I was born to work. Now please don’t interpret that as arrogance or conceit on my part. I’m not trying to paint myself as some mythical folk hero like John Henry, the “spike-drivin’ man” who burst his heart attempting to beat the railroad’s steam-powered rock drilling machine in a race. When I say, “I was born to work,” I mean it literally. I was born October 21, 1940, and lived on my grandfather’s 200-acre farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. America was just emerging out of the Great Depression and needed to get back to work to heal itself. Further complicating the USA’s economic situation was the imposed rationing of food and fuel once we entered World War II. Like many small private businesses, family-owned farms desperately needed workers but often couldn’t afford to pay them. The most cost-effective answer to their workforce problems was a common practice as old as the hills: have lots of children.
Grandad was a walking contradiction: a devout, prayers-at-every-meal, churchgoing Christian whose principal adjective was goddamn. I’m sure he used some other descriptive words from time to time, but that’s the one I remember the most. Grandma always used to say to him, “Billy, why would you ask God to damn that wheel barrow”—or whatever else he was working on at the moment—“when you’re trying to fix it?”
That was one of Grandma’s roles: to correct her husband. When he would tell his oft-repeated story about how the snow from the blizzard of 1888 came up above his knees, she was always quick to point out, “Billy, you were only a four-year-old during that blizzard. No wonder it came up above your knees.” Years later, a similar blizzard would still have covered most of his lower body. Grandad was barely five feet tall—a white-haired dynamo and part-time tyrant who always seemed to be in a hurry. In spite of Grandma being a one-woman correction bureau, she was very supportive of him and all he did.
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