Hoofnagle.org

When my grandfather was 7 his father pulled him out of school to go work in the lumber up in the Ozarks. He worked with the forest crews from then on because even as small and half literate as he was he could do the math for the day's cut and keep track of survey markings in his head better than the men could do it on paper. He worked the deep forest crews until his early 20s.

In his twenties, a tree fell on him, broke his back, shoulder and one arm. And he was the only man on the team who knew how to drive a truck, so they pulled him out from under the tree and tied him into the truck and he drove himself out of the forest in the old suspensionless truck down unpaved half finished fire roads to get medical care.

He never went back to the lumber. Neither the forest, nor the mill. During the Depression he was a wandering musician playing barn dances and odd jobbing. He drove an Esso truck, worked as a stockist in a grocery store, married my grandmother and worked as a civilian mechanic on planes during World War 2. He could play anything with strings. He could fix anything with moving parts and some things that didn't precisely move. He took apart and refurbished his own fiddle. He fixed watches, radios and virtually anything else that empirical observation and a keen intuition would allow one to fix.

I think he wrote my mother two letters in all his life. He died when I was about twelve.

Posted by karen at February 16, 2003 12:00 AM