He Died on the 4th of July

July 4th, 2022

My adoptive grandfather was a good man. Having served in the Army Air Corp. in World War II, he spent a lot of his time at the VFW of his small, central-Illinois town. And he was such a patriot that he died on the 4th of July. 

Growing up, Marty went to school in a one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from high school in 1941. After returning from war, he started working for the DeKalb-Ogle Telephone Company, digging giant holes for telephone poles. Gradually he worked his way up–back when companies were designed for one to do that–to phone-line repairman, telephone repairman, crew leader, and eventually, after decades of promotions, mergers and acquisitions, he retired from a comfortable office job at Verizon. 

I loved my Grandpa Marty. I remember the crisp $20 bills he would include with every holiday and birthday card, signed simply, Love Grandpa Marty. He was an avid gardener 

Apricot trees grew in my grandparents’ backyard, where I tasted fresh apricots for the first time. Growing up, my dad always kept huge quantities of dried apricots in his house, because of, I suspect, nostalgia. Grandpa Marty also grew all manner of vegetables and the sweetest yellow pear tomatoes I have ever tasted.  

All summer, he and Grandma Mary would can their extra harvest. My dad said that growing up, the family ate pickles with every meal. He said they must have been poor, but he never realized this because everyone else was equally poor and because my grandpa was so frugal, resourceful and incredibly handy.

My grandpa literally, physically, built the house my dad, and his younger sister, Lori were both (also literally) born in. And it was a beauty. Two stories, plus a narrow attic with one window and one twin bed I remember sleeping in on visits as a kid. 

When my dad had his accident, my grandpa remodeled the place to put a bathroom and a bedroom on the first floor so my dad could live there. Grandpa Marty also added an elaborate zig-zagging ramp out the back door. The basement was cool and musty and full of all sorts of treasures: an entire wall full of hardware, the likes of which I have never seen except inside an actual hardware store, seed starts he grew under a light in spring and watered with whatever he collected from his dehumidifier. 

He also kept a pool table down there, which I loved playing with as a child. When you entered the basement, you had to duck down to avoid bumping the hundreds of baseball caps hanging just above your head. My brother used to ask to keep one each time he visited, and my grandpa would always oblige. 

My dad fondly recalled being in high school and cleaning up used phones for spending money. Back then, phones had the earpiece you stretched out and brought toward yourself, and when they stopped working, people returned them to the telephone company and a clean, working phone was sent back out to them. My dad was the one cleaning those phones, polishing away in happy anticipation of his nickel, calling his dad and saying, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”

Armed with this anecdote about cleaning the phones, my dad bemoaned the throw away culture he saw as he got older. My grandpa, though still alive at the time, never bemoaned the throw away culture, because he never threw anything away. A child of the Great Depression, my grandpa never met a tupperware he didn’t want to hold onto and conscript into lifelong service.

Due to his years of hard physical labor, years of hard work, a union contract and strong company pension, Grandpa Marty was able to retire before I was born, at the ripe old age of 59. He enjoyed golf and lived a comfortable and, more importantly, worry-free retirement and even owned company stock, so he didn’t concern himself when giving away all those crisp $20 bills.

His company also offered extremely generous health insurance benefits. The benefits were so generous, in fact, that he and my grandmother paid nothing “out of pocket”–what that even a term they would have recognized?-- for emergency life-saving care when my dad was in a debilitating car accident at 18. Nor when he needed to stay in the hospital for 6-months for recovery, or undergo rehabilitation services, which, considering the accident left my dad a quadriplegic, were many. 

This same company health insurance also took care of my grandmother as she fought an unsuccessful battle against cancer decades later. Unlike someone facing this experience today, Marty was not burdened by worry about making ends meet or spending precious time fighting with an insurance company while he watched his wife get sicker, and sicker and die. 

So, Grandpa Marty benefited throughout his life from a company structure and an entire working world that is so much more civil and friendly than those of today. Where the average executive salary was 20 times the average workers’, instead of 670 times. He benefited from a company in which you could work your way up, in which hard work, persistence and performing excellently paid off, whether you were in an office or out in a line of “asses and elbows” digging ditches. Now, the people performing those operations in the same company never even meet. In fact, most often they aren’t even part of the same company.

It’s hard not to feel nostalgic about a man like my grandfather. Indeed, he was a great man. A man who worked his way up with nothing but a high school education, hard work, persistence and being good at things. A man who was such a jack-of-all-trades that he could personally build a house and remodel it, hold down an office job and invest in the stock market (his investments in Disney and Coke particularly resonated with 8-year-old me), shoot a passable game of pool and round of golf, grow the world’s sweetest tomato, and pickle it, too. 

He lived his entire life in a town that still tops out at 3,700 residents. 

It’s hard to imagine living in a town like that, or any city or town for that matter, and not valorizing that sort of resourcefulness and renaissance existence. To not yearn for that kind of masculinity. 

A masculinity so total and all consuming that it needn’t be defensive. Here was the deal for my grandfather’s generation: If you did what men were meant to do, took good care of your family even through trauma and disease, made a good, comfortable living with the anticipation of advancement and future promotions, then you could afford to rest and pursue leisure in your off hours. 

If you were able to do these things by design, having fought in a war and returned home to respect and significant financial and educational benefits, you didn’t need any other ways to prove you were a man. In fact, this kind of masculinity offered plenty of room to be gentle, kind, tender even, nurturing and still–and my Grandpa Marty was all of those things. 

This wasn’t meant as a political statement, only as a remembrance of my beloved grandfather on his yahrzeit, but it’s impossible for me to remember my grandpa and outline his life trajectory without considering the politics and increasing polarization of the world we live in. 

Impossible not to consider what it feels like for men who were raised with this blueprint of masculinity from their own grandfathers and fathers, but live at a time and in a world where opportunities to do that primary thing we expect of men–provide for their families–are few or non-existent. 

I wonder if this is partly why the political education divide is growing. When your model of what the good life is fundamentally incompatible with the way life is, when your attempts to follow the path of your father and grandfather are continually thwarted, when you lack the education to understand what is happening on a larger scale or imagine other possibilities, you go looking for answers. 

It becomes easy to blame the immigrants in your town, who seem to have jobs and even opportunities for advancement you lack, perhaps because their models and pathways to success are different. It is easy to blame the Democrats who closed the coal mine in your town, cutting off the major source of good, union jobs, because of their nonsensical environmentalism, as you face skyrocketing gas prices and can’t afford to feed your family. 

And it’s easy to latch onto whatever version of masculinity seems most compelling, confident and strong, especially if it feeds your fears and insecurities with rage and indignation at the same time. 

This July 4th, I am remembering my grandfather. A patriot. A good man. Part of The Greatest Generation. Someone who, based on his life story, would today be a unicorn, or something even more rare, and yet whose life story still remains the ideal of so many white, American men. 

And if we want to speak to these men (and the women who love them) we need to speak to their issues, and we need to speak in their language.