Mighty Acorns: Grandpa Bob

When I first took an interest in "Family Trees", I was young and innocent of sense, common or otherwise. I had the idea that if I looked hard enough I would find lurking in the branches of my ancestry kings, astronauts, baseball players... or maybe someone wealthy who had left behind a healthy fortune just for me.

So far, the closest my DNA comes to fame and fortune is "7th cousin to Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower's grandchildren".* But as cool as it is to be able to say that, I've discovered a much deeper fondness for my less "glamorous" ancestors than my younger self would have thought possible.

One of those regular people was Bob Callin. His great-grandfather, William Callin, was a true pioneer, clearing at least two farms in Ohio. Before the Civil War, one of those farms was a "stop" on the Underground Railroad. Bob's grandfather, John Henry Callin, fought for the Union, alongside brothers and cousins, and became a teacher after the war. His father, John Quincy Callin, was another groundbreaker, moving the family to Florida long before it became the Enchanted Kingdom. Bob himself enlisted in the Army when the rumbling approach of the Second World War could still be mistaken for a thunderstorm, and by the end of it, he had found his best friend and greatest partner, Nancy. They eventually settled in Glendale, the desert city where her father had carved out a farm back when Pancho Villa was still a real threat.

But, as impressive and manly as these deeds may sound in the history books, the real men behind them were not John Wayne archetypes. These were Real Men, who got by with love and a strange sense of humor. They would have needed a lot of both to survive. Great-grandpa William discovered an oil well on his farm, and sold it for what he thought was a great profit -- just a few years before Mr. Ford's very popular automobile took off. Grandpa John's Civil War service was spent largely in hospitals, recovering from diseases picked up in Civil War hospitals. And Bob's father, John, would write ruefully humorous letters to his son chronicling "that old Callin luck" that kept him from becoming a real estate tycoon. (It had less to do with luck, and more to do with a man who was too generous to succeed in such a cutthroat market.)

The man I knew as Grandpa Bob was every bit as lucky as his forefathers; blessed with happiness and a healthy family, yet plagued by minor tragedies. Prone to accidents around open cupboard doors and his beloved Volkswagen, Fang, he met every challenge with a long-suffering grin, and a ready joke. My last visit with him, during our 2005 Christmas trip to Arizona, he had just come out of the hospital. He had required another procedure to clean up his circulatory system, and the doctors had left him with livid bruises on both his arms. I asked him if it hurt him, and if he was alright, and he said he was.

"It's not as bad as it looks," he told me, looking somewhat glum. But then his eye twinkled, and he perked up as he said, "But you shoulda seen the OTHER guy!"

So, while I may not have found any kings or powerful magnates in our past, I have found something of much greater value to me. Our stories are the treasures that we spend at family gatherings. They collect in our memories, and the interest compounds with time. They are fortunes built on love, and Grandpa Bob always had a great storehouse of that treasure.

He will be missed, but our sadness is overwhelmed by the joy of having known him. We will mourn, but we are grateful for his life and his love: the greatest inheritance.

*Julie Nixon married Dwight D. Eisenhower, II, and my grandmother was 5th cousin to President Nixon. I can prove it, if you like!

New Blog/Old Tricks

Welcome. I know that saying this will make it seem like I don't know what I'm doing, but that's alright because I really don't know what I'm doing.

Here's the story:

Back in my USAF days, I worked on a watch floor. This meant regular mid-watches, often with little or nothing to do (don't start in on the self-improvement crap, or I'll get very cranky). Out of the dull stretches of the wee hours grew a weekly gathering/editing/resending tradition that I called "Tad's Happy Funtime".

From day one of the existence of email, there have been bad jokes circulating, and I made it part of my personal mission to collect them and distribute them to others who, like me, were sitting before a CRT screen at 2a.m. wondering how long they could hold their urine without doing permanent damage to their kidneys.

After a time, finding new material to forward became harder. Either I had seen it and sent it, or seen it and deleted it in disgust. Eventually, I began to include more of my own brain scribblings and meanderings... and much to my surprise, this was a bigger hit with people than the stupid jokes, lists of "actual quotes", Onion articles, and other violations of taste and UCMJ regulations.

Upon finding myself in the civilian world, several friends urged me to keep up THFT, and I tried half-heartedly to do so. Finally, James started up a Blogger.com account, called it "Tad's Happy Funtime", and begged me to start posting. We put up a number of stories there (happyphuntime.blogspot.com), and also started a seperate account just for our toilet humor (cornerstall.blogspot.com). But it was hard to keep up with, and I didn't really see the point. Eventually, I just stopped going there.

Then came MySpace. I've been putting all kinds of goofy crap up on there, including some stories I wrote for a science fiction contest sponsored by my favorite Podcast (Escape Pod). The trouble was that I wanted to be able to share some of these writings with family and friends who weren't on MySpace.

And so, I have returned to Blogger.com in order to make my favorite snips and tails available for the public at large. If you care to see any of the older items, please visit the "happyphuntime" site, and skim through the archives. Newer stuff will show up on a strict schedule of "when I feel like it".

Either way, I'm not here to sell anything, change any minds, or make any enemies. I'm here to help anyone who is stuck in the watches of the night, staring at a screen and wishing there was something to read that can take the mind off of a swelling bladder for a while. I'm here to share. I'm here to reminisce (albeit imperfectly). Most of all, I'm here to help you take life a little less seriously.

It's only life, after all.