How to Build a Fire: And Other Handy Things Your Grandfather Knew (2 page)

Introduction
•  •  •

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.”

—Historian and philosopher L
EWIS
M
UMFORD

I only knew one of my grandfathers, and though I loved him, I didn’t know him very well. When my family managed to make the two-hour car trip to visit him, my older sister and I would greet him with hugs and kisses and then dash off to his two-tiered electric organ, where we’d plug in the giant headphones, bang away at the keys, and toy with the rumba beats until it was time to leave. When I think about my memories of him, only two really stand out: When I was little, he let me occasionally “shine” his bald head with a rag, and when I was in college he taught me to play a few chords on his guitar. In what I now realize was an act of supreme generosity, he even let me borrow his beloved Gibson so I could practice. I still have it. I still play it. And I still wonder what else he would’ve taught me, if only I’d asked.

The fact is, for whatever reason, many of us didn’t ask (or even think of asking) our grandfathers about their lives. Maybe we were too young, or too timid, or even too arrogant, assuming we were smart and they were just, well,
old
. Since the days our grandfathers were born, we’ve invented television, the computer, the Internet, the iPod, the cell phone, the flu shot, hybrid cars, the GPS, and even the Large Hadron Collider. Heck, all of us were born in homes with electricity and indoor plumbing, and many of our grandfathers, as boys, were still finding their way by kerosene lamps and using outhouses. You’d think all of this progress would have made us a smarter, safer, more sustainable society. And yet we’ve somehow lost our way.

Think about it: With incredible thumb dexterity, we can make our video game avatars run, jump, punch, and shoot, but what do we really know about being brave in the face of danger? We email, chat, tweet, and share our status updates with the world at a frenzied pace, but would we even begin to know how to write a personal love letter? Would it even occur to us? We know how to program our iPods, but we don’t know how to make our own music, or for that matter any of our own entertainment. We can memorize and repeat the talking points we hear on talk radio, but we’ve forgotten how to think critically and have our own big ideas. We take our civil rights for granted, but we often forget to be civil to one another. We hold opinions about who should win
Top Chef
and
The Bachelor
, and yet very few of us actually know how to catch a fish (much less cook one) or make a marriage last a lifetime. We buy fancy cars and drive them everywhere with absolutely no idea how to fix them if they break. We invest in big houses without knowing how to paint the walls or even, in some cases, clean the rooms. We, as a generation, are so proud of our accomplishments, our technology, our wealth, and yet we have absolutely no idea about half the stuff we’re doing.

This is not sound footing. It’s time to get back to basics and regain a sense of self-sufficiency before it’s too late. And sometimes in order to move forward, you’ve got to look back. As members of the Greatest Generation, our grandfathers were defined not only by the Great Depression, but also by their heroic service to the country in World War II. Courageous, responsible, and involved, they understand sacrifice, hard work, and how to do whatever is necessary to take care of their loved ones. True, we’ve got Twitter down pat, but our grandfathers can teach us almost everything else we need to know.

I’m certainly not saying that all of us are completely inept in the grandfatherly arts. Take me, for example. Even though I never got a chance to
really
talk with my grandfather and I spend most of my time interviewing celebrities and writing profiles of them for my job at Condé Nast, I’ve managed to accomplish a few back-to-basics things I think would make him proud. After saving every penny for seven years, I bought my own apartment, a Brooklyn fixer-upper—which is a very nice way of saying a dump. I hung drywall, painted, installed molding, exposed brick, and made it a home. Because I love an ice-cold beer on a hot summer’s day, I learned to brew my own (though sometimes with mixed results). I’ve spent the past five summers on Lake Erie fishing for walleye and, on the days when I get lucky, cooking them for dinner. I’ve managed to change two or three flat tires, though thankfully not all at the same time. Still, despite my efforts, I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of self-sufficiency, and there is a great deal I have yet to learn.

Because my own grandfathers are no longer alive, I reached out to ten others from all across the country to see what I could find out. The first lesson came quickly. When I called each of them and explained that I had written a book called
How to Sew a Button: And Other Nifty Things Your Grandmother Knew
and was now writing my second book, this one about grandfathers, they immediately asked how they could help. None of them asked how I found them. None of them questioned their own knowledge. They each literally did what they were called upon to do, and once I got them talking, they didn’t stop.

“From the day I was born, whenever anybody asked me what I was going to do, I said, ‘I’m going to be a pro ballplayer,’ ” Robert Kelly, eighty-two, told me. In 1948, at age twenty-one, he was signed by the Chicago Cubs, and over the course of his career he also pitched for the Cleveland Indians and Cincinnati Reds. “Boy, don’t you think that was a thrill when I ended up playing for the Indians and standing in the middle of Cleveland Stadium against the Yankees? I took time to walk off the mound and look around the ballpark and gather it all in. It’s still etched in my memory. The emotion I felt standing on the mound, facing Mickey Mantle. I was in awe!”

Charles Tatum, eighty-three, who was featured in the HBO miniseries
The Pacific
, had plenty of war stories. At seventeen, he enlisted in the marines, where he served under the leadership of famous war hero John Basilone, who won the Medal of Honor. They fought together in the battle of Iwo Jima, where Basilone was killed and Tatum, a machine gunner, earned a Bronze Star for his valor. I asked him how he found his courage. “We were trained to be soldiers. Everybody in war is afraid or scared, but I was different,” he said, joking. “I was petrified.” Then, more seriously, he explained how to be brave. “Even though you were scared, you were trained to do what you had to do. You didn’t want to let your buddies down. You counted on them, and you knew they were counting on you. So, you had to put up.”

Bill Holloman, eighty-five, cheekily told me the real reason why we won World War II. In 1942, when the U.S. military was still segregated, Holloman went to Tuskegee, Alabama, to train with other black soldiers to become a pilot. “I volunteered, because I thought I could affect the world. I thought my country needed me, and I was going to make the best darn pilot you’d ever seen.” Fourteen months later, Holloman went to Italy, where he flew with the 332nd Fighter Group, or The Red Tails, whose members became known for their bravery and skill in escorting and protecting bombers on their missions. “After I completed my training, they told me to win the war. So I went over there, and I sent Hitler a telegram,” he said, pulling my leg. “I told him I’d arrived and that he should surrender.” When I asked him if Hitler ever wrote him back, Holloman laughed and replied, “No. But he listened to me, and then he quit.”

Even prior to the war, many of our grandfathers, hard hit by the Great Depression, felt a sense of duty. “Times were tough,” said Joe Toth, now eighty-seven, whose father worked in a steel mill. “We used to walk miles across railroad tracks and hills just to get to Father Baker’s Orphanage, where we’d get one or two free loaves of bread. That’d help us out.” Ever resourceful, he learned to help himself to other things, too. “The trains would come by loaded with coal, and we’d jump on top of them and throw the coal off. Later, we’d come back with a burlap sack, pick up the coal from the sides of the track, and bring it home. That’s how we helped out.”

Every grandfather has a story to share. Buck Buchanan, eighty-two, who grew up in Texas and later ran cotton-farming and shrimp-boating businesses, told me how he bounced back from the brink of failure. Angel Rodriguez, eighty-five, who immigrated from Colombia, told me how he found the wherewithal to work two jobs in a country where he couldn’t even speak the language. Philip Spooner, eighty-eight, who was born on a potato farm in Maine, told me how he learned to fish at age two, chop wood at age six, and deliver a rousing speech at age eighty-six. Joe Babin, a ninety-three-year-old father of two, told me how to always stay coolheaded. Eighty-seven-year-old Al Sulka, who was married for forty-eight years before losing his beloved wife, told me how to have a long and happy marriage. Frank Walter, eighty-seven, who still hits the slopes every single day of the ski season, told me the secret to a long and happy life.

Before talking to these men, I knew that our grandfathers were brave, smart, and sometimes a bit puckish, if you caught them with that twinkle in their eye. But what I didn’t know was how open they would be. Every single grandfather readily and eagerly shared his stories and advice, and to think, all I had to do was ask. Try it sometime. If you’re lucky enough to have your own grandfather around, learn from him. Ask him big questions, like how he found the courage to go to war, and little ones, like how much cologne is too much. Ask him fun ones, like what was the first car he ever drove, and funny ones, like what’s the best clean (and not-so-clean) joke he knows. Ask him when he hit his first homer, had his first cocktail, and fell in love for the first time. Ask him anything, really, and you’ll find that if you take the time to sit and listen, the stories will just start pouring out. If you don’t have your grandfather by your side, it’s my hope that through this book, you’ll have the spirit of him by your side, and you’ll be smarter, happier, and braver for it.

Meet the Grandfathers
•  •  •

It’s my great pleasure to introduce you to these ten incredible grandfathers, all of whom contributed their stories and wisdom to this book.

Joseph Babin

Joe Babin was born on September 27, 1916, in Cleveland, Ohio, where he had a carefree childhood. “The streets were our playground,” he told me, adding that he and his friends played baseball and football just about every day. About a month after his thirteenth birthday, the stock market crashed, and his father’s building supply business nearly went down with it. “It was touch and go, but there was always food on the table,” said Babin, who attributed his family’s ability to scrape by to his mother’s frugality. “My mother was a good leader, so we managed.” She budgeted so well, in fact, that Babin even had the opportunity to go to college and law school, a luxury some of his friends couldn’t afford. “To get to high school, I’d walk two miles east from home,” he said. “To get to college, I’d just walk two miles west.” During his freshman year at Case Western Reserve University, he met his wife, Geraldine. “I needed a date for a fraternity dance, and my friend told me he had a girl for me. He used to chauffeur his mom around, and they made a call at my future wife’s family home. He never even talked to her, but when we got home, he dialed her number and as soon as she got on the phone, he jammed the receiver in my face,” said Babin, still incredulous after all these years. In case you’re wondering, she said yes to the dance—and a few years later, also to marriage. A month after they tied the knot in 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and two days later Babin was called up for the draft. He then enlisted in the air force and served as a groundling in North Africa, Sicily, and England. Upon his return home in 1945, Babin went to work at his father’s building supply business and embarked on what he considers his life’s boldest undertaking: starting his own family. Now, whenever Babin drives around Cleveland—where he still lives—with his two children and four grandchildren, he can show them all the houses he helped build. Of all the things he helped raise in his life, though, it’s the people in the backseat that make him proudest.

William Buchanan

Buck Buchanan, the youngest of the three Buchanan boys, was born on September 29, 1927, in McAllen, Texas. When the Great Depression hit, his father, a lawyer who’d invested heavily in real estate, went bankrupt, and though his mother held a job at the chamber of commerce, his family had to do whatever they could to get by. At first, they rented a small farm where they were able to grow their own food, and then the family moved to Oracle, Arizona, to mine for gold. “I can remember the dry creekbeds,” said Buchanan, who attended a one-room schoolhouse there. Rather than striking gold, they struck out, and the family eventually moved to Rockport, Texas, where they operated a shrimping boat. Buchanan not only worked on the boat as a deckhand, but also helped build their house, which didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing, but did have an outdoor shower made of palm fronds. He spent his spare time at the beach. “We had a diving platform and raced tin boats,” he told me. After he graduated from high school, Buchanan enlisted in the marines and spent the next eighteen months on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific. “I was very, very fortunate,” he said. “I got in after World War II and out right before the Korean War.” In 1948, he enrolled in the University of Texas, where he met his wife, Sue. They married in 1951, and Buchanan left college to help his father grow and harvest alfalfa and cotton. While raising four daughters, he spent the next several decades farming cotton, operating heavy machinery for other farmers and oil field producers, and even building homes. Now, rather than watch his cotton grow, he enjoys watching his three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren grow. They’re just as soft.

William Holloman III

On August 21, 1924, one of our nation’s bravest pilots was born. All Bill Holloman ever wanted to do was to fly airplanes, but before he got off the ground, he spent plenty of time playing ball on vacant lots in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, and swimming, hunting, and camping on his grandparents’ farm fifty miles outside the city. Because his father was a postal worker, his family managed to get through the Depression relatively unscathed, but Holloman’s friends and neighbors weren’t as lucky. “There were five of us in my family, but my mother
always
set a table for eight, and there were always eight people at the table. She’d let us bring some hungry kids home,” he said. In 1942, Holloman enlisted in the still-segregated military and learned to fly at the Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama, where the first and only black pilots trained. During the war, he flew in the famed 332nd Fighter Group, The Red Tails, an elite all-black unit, which escorted and protected bombers on their missions. (Holloman recently consulted on the George Lucas film
The Red Tails
, starring Terrence Howard and Cuba Gooding Jr.) After the war, Holloman served as an instructor at Tuskegee, but before he had a chance to get a college degree he was ordered back into the air force to serve in the Korean War.

Despite spending years fighting evil abroad, Holloman still had to fight racism at home. Though he’d served in two wars, no American commercial airline would hire him because of his skin color, so he stayed in the military. “The color bar was still there,” he told me. “I just wanted to do what I loved: fly airplanes.” Eventually, a crop-dusting outfit in Central America hired him, and in 1957 a Canadian commercial airline offered him a job, after which he soon met his first wife and started his family. In 1966, he was recalled into service to fight in Vietnam, and by the time he returned to the States he’d found another mission: “When I came back, I became upset that most Americans didn’t know that blacks flew in World War II.” From that day forward, he dedicated his life to teaching history to younger generations, which include his six children, two stepchildren (he remarried in 1990), and seven grandchildren. It wasn’t all lecturing, though. He also loved to travel with them—by air, of course. On June 11, 2010, a few weeks after my last interview with him, Holloman passed away, and the nation lost a hero.

Robert Kelly

From the day he was born on October 4, 1927, Bob Kelly knew he wanted to play baseball, which explains why he spent every free moment of his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, at the sandlot. After he graduated from high school and put in a semester at Purdue, he was drafted into the army in 1946. “They put us on a train to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where they gave us shots before they figured out where they’d send us. They wouldn’t let us go to bed until we made our mind up whether we’d enlist or stay drafted. I got so tired that finally I said, ‘All right, where do I sign?’ ” Kelly, who’d enlisted for eighteen months, went to Camp Lee in Virginia for basic training, and he stumbled across a baseball diamond where the camp team was playing. He joined the game and was soon offered a spot on the roster. “During the war, the navy and army teams were better than the major leagues, because all the guys were in the service,” he said. In 1947, after he finished his military service, Kelly signed with the Chicago Cubs and played on their minor-league farm team. Soon after, he began dating his wife, Sandra, a high school classmate whom he’d admired but had previously been too shy to approach. Within three dates, he proposed, and within six months the two married. In May 1951, Kelly made his major-league debut, as the Cubs’ pitcher, a position he’d hang on to until 1953, when he was traded to the Cincinnati Reds. He finished his baseball career in 1958 as a Cleveland Indian. After his retirement, Kelly opened a record shop. He then spent the next several decades working various sales jobs and raising his seven children. Now he lives with his wife in Connecticut, where he enjoys the occasional Manhattan cocktail. He also has fourteen athletic grandchildren and one great-grandchild, and he makes a point of cheering them on at as many of their games as he can.

Angel Rodriguez

Angel Rodriguez was born on a corn and yucca farm on November 28, 1924, in Palmar de Candelaria, a rural town in Colombia. He was the youngest of five children and son to a single mother. When he was three years old, his sister Paulina, who was thirty-two, traveled in search of work to the port city of Barranquilla, where she met and fell in love with a German optician named Adolf Kinderman, who immigrated to the country after World War I. As part of their marriage arrangement, Paulina insisted that she and Kinderman would raise her little brother Angel as their own, and he agreed. Rodriguez lived with them in Barranquilla, and almost immediately began to apprentice at Kinderman’s optical shop. By age fourteen, he was able to run it on his own and did so for the next six years. Before long, political tensions in Colombia took their toll on Kinderman, and he lost the shop to another family, who kept Rodriguez employed. In 1952, after having a vision of an angel who told him to marry, he and his sweetheart, Gladys, tied the knot and expanded their family. In 1968, in order to give his children a better education, Rodriguez, who didn’t speak any English, moved to West New York, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and got a job through a friend making glasses at the American Optical Society. “I had a good salary in Colombia, and I moved here and earned less. I used to cry, because I felt so stupid,” he said. Still, he persevered, working hard at two full-time jobs and earning promotions, and in 1970 he was able to bring his wife and five children to America with him. They had one more child together, and in 1995 Rodriguez became a proud American citizen. Thanks to his dedication and handiwork, thousands of New Yorkers can now see clearly. Since his retirement, Rodriguez can often be found in Brooklyn at the home of his son, a Grammy-nominated jazz musician, where he and his large family, including thirteen grandchildren, love to boogie into the night.

Philip Spooner Sr.

Philip Spooner was born on a potato farm north of Caribou, Maine, on January 2, 1922. As a young boy, his chores included feeding the horses and milking thirty to forty cows at five o’clock every morning before school. He attended a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade, but since the nearest high school was twenty miles away (and his family didn’t have a car), his education was cut short. Rather than continuing on, he became a janitor at his grade school, where his duties included lighting the stove and fetching water for a dollar and a half a month. At age eighteen, Spooner traveled north, ten miles shy of the Canadian border, to harvest lumber for thirty-five cents an hour. After that, he joined a road-building crew outside Bangor. “We lived in tents, and the boss’s wife was the cook and I mean she really cooked: homemade pies and baked beans,” he told me. Then he worked for a private contractor in the navy yard, and fell in love with a waitress named Jenny at a nearby restaurant, before being drafted for the war in November 1942. “It was love at first sight. We got married on Saturday night, and I left Monday morning for the army,” he said of his late wife of fifty-four years. During the war Spooner became an ambulance driver and medic and saw action in all five major campaigns, participating in the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Paris. Not only did he carry injured soldiers to hospitals during battle, but he also transported Allied prisoners of war home from Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary and hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany. His unit earned the Presidential Citation. “I’m probably the only guy who sat with Eisenhower in France,” he said. “He and a British big shot came to see how the bombing was going to go, so they put us ambulance drivers out back of the hospital tent, because we weren’t all spruced up, and all we had to eat was K-rations. Eisenhower got out of the car and instead of going into the hospital and having chicken, he sat down in the grass with a K-ration and talked to us.” After the war ended, Spooner returned to Maine, where he raised his four sons and one daughter and made a living driving trucks and delivering newspapers. In April 2009, Spooner, a lifelong Republican, made history once again when he made a speech to Maine’s Judicial Committee. He said, “I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, ‘Do you believe in equality for gay and lesbian people?’ I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, ‘What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?’ … For freedom and equality. These are the values that make America a great nation, one worth dying for.” He’s a hero not only to his two granddaughters and several great-grandchildren, but also to all those Americans who believe in equality for all people.

Al Sulka

Al Sulka, the son of Polish immigrants, was born on July 12, 1922, in Blue Island, Illinois, on the far South Side of Chicago. He spent much of his childhood playing basketball (“we had an old bushel basket nailed to a post in the alley”) and, when he had the dime to spare, watching Roy Rogers westerns. During his summers, his father and mother—a railroad stevedore and a hotel maid—would send him, along with some of his six siblings, north to his uncle’s farm in Michigan to pick strawberries and weed onions. In return, Sulka was paid ten cents an hour (which he promptly spent on school clothes) and his uncle would send his family sacks of potatoes, corn, and apples for the winter. Sulka also caddied at a local golf course. “I got fifty cents a round, and if you got a dime tip, then hallelujah! That meant you had a milk shake. It was tough during the Depression, but we pulled through.” At seventeen, Sulka, along with his only brother, joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of the public works programs of the New Deal, and went to Oregon to build roads and fight brush fires. About three years later, in 1942, he enlisted in the navy, where he spent three of the next four years on the water off the coasts of Italy and Africa, repairing amphibious landing craft. He was lucky enough to be stationed in Staten Island on VE Day, May 8, 1945. “We had a three-day pass to go into Times Square, and I don’t know if we slept those three days or not. You couldn’t even move! Oh, we snake-danced. It was a big deal!” After the war ended, Sulka moved back to Illinois and in 1946 married his wife, Helen, whom he’d met at a town carnival just prior to enlisting. They had two children, and to support his family Sulka worked several jobs, including bartender, steel bender at a local factory, and even trash collector. Helen passed away in 1994. Now Sulka lives outside Chicago, in Crestwood, where he calls bingo (and breaks hearts) every Wednesday night, and entertains his three grandchildren and one great-grandchild with his very funny jokes. He has a lot of them.