The author reflects on his grandfather's passing and the complex emotions surrounding his life and legacy.
Not quite a comedy, not quite a tragedy. For me, Christmas , 1969, had the ironic tone of a Chekhov play, with a little Joan Rivers mixed in. My grandfather Earle Steele had died alone in a nursing home in Indiana. So my Hoosier parents drove me and two siblings 550 miles from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with our aging dachshund, Pickles, for the funeral. The return drive: a nightmare.
Earle was a link to another age, born during Chester Arthur’s presidency and a boy when Democrat Grover Cleveland, who may have fathered a child out of wedlock, was president. My Republican grandfather savored repeating the anti-Cleveland campaign chant, “Ma, ma, where’s my pa!” In 1900 he played for the winning high school team in the “famous” Indiana-Kentucky football game. He was small, and according to family legend his teammates tossed him over the line while carrying the ball to gain yardage. Earle served in World War One on a base in Oklahoma. In young adulthood, he reported for the Huntington Herald, owned by Vice President Dan Quayle’s grandfather, lost that job in the Depression and never worked steadily again. He rejected air travel and once said to me that if God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings. John F. Kennedy’s 1960 election infuriated him and led him to declare that Catholics had no business in politics. Worse, he thought it was OK in principle to use the N-word, although I never heard him use slur words of any kind. Yet he proudly recounted that his ancestors had been driven from the South for freeing their slaves. Self-righteous about Southerners but unsympathetic toward African Americans. He was always kind to me, and I loved him. But somehow he had earned the disdain of his two daughters —was it the failed career? — and I’ve wondered whether this is why they neglected him in his final days. I am virtually certain my mother, an excellent woman, later felt guilty about this. The funeral took place on Christmas Day
Grandfather Family Legacy Memories Christmas
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