346“Our father was a handsome man: six feet tall, weighing two hundred pounds, he had the blackest of black hair, large, white shiny teeth, red cheeks and the heartiest laugh ever. Reared on a scrabbly Illinois farm, he was the fifteenth and youngest of a healty breed of hard-working, hard-fighting and hard-drinking men. We hung breathlessly on his tales of copper-toed shoes made by his own father—boots that could be worn on either foot; his stores of the wild cow he had to chase every evening through the thorny gooseberry bushes; his talks about Grandpa’s emigration from Daniel Boone’s county.

“Although Mamma despised the handmade, wooden pegged hickory chairs Grandpa had made for their wedding in 1893, we struggled to sit on them and always used them for our favorite train. Those chairs gradually disappeared through many movings, broken or lost in transit, but I strongly suspect that mamma frequently knew what had happened to them. How valued they would be today—the handiwork of the gnarled-fingered, beetle-browed gentleman I learned to know from the picture in Papa’s study. Grandpa died long before I was born, but his face is as clear as that of my father. So much so, that my daughter, coming on the picture unexpectedly in our attic, gasped, “Why that’s my granddad!”