Just some thoughts, not really trying to write here or anything. I haven't re-read or even proof read. Just felt like getting this out.
His name was Edward. Actually it was really Elwood, but a switch happened somehow in the army, and somehow it became Edward-perhaps on purpose. He hated Elwood from what I understand. and he always went by Ed.
My grandfather is unique in my life, dying when I was 5 years old. Since his death, no one in my family has died, except for a great grandmother at 99. My other three grandparents are alive, and only 75. Tragedy has so far not touched my life.
He was born in the Bronx of Hungarian and German immigrants on December 31, 1915. I don't know that much about his early life. He had a brother and a sister (twins). The sister is still alive and the brother died maybe 8 years ago. The twins did not speak, because the brother's wife took some jewlery that the other was supposed to get when their mother died, or something like that. The truth is lost to the mists of time, but the sister cried at her brother's funeral as if they were best friends. My grandfather spoke to both of them.
He joined the army, or was drafted, I am not sure which. Something happened and he got very sick, and his unit got shipped off overseas and all died, and he stayed in the U.S. At least according to grandma, but grandma is known to get a few details wrong. I've always been partly skeptical, if only because it sounds like a movie.
I don't know why he did not get married until relatively late back then, around 33-34. I don't know whether he had other girlfriends-I assume so, but it isn't the type of thing you ask grandma
.
I know at some point he took some money, somehow, and bought land in Connecticut. It was a big piece of land. Maybe 15 years ago, the government took some to expand the Appalachian trail. The property was in the middle of the woods on a dirt road, with maybe 3 other houses. He built the house with his own hands, along with his brother. Men were a bit different then, I think. I'd have trouble building a doll house. I wish he would have been around to teach me some of those things.
The house was his oasis from the City (and if you live anywhere near New York, there is only one "the City") I suspect. I really don't know for sure, but I can assume that a boy from the Bronx found that house in the middle of nowhere a sanctuary. The house sat in the woods in the middle of nowhere, at the bottom of a mountain, at the top of a trail that went down to the Brook. Where you could fish, swim, bathe. The house was small, but sturdy, and still stands to this day. Even as a kid, you could go there a week and see maybe two cars pass down the road. I can only imagine how isolated it was in the 1940s. As a kid, you had to go a long way for food, unless you bought it at the General store, a brisk two miles down the road, but harder coming back, uphill. Today, there are maybe 8 houses on the road, and a car or two goes down it every day. It is still a cabin on a dirt road but there's a McDonalds 20 minutes away by car. You can't fish anymore in the Brook, but we still bathe in it.
Anyway, my grandfather got a job as a conductor with the New York City Subway-a transit man. He met my grandmother on the subway in 1949. She used to travel to work at the Waldoff Astoria by subway, and her father always told her to sit in the car nearest the conductor. She apparently did. They fell in love and were married by 1950. Of course, she was 17 when they met and married and he was 33/34. That's kind of weird. But apparently he got along well with her parents.
In 1951 my uncle was born, a true baby boomer. A Bronx apartment must have seemed pretty cramped. That same year, with the miraculous ability to buy a home granted by William Levitt, he bought a house in Levittown. The house cost $6,000 or so, including washing machine. How wonderful that house must have seemed-even if the upstairs was unfinished in Mr. Levitt's assembly line method of building houses for returning GIs with expanding families. 4 bedrooms. Ok they were small. A carport-open on 3 sides, not a garage. An eat in kitchen, no dining room. Somewhat famously around here, no basements! But yards (no fences in those days) and thousands and thousands of other men and women in their 20s and 30s, all starting out, all in the same boat, with new families. Taking the Long island Railroad to work, so the wife could have the car (if they drove in those days). The pools and playgrounds and baseball fields and stores in walking distance-Mr. Levitt did not foresee the two car family. It must have seemed like a unique paradise. A town full of Irish and Italian and German immigrants. Did it bother my grandfather that part of the deal was no black families could move in? and that Mr. Levitt (who gave out the houses after all) kept that going, even after the clause in the contract was declared unconstitutional? I don't know. I sort of doubt it. But it's not really the thing you ask grandma.
He wound up having 4 children and growing older. He had a bad heart and from his 40s on was very sick, having multiple heart surgeries. By the 1960s he was retired from the transit, with his bad heart. They did not have much money. When my dad first dated my mom, he said she had holes in her jeans and nothing new. My grandma went to work. Still, there was the paradise in Connecticut and he started going almost every weekend.
Like every Nassau County resident back then, he joined the Nassau Republican party and dutifully went to meetings, Chinese auctions, and $50 a plate dinners he could not really afford. But grandma started working for Nassau County and then the Town of Hempstead, and those meetings were important. TOH hadn't elected a democrat since the 1800s and the growing Nassau county was soldily Republican and would remain until the 1990s.
Most of the rest is a blur to me of half-remembered stories. He loved watching baseball and the Mets. He loved cartoons. He loved John Wayne and westerns. He was an old fashioned type patriot. He wore a lot of flannel shirts. He was pretty bald early on, and apparently shaved his head. He was very close to my mother.
When he was 61 I was born and was his favorite thing in the world. The first grandchild. He called me Little Arby because my mother worked at Arbys, for a time. I called him Pop Pop since my mom called him Pop. He bought me candy. I helped pull him out of my chair- with all my might I would pull. He said he couldn't get up without me. I used to walk on his back.
He took me to the duck pond, to Wantagh Park, to the beach. and one time, the first trip away from mom, to Connecticut. Grandpa was too sick to climb the mountain though. But he let me run to the top by myself. Five year olds could get away with things like that back then, especially with grandpa.
When I was 5 years old, my grandfather's heart gave out. He was 66 and my mom was only 24. My grandma knew something was wrong when he was too tired to go up to Connecticut that weekend. He went to the hospital and needed a quadruple bypass. I remember my dad telling me, at the park. I ran and cried. I feel bad to this day that the day before he died, I had been in the hospital with him and got bored and asked my mom to leave the room. When I asked to see him again, the nurse said I couldn't go back in. No kids.
I wish I could have done all the things he would have loved to have done with me-fishing, hiking, building campfires, hanging out together at the cabin. I wish my grandmother had not spent the last 25 years alone. I wish my mom didn't cry every New Years Eve on his birthday since she was 24. I wish I remembered him better. I remember my grandfather. Kinda.
