn in whatever he had. Some days the phone would ring all day. Others it didn’t ring at all. I asked if he could read a book or something and Dad said no. I would have gone nuts! But it turns out Pop was most likely receiving coded messages from field operatives from around the world, so as boring as the actual work was, he was helping fight the Cold War. That’s pretty cool.

He was offered a top secret position somewhere else with CIA. All they could tell him was that he would be within 1500 miles of Washington, DC. So Pop got a globe and mapped out that 1500 mile radius around DC and decided there were enough places in that area that he didn’t want to go to and turned it down.

4.  Pop left the CIA to become a milkman. I knew this about him. He delivered milk while he was at CIA too and decided to get into the dairy industry full time.

5. Eventually, he got into Automated Data Processing (ADP) and worked at Health, Education & Welfare (HEW - what is now two agencies: Education and Health & Human Services). He retired from HEW, bought a farm in Drakes Branch, VA, where he died one summer day while building a bench around a tree.

He sounds like the kind of guy I would have loved to hang around with. I’m sad he didn’t live long enough for me to get to know him better. Thanks for sharing the history today, Dad.

Up next in the family history of Jen: my grandmother’s bootlegger father and uncles, the 50-foot yacht, and 9 daughters. Now this side of the family is something else!