Grandpa Tony

If I knew my Grandma Marguerite but little, I knew my Grandpa Tony even less. I met him only once in 1963 when he came to visit my family for a short stay during our tour of duty at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Until then and even afterwards, I could hearken back to only a few “over-heards” rather than any substantial stories about him. I knew that he had been divorced from my grandmother when my father was in his early teens and that as a devout, even fanatical, Christian Scientist, he eschewed modern medicine in general and disapproved of my father’s chosen profession in particular. It had even been suggested that Dad had been disowned by his father, but that claim was surely an exaggeration for I’ve come to understand that a parent needs to have a certain amount of assets in order to effectively disown an offspring. To his dying day, my grandfather Tony had nothing much to pass on, much less withhold. That said, he was better off in his later years, mainly because he went to work for the first time in his life, employed by his oldest son Gene in his successful tool and supply company.

Several vignettes of my grandfather’s one-and-only visit stand out in my memory now forty-five years later. For dessert after our first dinner together my mother offered everyone a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Grandpa Tony and I were the only takers, as I recall. He quickly finished his and then looked on as I methodically shaped, sculpted and scooped mine, taking my time as I savored my favorite flavor. All at once he pointed over my shoulder and called out, “What’s that?” I turned quickly to look in the direction he indicated and then turned back just in time to see him take the last spoonful of my ice cream, sliding it gleefully into his grinning mouth. I responded with a mixture of shock and pleasure…shock that he would be so forward when he’d only just met me and pleasure at being taught such an amusing ploy that I would perpetrate repeatedly on others in years to come.

After dinner my dad, Grandpa Tony and I took a stroll around the housing area comprised of carbon copy officers’ quarters. I say “Grandpa Tony” now, but at the time I was careful to call him just “Tony.” Even before he’d stolen my ice cream, he’d surreptitiously paid me a dollar to drop the Grandpa and refer to him merely as Tony. Knowing that such familiarity would not fly with my folks, I assiduously avoided calling him anything at all. As we approached a corner expanse of lawn, Tony suddenly requested, “Let me see you run!” When I did so, proud of my natural ten-year-old athleticism, he proceeded to give me about eight different pointers on how to improve my gait: where to place and how to push off with my feet, how high to raise my knees with each stride, what to do with my arms, how to hold my head…I recall glancing at my father just in time to see him close his eyes and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Needless to say, I could barely walk much less run, as I tried to implement all of Tony’s helpful hints.

During the day while Dad was at work in his clinic, it fell to Mom and me to entertain Tony. My three years of single-minded supplications had finally paid off that summer when my parents agreed to buy me a horse, which I boarded at the base stables. At my dad’s suggestion, we readily engaged Tony’s expertise as we sought to build a shelter in a barren pasture so that my jet-black gelding could escape the hot summer sun of south Texas. Thrilled to have not one but two able adults working on my behalf, I was completely unaware of how close my grandfather came to meeting my vivacious mother’s dark alter-ego. Later that night I could only catch snippets of the mostly muffled tirade sifting past my parents’ closed bedroom door…phrases like hard-headed German and pompous ass made no sense then, but cause me to chuckle now.

It was during that visit as well that I was taught the first German I ever learned. Knowing that my family and I would soon rotate – the military term for relocate – to Wiesbaden, Germany for a tour of duty, my grandfather took it upon himself to introduce me to the German language. Ich und Du, Müller's Kuh, Beckel's Esel…der bist Du! (I and you, Miller’s cow, Beckel’s ass…that’s YOU!) At first he refused to translate for me, but then thought better of it when he imagined me repeating his little rhyme to an actual German in the near future! Just as I regret never learning to sew, I also lament never having had the occasion to actually converse with my grandfather in his native language. Before I could return to the United States with my newfound fluency, he would be dead.