Grandson and grandpa. Grandpa died shortly after this photo was taken sometime in the spring or summer of 1955, on Christmas Day 1955. I think my visage reveals my character quite well - cautious, skeptical, inquisitive, and a bit melancholy and pessimistic. What do you think? I was shipped off to Iowa to live with my grandparents for a few months, because my mother was having "problems." Gramps took me everywhere, to his medical office, to lectures, to the Outing Club. I was quite well behaved, but then would depose Gramps after about the meaning of it all. His wife was worried that he was spoiling me rotten, and she was right, and well also wrong.
Grandpa hoped I would be a football player like he had been (he paid his way as a football coach under coincidence would have it, my subsequent alma mater, under Alonzo (?) Stagg, to pay his way through medical school), but alas that was not in the cards. I suspect his thinness here, was a portent of his final exit.
Speaking of Grandma, during that stay, one morning I told her that going to nursery school was discommoding me, and I preferred to spend my valuable time in other pursuits. She said, well Grandpa has his job healing the sick, and I have my job running this household and feeding the men in the house, ie Grandpa and yourself, and your job is to go to nursery school! It was like a light bulb went on, and I picked up my things, and decamped to the other venue without a further word. Grandma love to tell me that tale years afterword, but she need not have. I remember it like it was yesterday. Our brains work in mysterious ways, but at age 4, thanks to her, I learned a valuable lesson. We each have our jobs, and our job, is job one.
