Happy Father's Day Grandpa: Thanks for hooking up with grandma!
Happy Father's Day!
Usually we take this day to honor our Dads, which makes sense considering the name of the holiday. I'm going to take it one generation further and talk about my grandfather. We'll get to him in a bit.
I come from a huge family. It's so big that our family tree looks like the IBM org chart. It's so big that the number of relatives on the tree numbers in the hundreds. For years, just looking at the thing gave me headache. I never could figure out how I was related to someone. One day it became clear. It was all because of my grandmother and her siblings.
My Grandmother, Leah, was the oldest of ten. All of them had a bunch of kids and so on down the line. That's why I had a headache. That's why I have seven cousins born in the same year as me. That's why I have cousins that run into each other and have no idea they're related. But they're a story for another day. Back to Leah.
My grandmother was born in 1883ish. She married a guy named Shea and they had a bunch of kids. The org chart says seven. One day Shea was working and he was getting into his transportation which was a horse and buggy. The horse escaped and while Shea tried to capture it, the horse ran him over and killed him. Serious! You can't make this stuff up.
That left Leah a widow with a crew of children. I don't know the time frame but along came my grandfather, Harry Moore...the guy in the photo.
I don't know how they were introduced but Harry met Leah and they fell in love.
A quick question for the guys in the audience....if you're a single guy and you meet a woman with seven children, how fast are you running in the other direction? Yeah...me, too but we aren't Harry Moore!
So Harry and Leah decide to get married. The story goes that Leah's sisters had a meeting and tried to decide who would take her kids because how was Harry going to marry her with all these children? Harry heard about this and told Leah that not only was she keeping the kids, he wouldn't want to marry a woman who would give up her children for a man.
Another quick question for the guys in the audience...how many of you are doing anything like this? Yeah...me, too but we aren't Harry Moore!
Harry and Leah get married and apparently seven wasn't enough. They went on to have one more, my dad, Norman. My grandparents were apparently the Bradford's of "Eight Is Enough" just fifty years earlier.
Harry died in 1948. He never met any of my father's children. My parents didn't get married until 1950 and I came along a couple of years later. I missed Harry by four years. I occasionally hear stories about him and everyone speaks of him in glowing terms. He was the nicest guy, had time for everyone and treated everyone the same and with respect.
That's my grandfather and that's Harry's story. Today is another Father's Day. My own father has been gone for a long time. I have my own children but they're adults and one of them is in Israel. So Father's Day today will be Golf and Baseball and I'm good with that. But I'll spend a few minutes thinking about the grandfather I never met.
Thanks Harry for being my Grandpa.
Here's the Father's Day Gallery I wrote a couple of years ago.
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