When I was growing up with my four older brothers, all of them very large like me, my mother became masterful at making meals that could feed our small army….
As I write the Good Grandpa book I’m grouping my interviews with grandpas by topic—for example, three veterans from different branches of the military—then writing a chapter focused on…
On December 3rd, 1947, the blond-coiffed professional wrestler known as Gorgeous George ascended into the ring of the Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles, basking in the applause and jeers of…
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When I set out to write the Good Grandpa book, I went into the experience with ears and eyes wide open to whatever might come my way. I’d heard from…
When I set out to write the Good Grandpa book, I went into the experience with ears and eyes wide open to whatever might come my way.
I’d heard from historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin that the right story for a book needs to find you, not the other way around. She explained that she set out to write the definitive biography of Abraham Lincoln, but as she learned more about the men who competed with Lincoln for the presidency a far more fascinating story emerged. The result was her extraordinary book, Team of Rivals.
Today I’m about half-way through my book journey—about 50,000 words—the result of many interviews with amazing grandpas from different walks of life (and waking up at 5am with lots of strong coffee as I tackle new chapters). This has been quite an experience.
The stories I’ve heard from grandpas have been extraordinary.
I’ve been deeply moved so many times, surprised by twists and turns, and found my own pathway as a grandpa illuminated by the wisdom that has been so generously shared with me.
Early on, I heard from legendary newsman Tom Brokaw that he believed every generation would have its own epic challenges to overcome, the kind of struggle that could forge our grandchildren to become the new greatest generation. The key was to learn from each challenge and become even stronger.
Tom Brokaw
I heard from John Cleese that it’s more important to find the truth than believe you know the truth, that sometimes absolute certainty can get in the way of learning.
Me with my comedy God, the great John Cleese.
I spoke with a grandfather who discovered the power of prayer to heal his cancer-stricken granddaughter, and in the process found his path back to God.
Eric Behr rediscovered his spirituality.
I met with a Muslim grandfather from India who sees our grandchildren as already the greatest generation of all time, bestowed with extraordinary gifts and opportunity, but in need of a greater sense of gratitude.
Recently, I spoke with three different grandpa Veterans, including a Vietnam combat Vet who shared a story that blew me away.
Gresh Lattimore, retired Navy Captain.
I have a long way to go before I finish, but I’ve definitely had an epiphany.
I set out on a mission to bring together stories and wisdom to help nurture the next great generation.
This purpose was grounded in the concept of changing our grandchildren and their future so they could live their best lives. What I’ve learned, however, is that I’m the one who has to change first. The youngest people in our growing family look up to me, and I must lead by example. There can be no pontificating.
Over the past 6 months, when I’ve questioned grandpas and probed for the essential wisdom they wished to impart to our grandchildren, I’ve heard the most powerful things. Many times before telling me their answers, these grandpas pause and then say, “I’m going to tell you something I wish someone had told me fifty years ago.”
I can’t wait to share these things with you when the book is published in the second half of 2025. All I can tell you now, without spoiling the happy ending, is that a pattern is emerging.
Stay tuned, and thank you for coming along with me on this journey. I’m very grateful. If you or someone you know has a story to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Once upon a time in a land far away and long ago, my dad used to make up stories for us at bedtime. All his stories involved the same seven…
Once upon a time in a land far away and long ago, my dad used to make up stories for us at bedtime.
All his stories involved the same seven characters, Casper, Jasper, and five boys named Calvin, Charlie, Nick, John and Ted — me and my four older brothers. I recall loving the stories, but that’s all I remember because they were never written down.
When my two kids where little, I took a page from my dad’s dreamtime creative playbook and made up my own stories to tell them at bedtime. My kids remember loving the stories, but that’s all they remember because I never wrote them down.
These days, coming up with stories that feature my grandkids is as wonderful for me as it is for them, and maybe I’ve finally learned my lesson because I’ve started writing them down so they’ll never be lost.
My grandkids jump into bed and implore me, “Grandpa, tell us a story!”
Then—like the grandpa in The Princess Bride—I spin a tale of magical adventures. I’ll often pause in the middle of a story to offer up different branching pathways and give the grandkids a choice of which way to go, or ask them to create and vote on the best solution for beating the dragon, crossing the fiery swamp or outwitting the ogre.
Of course, it’s inevitable that they get so excited that going to sleep is impossible. I completely fail at the ‘get the kids calmed down’ concept and I’ve taken some heat for it. I beg forgiveness. Many years from now, my grandkids will never remember that they lost a few hours of sleep, but they will remember the stories I told them and the special time we had together.
These are Forever Stories, cut from the same cloth as Forever Letters but with a creative twist.
Here’s a recent tale:
Lucinda had been playing with her Teddy Bears—Henry, Charlie, Roen and Mae—for much of the afternoon on a green spring day in the little town of Oakdale, Connecticut, when she yawned very wide and said, “Oh goodness. It must be nap time.”
Lucinda’s mom, Fern, called up from downstairs just at that moment, “Lucinda! Time for your nap!”
Lucinda gave her bears a big hug and a kiss, and set them down side by side in the playroom. “Sleep tight, my fair princes,” she said. Lucinda’s mom tucked her into bed and soon the little girl fell into a deep sleep.
But in the playroom, things were just starting to wake up.
In the dimness, a small red light blinked on and a man’s voice crackled over a radio. “Calling all Teddy Bear Rescue Squads. Calling all Teddy Bear Rescue Squads. Can you read me?”
The Bears jumped to their feet and ran to the radio. Charlie pressed the red button and whispered, “Squad one reporting! I repeat, squad one reporting! Over.”
“Roger that, squad one!” said the voice. “We need you down at the playground immediately! A tiger has gotten loose from the zoo, and if he’s not put back in his cage who knows what could happen!”
“No problem!” said Henry. “We’re on it, Chief!”
“Let’s go!” piped up Roen, a girl bear.
“Let’s go!” chimed in Mae, Roen’s little sister, who was learning how to talk and often repeated whatever her sister said.
The bears had a quick meeting, trying to keep their Teddy Bear voices down. In case you’ve never heard a Teddy Bear talk, it’s a very high pitch, almost like hearing a baby ask for crackers or something. Use your imagination.
The question now was, should they take the Rescue Squad race car, the mini-jet, or the hot air balloon?
“This is my thinking,” said Charlie, “if we take the mini-jet we might get there faster but there’s no place to land at the playground. The racecar would be pretty fast, but if we take the hot air balloon we can bring the animal cage to put the tiger in. The cage won’t fit in the car.”
“Excellent idea!” said Henry, a little too loudly, apparently, for they suddenly heard footsteps in the hall getting closer to their door.
The bears jumped back to sit exactly where Lucinda had left them and sat very still, trying to make their glass eyes look blank, so that if Fern peaked in she wouldn’t suspect that they were real live bears with a secret mission in the Teddy Bear Rescue Squad.* They heard the footsteps stop just outside the door, as if Fern had stopped to listen, but then they moved on.
“Quick!” Henry whispered.
“Yea,” Charlie whispered back, “before anyone spots us!”
“’I’ll bring some blueberries!” said Roen, who always enjoyed snacks even during emergencies.
They grabbed the hot air balloon from the closet and hung it out the window, then used the air machine to pump hot air into the balloon, which quickly grew in size. Then they attached the red and blue striped basket to the bottom of the balloon with ropes, and below that they hung the animal cage.
Within minutes they were floating above the house and over the trees as the wind blew them towards the school playground.
Charlie used the spyglass to navigate. “Left, twenty degrees!” he ordered. “Good, now down a bit – WATCH OUT FOR THAT TREE!” They barely missed hitting the top of a big oak tree with its branches that seemed to reach out towards them like arms.
“Look!” Henry squeaked as he peered through the spyglass, “the tiger!”
“Let me see!” Charlie said, taking hold of the spyglass. “Wow!”
Roen had her turn, too. “That’s a big tiger!” she said when she saw the yellow and black striped beast pacing next to the swing set, its tail swishing side to side.
“That’s a big tiger!” Mae said.
Mrs. Moore, one of the teachers at the school, was perched on top of the swing set clutching the metal bar for dear life, staring down at the tiger pacing hungrily below.
The Squad arrived over the playground and hovered there as they worked out a plan. How would they get the tiger into the cage to save Mrs. Moore?
“I could blast it with my stun rocket,” Henry said.
“I could make it fall asleep by shooting it with an arrow tipped with sleeping powder!” said Charlie.
“Let’s cast a magic spell!” Roen said.
Mae stomped her feet and said, “I’ll kick it in the face!”
Everyone looked at Mae, wondering when she’d learned to say something like that and how the tiger would respond if kicked in the face by Mae’s little boot with its silver sparkles and a picture of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen.
All of these ideas could work, they decided, but were a bit risky.
Roen got out her blueberries to have a snack, offering a bowl of them to the rest. They munched the sweet blueberries for a minute, thinking hard to make the right decision. Then Roen had an epiphany, which is like an idea that pops into your head, “I’ll put my blueberries into the cage so the hungry tiger will go in and eat them. Then we’ll slam the door shut!”
Mae piped in, “Then we’ll slam the door shut!”
“Yes!” Henry said, pumping the air with his furry brown fist, “That’s how Grandpa Ted catches groundhogs. If it works for groundhogs, it’ll work for a tiger!”
“But do tigers eat blueberries?” asked Charlie.
“There’s only one way to find out!” Henry said.
“Find out!” Mae said.
Roen was lowered down on a rope towards the cage, which was hanging below the hot air balloon. Being as careful as possible, she attached a bag of blueberries to one side of the cage with tape. Henry and Charlie hauled her back up and she plopped down into the air balloon’s basket. “I’ve never done THAT before,” Roen said breathlessly.
“Well done, Roen!” Charlie and Henry said.
“Well done, Roen!” Mae said.
They positioned the hot air balloon directly over the tiger and—bit-by-bit—lowered the cage down to the playground. When Mrs. Moore saw them, her eyes filled with wonder because Teddy Bears flying around in balloons is not something you see every day.
The tiger looked up and growled, “Who is this who dares disturb my snack time?”
But when the tiger saw the cage and walked towards it, he grew curious. He walked into the cage slowly, further and further, sniffing the bag holding the blueberries.
The tiger growled, “Is it meat?”
“No,” said Roen.
“Is it cheese pizza?”
“No,” said Charlie.
The tiger licked the outside of the bag, curiously. “Is it candy?”
“Much better than candy!” said Henry.
“Much better than candy!” Mae said.
This is when Roen took out her ukulele and sang her blueberry song, “Blueberry, blueberry, bluuuuuuuue…..berry!”
The tiger could not resist. With one giant chomp he bit the whole bag of blueberries right off the back of the cage and chewed, a look of heavenly satisfaction spreading across his big cat face.
Quick as a wink Charlie pulled a rope that snapped that cage shut.
Oh, the tiger did not like being trapped one bit. He roared, blueberries clinging to his huge teeth as he bit the bars of the cage in vain. Mrs. Moore, however, was delighted. She jumped down off the swing set and looked up in gratitude as the balloon—now towing the furious tiger inside the cage—rose up into the sky.
“Who, er, what are you?” she called up to them.
“We’re the TEDDY BEAR RESCUE SQUAD!” they shouted.
Henry, Charlie, Roen and Mae flew over to the zoo and lowered the cage down inside, then fast as birds they fluttered their way back home, let the air out of the balloon and crawled back through a window. It was good they did, because just after they’d sat down in the pile of other toys, Fern (who thought she’d heard something) popped her head into the room. But all she saw was four Teddy Bears sitting absolutely still.
The Zoo was grateful to have a real tiger, something they’d always wanted. They set it loose in their African savanna area so it could roam around freely.
What the zookeepers could never figure out, though, was why the tiger never wanted to eat the bowls of red meat they put in his cage.
All the tiger would eat was fresh fruit, brought in by the truckload.
Over time, the zoo bought four more tigers to add to its collection. On any given day, though, you can easily tell which of them is the tiger that terrorized Mrs. Moore in the playground. It’s the one sitting, its belly stuffed, in a pile of banana peels and bits of blueberries, apples, oranges, grapes and mangos. On Thursdays he gets a special treat of pineapples, which he eats in one gulp. He never ate meat again. Kids visiting the zoo named him Fruity the Tiger. And that, oh my best beloved, is the end of the story.
It turns out lots of grandpas make up stories for their grandkids, and one in particular— Andre Renna, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania—took the idea to a whole new level.
Andre reached out to me through my blog and we had a great conversation in Zoom-land where I learned about his family roots and his storybook grandpa creations. Andre, 70, is a retired engineer and healthcare manager who grew up in a classic Italian-American family in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
“I had the greatest childhood in the world,” Andre told me, “My cousins lived in the house with me. We’d sit on the porch and watch the Mets on TV and have some expresso and sweet pastry. I’d walk to my grandmother’s house four blocks away.”
Andre’s dad was his hero, a solid presence in his life who worked multiple jobs to make sure there was always food on the table, with Italian feasts served up by his mom.
Andre had a close relationship with both his grandfather, a bricklayer, and his grandmother. “I inherited some of my grandfather’s tools— trowels, a hammer” Andre said, “those things are precious to me.”
Andre and his wife raised their two kids in Lancaster, and today they have two grandkids. His granddaughter, Aria, arrived on the scene first, launching a wonderful new chapter in Andre’s life. “She is without a doubt the light of my life,” Andre told me, “Everyone else is a close second. I have a beard because of Aria (Papa, grow a beard!).”
Andre’s #1 wisdom he wants to share with the next generation is to never break a promise. “Your word,” he said, “is the most important thing you have.”
When Aria was 18 months old, she won a stuffed yellow duck at a seaside boardwalk arcade. Aria’s Ducky became a much-loved companion that she carried everywhere — even into her imagination.
One day when Aria was 5, Andre was pushing her on the swing. “And she says, ‘I want to have a surprise birthday party for Ducky.’ And then she disappears because I’m pushing her and she’s still talking, right? We were on the swing for forty-five minutes, and she told me this whole story…”
“Everyone will be at the party,” Aria said, “Penguin, Turtle, Unicorn….”
WHOOSH!
“Flamingo, Snakey and T-Rex and….”
WHOOSH!
“But Jasmine the cat is going to ruin the party…”
WHOOSH!
“In the end Ducky will be OK because he knows we really love him.”
When they went inside, Andre excitedly told his wife the whole story. His wife told him, “Why don’t you write it as a book?” Andre replied, “What the heck do I know about writing a children’s book?”
“Just do it!”
When Andre related this, I was reminded—based on my personal experience—that the smartest thing we can do as grandpas is to listen to our wives.
Andre immediately went to work, embarking on a remarkable collaboration with Aria to create a new children’s book, The Adventures of Aria and Ducky: The Surprise Birthday Party, featuring a little girl named Aria and her menagerie of animals.
The Surprise Birthday Party, a collaboration between Andre and his granddaughter.
He started by simply writing down the story Aria had shared with him; she, along with Andre’s wife and sister, offered up suggestions and corrections to polish the draft. Andre then hired a professional illustrator, David Leonard, to bring the story to life.
For Andre and Aria, the smallest details mattered.
Aria would review the working drafts and say things like, “that doesn’t look like Ducky” or “Jasmine the cat is the wrong color.” Andre was diligent about making sure that the Aria character looked just like the Aria, from facial features to blond hair. “I said to the illustrator, it has to look like her because I want to be able to say, that’s my granddaughter. And in the future I want her to be able to show this to her kids and grandkids. I drove him nuts.” It was worth it.
Andre Renna shown here with his granddaughter, Aria, and Ducky.
When the book launched, Andre and Aria did their own promotional push, appearing on local TV stations and doing interviews for newspapers.
While Andre has sold numerous copies of the book, he’s found a bigger audience by donating copies to pediatric hospitals.
The genesis of the book, with characters based on toys and featuring real children, will have a familiar ring to students of classic children’s literature. Winnie-the-Pooh came about when English author A. A. Milne was inspired by a stuffed bear toy that he had bought for his son Christopher Robin.
But whether or not The Adventures of Aria and Ducky ever becomes well known doesn’t ultimately matter, and the same is true for The Teddy Bear Rescue Squad.
What does matter is that these stories have a chance to become classics in the lives of our families.
I think about the magic of storytelling a lot when I ponder what our grandkids will need in order to become the greatest generation. Many young children live in a world that’s rich with imagination. The couch cushions are their castle walls, a chopstick is Harry Potter’s magic wand. But somewhere along the line—perhaps when they are lined up in rigid rows at school—their flights of fancy become more grounded, their creativity stymied by the need to pass the next test. Yet the truth is that being creative throughout their entire lives may be the ultimate test, the best thing they can bring to their own families, and indeed to employers.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey found that creative thinking skills are a top priority when considering talent.
Artificial Intelligence will eat a billion jobs, but the careers of genuinely creative people will be secure for all time.
If we follow the example of Andre and Aria, and A. A. Milne, the next generation will always have their secret forest to walk in, their Hundred Acre Wood, a place where wise owls talk, where the mysterious heffalump eludes even the best trackers, and our favorite bear devours pots of delicious honey. Ducky, Casper, Jasper, Christopher Robin, Calvin, Charlie, Nick, John and Ted will also live in the forest, plus my grandkids and yours, forever and ever.
And that, oh my best beloved, is the end of the story.
Note: If you’d like a signed copy of The Adventures of Aria and Ducky, contact Andre here: awrenna@comcast.net
*Just out of curiosity I recently Googled “Teddy Bear Rescue Squad” and discovered that a woman in England is crafting outfits for a Teddy Bear Rescue Squad. Small world!
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I was delighted to be a guest on the Retirement Wisdom Podcast, hosted by Joe Casey, who had me on to talk about the blog and my upcoming Good Grandpa…
I was delighted to be a guest on the Retirement Wisdom Podcast, hosted by Joe Casey, who had me on to talk about the blog and my upcoming Good Grandpa book. Joe asked great questions. Here’s a link to the show. If you’re retired, or thinking about it, you may want to check out Joe’s consulting practice. He works with people to help design their retirement thoughtfully so they can get the most out of it. I’m not yet close to retirement, but when I am I know I’ll be talking with Joe again.
When my wife, Nancy, was due to give birth to our daughter, Abigail, we’d packed our bags for the hospital and were ready to go when the contractions started. I…
When my wife, Nancy, was due to give birth to our daughter, Abigail, we’d packed our bags for the hospital and were ready to go when the contractions started. I remember that feeling, the quickening of my heart, the excitement of heading into the experience as if it were a class four white water rapid, thinking I was ready but fearing I might not be – who could ever know?
This time, it was a call from Abigail that told me she was going into labor.
I’d just had a relaxing glass of Scotch and was watching TV. When I picked up the phone I expected a casual check-in call, but it was a different story. Abigail and her husband, Ryan, were at the hospital already. Contractions were steady. And because the baby was breach, there would be a C-section. In two hours. The rush of emotion and excitement all came back to me as if it were Abigail being born and not my grandson. I told Abigail I’d be driving down as soon as possible.
Nancy, at this time, was on a business trip, and I knew she’d be in a bit of a panic. I didn’t want her to feel badly for not being there, and was resolved to keep my calm and reassure her as well as my daughter that things were under control. Nothing, of course, is ever “under control.” When birth is involved, I knew from experience it was a joyous cavalcade of bodily fluids and wailing baby cries and slimy poop and the uncertainty of wondering if there would be the right number of fingers and toes, and the billion other concerns that overwhelm even the best prepared mom, dad, or grandparent. You take a deep breath, keep moving, and hope to God things will work out.
I slept fitfully between texts from Ryan and Nancy. At 2:30 am I received the text I had been hoping and praying for: Mother and baby are happy and healthy. His name was Henry. I sat on the edge of my bed and wept. Thank you, God, I said. Thank you.
I hit the road at 3:30am for New York City, guzzling hot coffee in the darkness and light rain on the Mass Pike, and arrived at New York Presbyterian hospital on the upper East Side around 8:00. Abigail’s hospital room was quiet when I entered, save for the tiny murmuring of a baby, my grandson. The floor to ceiling hospital curtain surrounding Abigail’s bed felt to me like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, pulled back to reveal the old man feverishly tugging at levers, only now it was Abigail in the bed holding Henry, smiling up at me, Ryan grinning in a fatherly way beside them, and I was the old man.
Meeting your own child for the first time is amazing. Meeting your grandchild is similarly exhilarating, magical and joyous. And yet there’s something more to it, another layer.
The hard work of raising Abigail right, nurturing and loving her, making sure she grew up in a nice town with great schools. Sending her to the college of her choice (George Washington, not coincidentally in the same city where Ryan – her high school sweetheart – was attending Georgetown). Celebrating her wedding on a beautiful old farm in Vermont with friends and family there to support her. All of these things formed a kind of foundation for her life that she could then build upon. And even though I could not see all these things at that moment when I held Henry for the first time, I was aware of them and felt the love and effort of all that parenting as if it had been somehow condensed in time, right at the moment I saw this wonderful and handsome baby, Henry, my grandson.
Me with my first grandchild, Henry, hours after he was born.
I held him in the crook of my arm and made no effort to stop the tears from streaming down my face. I whispered to him as much as to myself, “Hi Henry.” He was so light and small. Deeply asleep. Content.
After I’d visited them for a while, I went back to Abigail’s apartment on West 74th street and slept for a few hours. When I called Abigail to say I was heading back to the hospital, she asked me to bring the diaper bag, and the Boppy — a large horseshoe shaped pillow women use when breastfeeding. Trekking across Central Park with a diaper bag and a Boppy is a singular experience that’s hard for me to describe. Part of me felt like I was a new dad, like this was just—quite literally—another walk in the park for me. I saw young parents with kids in strollers along the meandering verdant walkways, and they’d cast knowing glances at me with my Boppy as if it was a totem of my fatherhood.
I considered blurting out to strangers, “I’m not actually a new dad! The Boppy is for my grandson!” But I didn’t. I reveled in the illusion instead.
When I arrived at the hospital room with the Boppy, Ryan and Abigail giggled at the sight of six foot six tall me holding it, with its multicolored illustrations of giraffes and elephants. Ryan looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Boppy. Maybe you’re Boppy.”
For months all my friends had asked me what I wanted my grandfather name to be. Grandpa? Pops? Gramps? I said I wasn’t sure, and didn’t know if it was actually up to me. When Ryan suggested that perhaps I was Boppy, it struck me that Henry and I had both been newly named at the same time. Both born into new lives, Henry launched into childhood, me ascending to newly minted grandfatherhood. I felt that my whole life was ahead of me.
That was ten years ago. What’s become clearer with each passing year is that my whole life was actually ahead of me—not an entirely new life of course—but a very different one, so different that I am not the same guy I was before.
In that long ago life when I was a parent, small things could make me angry, my emotional trigger ready to fire at dumb things like bad drivers. Having time to hold a baby grandchild in the quiet of the night and hear nothing but the sound of our breathing put the petty annoyances of life in perspective. Reading my grandchildren the same books we used to read our children, like Goodnight Moon and The Cat in the Hat, felt like rediscovering magic. I could use the word “joy” without irony. The often angry world still exists but somehow I’m floating above it. I’ve been admitted to the best club in the world, one so exclusive no amount of money can buy it. As you’ll see if you read my book (coming out in 2025 from Regalo Press), I’ve interviewed rich and famous grandpas, but most are regular Joes like me, and we are all on the same level playing field.
As Henry grew he was joined by a brother, then two cousins, both girls, and my name in time changed from Bobby to Grandpa Ted.
They could call me anything and I’d be happy with it, because this is the new Ted, not the old Ted, which is ironic given that I’m getting older. I’m not alone in this sentiment. Many grandfathers become deeply changed for the better, as if we’ve emerged from a chrysalis to become something freer, lighter, happier. We are the ones who walk across Central Park with a smile on our faces, carrying within us a newly found contentment. We’re the retired four-star generals sitting on the floor with their granddaughters playing with Barbies. We’re putting on our reading glasses to help find the missing LEGO piece, and while we may have grey hair (or, in my case, no hair) we are boys again.
It’s a new experience, yet it’s not all new. There are still diapers. But we all have our roles to play in this new landscape. When I’m with one of our grandbabies and a particularly pungent aroma fills the room, I’ve been known to say to my son or daughter, while making my exit, “I think someone needs changing.”
Author’s note: If you’re a grandpa, you are more than welcome to post a comment here to share your experience of the day your first grandchild was born. How did your life change?
In the early hours of May 1, 2023, a single engine Cessna 206 crashed like a meteor into a remote jungle of the Columbian Amazon. On board was…
In the early hours of May 1, 2023, a single engine Cessna 206 crashed like a meteor into a remote jungle of the Columbian Amazon.
The plane carrying the family crashed in a part of the Amazon that had never been explored.
On board was a mother and her four children, aged 13, nine, four and one; the pilot and one other adult died instantly, the mother likely lived just long enough to warn her kids to get out. The children crawled through the wreckage into a part of the Amazon that had not yet been explored, a place so wild it could have been a different planet. They were in “a very dark, very dense jungle,” explained indigenous expert Alex Rufino, “where the largest trees in the region are.” News reports of the crash described the area as .”(1) This description dramatically understates the extent of the danger these children faced, alone.
Take the snakes, for example. The amazon is home to the Anaconda, a behemoth that can weigh up to 500 pounds and grow to 29 feet long. It wraps around its prey then swallows it whole. Then there’s the Bushmaster snake, which is only about 12 feet long but is incredibly poisonous and capable of multi-bite strikes, followed by the Amazonian Palm Viper, the Fer-De-Lance, and last but not least the South American Rattlesnake.
If by chance the children were not poisoned by snakes, they’d have to contend with the Black Caiman alligator, one of the largest predators in the Amazon basin. It can grow to be over 16 feet long.
The kids could also come into contact with a Poison Dart Frog, which has a skin so toxic that merely touching it can cause paralysis and death.
More unpleasantries awaited if the children went into a body of water, which in the Amazon can be inhabited by sharp-toothed Piranhas, and Electric Eels—a fish that can send out a 600-volt shock powerful enough to incapacitate an adult. Then of course there is the Potamotrygon Stingray, the Bull Shark and the dreaded Candiru — known as the Vampire Fish due its ability to lodge in its victim’s genital track where it feeds on blood.
If the hungry children ate the fruit of the Strychonos Plant, which resembles clementines, they would ingest a juice used for making poisonous arrows.
But why worry about treacherous snakes, insects, fish and fauna when there are Jaguars nearby, a predator that can reach speeds of 50 miles per hour?
If you followed news of the crash, you may already know that 40 days later the children were found alive. There are many heroes who can take credit for their miraculous survival, but the one who caught my attention was the children’s grandmother, María Fátima Valencia, who raised them from a young age and taught them the ways of the jungle. Members of the indigenous Huitoto people, they knew to avoid the poisonous fruit of the Strychonos Plant and instead hunt for the Avichure tree—known as the milk tree—and chew its sugar-rich seeds, or the oily fruit of the Bacabapalm. They knew how to get drinking water while avoiding Piranhas. And do their best to hide from lurking Jaguars.
When military helicopter crews hunted for the children, flying low over the thick green jungle canopy, they broadcast a message recorded by María: “I’m your grandmother! I ask you a favor: You need to keep still because they are looking for you, the army!” If there was a prize for 2023’s Badass Grandma of the Year, María would have won it hands down.
Here in the United States, we don’t have an Amazon jungle, but we do have Amazon — the most efficient way to buy and receive boatloads of crap the world has ever seen.
I don’t mean to pick on the good folks at Amazon here (I’m a customer and a stockholder, and appreciate the cat litter they delivered last week, same day no less). I’m simply using Amazon to illustrate the world of modern products that pose as improvements, yet hidden within them are dangers as venomous to our grandchildren as Yellow-Bearded Vipers. When I speak to grandpas about what they fear most when they think about our grandkids’ future, the top bogy man is technology. Internet media, kids’ faces glued to screens, and the rise of artificial intelligence are the new jungle, and there is no indigenous guide to teach survival skills.
If we journey into our Amazon, here’s just a few examples of the pestiferous things families can order today.
For $264.99 we can buy a Galaxy A25 5G A Series Smart Phone with 128GM, an AMOLED Display, Advanced Triple Camera System, Expandable Storage and Stereo speakers. Forty-two percent of U.S. children have a phone like this at the age of 10. By age 14 that number jumps to over 90 percent.(2) This is not surprising given that children beg their parents for smart phones as if they were candy. The phones themselves may not be yummy, but what kids consume with them certainly is. Watching internet media releases dopamine into the brain’s pleasure centers—the same chemical released by eating delicious food or snorting cocaine.(3) And the more our grandkids eat up this media, the worse off they are. Scientists have found that there is correlation between how much time kids spend on social media and how depressed they are.(4)
In addition, there’s evidence from a UCLA study that shows that the increased use of smart phones and the resulting lesser time spent for face-to-face interaction leads to the decline in social skills among kids.(5)
If Smart Phones were alcohol or some other drug they’d be illegal for minors. Yet parents often give their kids smart phones to make them happy, or to mark a passage into adulthood like a Middle School graduation present, without fully understanding the creatures hidden inside complex circuits and Internet algorithms. Imagine a parent from the Huitoto indigenous community giving their kid a Tityus Scorpion, only worse. At least the scorpion is self-evidently dangerous so the kid wouldn’t try to play with it. But kids interact with their smart phones all the time without any hint of danger. The average teenager spends nine hours a day looking at screens.(6) Young kids have less screen time but may be at higher risk. Toddlers who spend more than two hours a day in front of screens have an increased chance of delayed speech development.(7)
Search Amazon for laptop computers and you’ll get an amazing deal on the 2024 Chromebook for students and businesses ($299 with one day Prime delivery). What parent wouldn’t want their young scholar to have the very best technology in hand when they go off to college Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way.
Just like phones, laptops and the media they serve up can be incredibly distracting.
Students type notes in lectures on their laptops or do their homework, but frequently jump away to check the latest Facebook/X/Instagram/Tik-Tok postings, which totally messes with their mental focus. Teens may claim they are good at multitasking, but scientists have demonstrated that people in general are simply not hardwired for it.(8) It takes about 20 minutes after being interrupted before mental focus is regained.(9) A study conducted at Harvard University found that just being near another student who is multitasking on a laptop during class results in poorer grades.(10)
Setting aside the hazards of media and distraction, excessive amounts of screen time is bad for eye health.
Most digital screens emit high amounts of blue light, creating what scientists refer to as the Blue Light Hazard (BLH), which can harm the retinal cells in the eye.(11) Children’s eyes are still developing, making them likely more susceptible to retinal damage from blue light. More than 65 percent of blue light is transmitted to the retinas of young children. At age 25, those numbers change to between 20 and 50 percent, depending on the specific wavelength of the light.(12) New types of non-emissive screens made with E Ink ePaper provide a much healthier screen time alternative, but few people are aware of it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a whole different beast.
I’d read about all the buzz and decided to try it out, enlisting the help of Google’s Gemini to write a blog post about being a grandfather. Technically, Gemini is a conversational generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But Google calls it, “Your creative and helpful collaborator to supercharge your imagination, boost productivity, and bring ideas to life.” Based on what it wrote for me, I’d agree it supercharges my imagination, although not in the way Google may have intended. I was astonished that Gemini did reasonably well, instantly crafting sentences such as…
“Being a Grandfather: The Best Job in the World. Being a grandfather is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. It’s a chance to relive your own childhood through the eyes of your grandchildren, and to pass on your love, wisdom, and experience to the next generation.”
The more I read, the more it became clearer to me that Gemini’s AI algorithm was pulling ideas from my own Good Grandpa blog. All AI programs are designed to do this. What they “write” is not original per se, but rather in instant conglomeration of the most relevant stuff on the Internet. The following sentence from Gemini is basically digital plagiarism — not a word-for-word rip-off but pretty damn close:
“Being a grandfather is more than just fun. It’s also a great responsibility. You have the opportunity to make a real difference in your grandchildren’s lives. You can help them to learn and grow, and to become the best people they can be.”
In 1950, a British cybernetics pioneer named Alan Turing developed what he called The Imitation Game, known today as the Turing Test. The test was designed to determine a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, we humans. The Turing Test is more relevant today than ever as AI chatbots proliferate. How can we tell if an AI program is writing or speaking, or if it’s a real person?
For my Good Grandpa blog post, Gemini failed the Turing Test in glaring and hilarious fashion with this sentence: “If you’re thinking about becoming a grandfather, I encourage you to go for it.”
From Gemini’s perspective, we have total control over when we’re going to become grandparents, like it’s deciding if we’re going to join a gym or taking up knitting. Running with this idea, here’s an imaginary father/daughter conversation.
A phone rings. A young lady answers.
“Hi dad!”
“Hi, honey, how are you and Peter doing?”
“Good, good. Busy. How are you and mom?”
“We’re great. Planning a trip to Albuquerque in the spring.”
“Nice.”
“Oh, and one other thing. I’ve decided to become a grandfather!”
Pause. Silence.
“I see, well, that would be wonderful, someday.”
“I’m thinking now, actually.”
“But Peter and I aren’t ready to have children! We’re going to do some traveling first and…”
“Sweetie, you’ve been married for five years and it’s time to start procreating. Mom and I aren’t getting any younger.”
It’s a sure thing that AI capabilities will rapidly improve, but based on its automatic notions of total control I can only hope that future iterations will never be given access to the nuclear launch codes.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my least favorite modern technology of all, now available on Amazon with free delivery right to your yard — the leaf blower (such as the Husqvarna’s 125B Gas-Powered Leaf blower for only $196.00!). If products could go to hell, there’d be a special circle in the inferno for these deeply annoying machines. Quiet fall days are a thing of the past. More often than not there are multiple leaf blowers whining incessantly like an off-key monotonous chorus of monks. Many people will say that leaf blowers are a necessary evil. But if we add up enough small but necessary evils, it amounts to an incalculable loss for our grandchildren.
Here’s my point. We grandparents grew up in an analog world and it’s up to us to let our children and grandchildren know that new technology isn’t a de facto improvement, and often it represents a giant leap backwards. A few years ago, I was touring an exhibit on industrial design at a museum in New York City when I came upon the same stereo turntable I had in college in 1978 (this was the moment I realized that I myself was an antique, but hopefully one that could still make beautiful music). Lots of people still prefer the warm sonic depth of vinyl records over the digitally cold Spotify vibe. Instagram has filters that let you make your pictures look like Polaroids from 1970. I worked for Polaroid and I can assure you that my SX-70 took way better pictures—with richer and more painterly hues—plus the picture popped out of the front of the camera so you could save it in an album or stick it on the fridge.
Most pictures taken with smart phones ultimately get lost in a digital ephemera, including those of our grandkids; shouldn’t we hold on to the pictures just as tightly as we hold them?
Today, as technology advances with growing speed, I don’t think we should fear it. To quote Frank Herbert’s classic Dune science fiction series, “Fear is the mind killer.” We simply have to get educated on technology’s hidden dangers in order to protect and nurture those we love. If we’re going to help our grandchildren become the greatest generation, we need to be the voices of experience and wisdom broadcast from the helicopter flying over our Amazon —
“We’re your grandparents! We ask you a favor: Turn off your smart phone! Close your laptop! Be social with your friends face-to-face instead of on Facebook! Stay focused on your homework so you can gain Actual Intelligence (AI) instead of the artificial kind! We love you! Now, grab a rake!”
Sources:
BBC
Forbes Health
The Guardian
Child Mind Institute
The Healthsite.com
Common Sense Media
Pediatric Academic Societies
Mayer and Moreno
Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM).
Technology and Student Distraction, Harvard University Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
Blue Light Phototoxicity Toward Human Corneal and Conjunctival Epithelial Cells in Basil and Hyperosmolar Conditions, Marek V., et al. Free Radic. Biol. Med. 2018, 126:27-40.
Light-emitting diodes (LED) for domestic lighting: Any risks for the eye? F. Behar-Cohen, C. Martinsons, et al., Progress in Retinal and Eye Research 2011.
Author’s note: As I write the Good Grandpa book, slated for publication in 2025 by Regalo Press, I’m sharing parts of the chapters on my blog. This post tells the…
Author’s note: As I write the Good Grandpa book, slated for publication in 2025 by Regalo Press, I’m sharing parts of the chapters on my blog. This post tells the story of Forever Letters and the power to share our love and wisdom with future generations.
In the early 12th century, Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon, a translator and physician living in Southern France, picked up his pen to write a letter. He was likely an old man at the time, wise and perhaps frail, fully aware of the limited amount of sand remaining in his life’s hourglass. His words were not meant to be read by friends or business associates. It was a letter to be read in the future by his children and grandchildren:
“Avoid bad society, make thy books thy companions, let thy bookcases and shelves be thy gardens and pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If thy soul be satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow, from sight to sight. Then will thy desire renew itself, and thy soul be satisfied with delight.”
Judah’s letter was a form of ethical will, an ancient Jewish tradition with roots in the Bible. The practice of passing on accrued wisdom to nurture future generations, these written time-capsules, became more broadly used through the Middle Ages and in time was adopted by people of all faiths, continuing into our modern era.
Here, I must pause to ask my father’s favorite question: Why?
I’ve seen the answer written on the faces of the many grandpas I’ve recently interviewed. Not one single man I’ve spoken with (all of them Boomers like me), ever had a chance to know one of their grandpas. The actuarial tables show why this is the case. An American man born in 1900 had an average life expectancy of about 47 years.12 By the time their children had children most of them were no longer on the scene. An ethical will, often referred to as a Forever Letter, is an insurance policy against the loss of the precious ideas and values we pray our grandchildren will learn from us. We yearn for the chance to guide our grandchildren and leave a lasting legacy.
The history of the Forever Letter was brought home to me by a grandpa who has become a friend, Bob Halperin.
Bob reached out to me after reading my blog, and we met up at the local Grandpa Networking Center (Starbucks), and for subsequent fast hikes through ice-covered nature trails. Bob, I quickly learned, is a fascinating guy. He earned his undergraduate degree in economics from Brandeis, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and went on to lead a range of learning-focused organizations, notably serving as Director of the MIT Sloan Executive Education program. Today, Bob runs his own consulting practice that provides support groups for senior executives.
Bob and I have different educational backgrounds (his is better), but have the same haircut (bald), and share an interest in family stories. Bob, 68, speaks animatedly to convey ideas that spark out of his prodigious mind like intellectual popcorn. He’s also a writer, and a good one. While he didn’t know his grandfathers, one of them — Morris Jacobsohn—nevertheless left a big impression on him. “In 1950,” Bob said, “he wrote a letter to my oldest cousin, David, and I got to read it when I was 12.” Bob shared the letter with me. It begins…
I am addressing this letter to you. Being the oldest, the first of our grandchildren, you will reach maturity and fuller understanding before all your cousins. My request: please impart the contents of this letter to them, as they reach the age of full understanding.
Morris went on to describe his early childhood growing up impoverished in Palestine before it was Israel, his learning Hebrew at the age of three and a half, and studying the Talmud at age six. Morris poured his soul into sharing a structure for how his grandchildren could and should live:
In this outline, I hope to impart to you my personal code for living. I consider this code, not merely my ethical foundation, but the very cause of my humble attainments in life.
His lifelong love of scripture featured prominently in the formation of his personal code…
Studying the Bible in the original Hebrew I was trained to reach a broader understanding of “How and Why” of human actions and progress.
Morris finishes with words that spoke to Bob as if he were in the same room with him, because, in a way, he was:
One wishes to be remembered well. And in the hope that you will all so remember me, I conclude this letter with my final wishes; may you all share good opportunities and good fortune all through your lives.
Inspired by his grandfather’s example, Bob started writing letters to his two daughters when they were young, each letter designed to share his love and wisdom to mark a milestone in their lives such as graduating from high school or having their first child. When Bob’s first grandchild was born, he set up a special Gmail address from grandpa Bob. As of today, he’s written about forty letters to his three grandchildren, letters from Saba (Hebrew for grandfather). “They’re written in an adult way for them to read when they’re older,” Bob said, “and I’ve told my daughters ‘here’s the email address, here’s the password. I could die at any time, but they’re there.’”
Bob shared some of the letters with me, starting with this introduction…
This is the first of what I hope will be many emails I will send to you over the coming months and years! It may be many years before you can fully understand all of my messages. I will leave it to your parents to decide how and when to share with you.
And an email with a playful lesson on gratitude…
One small way that I try to remember to be grateful for even the smallest things I have is by saying what orthodox Jews call Asher Yatzar (or informally the “Peeing Prayer”).
Plus other emails addressing some of life’s most profound challenges….
The reality of life is that you will be blessed to have people in your life that you love and respect, and can’t imagine living without. And then through accident or illness, they will be taken away from you. I cannot shield you from these hard realities, but I can offer some perspective, having lived through my own losses.
I found Bob’s letters to be incredibly charming, thoughtful, loving and smart. How cool is it that a tradition that dates back to Biblical times is now in email form? While Saba’s letters were written to his grandchildren, they also spoke to me. The more I thought about Letters from Saba, the more I thought of my own family and our legacy.
I remembered a letter that my dad had written to my four older brothers a few years before I was born.
The first time I read it I was in my early twenties, when my dad was still with us, and I recall thinking it was lovely, but not life-altering. After talking with Bob I tracked down the letter and when I read it again—as a 64 year old grandpa—it resonated profoundly. My dad passed away in 2011 and reading this brought him back to me, vividly. But I also had to live longer to more fully appreciate the depth and beauty of his wisdom. Here is the letter.
July 2, 1956
To my Children:
When you get old enough to understand this letter fully, you will be as old as I am but I hope you will keep it, Calvin, so that you and the others may read it later on. Dear Calvin, Charles, Bill Jr. and John: There are times when I wished I knew what my father thought. It wasn’t that I wanted to lean on him for advice but it’s just that I always felt that he was a man that I would have liked to have known better. I expect to be around a long time after you have grown up but I want to talk to you now.
I’ve just finished flying across the country — to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles and Denver where I bought your mother an Aspenwood pin and some gold nuggets for you fellas — and then back to Boston. I know that you will all take this air trip some day and when you do, I know you will feel as I did that it is a tremendous and fascinating experience — where the grandeur of these United States perceived in a brief span of hours brings the meaning of unity home — unity of the land and the people and the weather and the soil. Nature shouts out to you, “This is what I am.” And our people say, “Fine, this is what you are. Here is what I can do to change you — to make you do something for me and my fellow Americans. Nature, I have the most powerful tool in the world – it’s the cooperation I get from my fellow citizens. They are my partners and if your soil grows plants and your mountains give minerals and if your waters carry boats and generate power and quench people’s thirst, it is because they are partners.”
I looked down, near sunset, on the tiny town of Delta surrounded by the vast desert of Utah. Off on the edge of town on a hill was a Mormon church. The people of the town had planted the hill with green grass and connected up lights on the lawn to illuminate the outside of the church. And with the sands of the desert mixing with the grass at the bottom of the hill, one of the greatest symbols of man’s unity shown brightly and gloriously in the dusk.
One of the things that will impress you when you fly across the country is the progress that people have made and the potential for the progress that has yet to come. You are all going to take part in that progress and your contributions to that progress will influence the lives of each of your other fellow Americans. Here is the challenge that comes with being born a United States citizen. You have more tools at your disposal here than anywhere in the world, — more knowledge, more education, more cooperating and effective people to work with, and a more responsive and better loved governmental system than the citizens of any other country in the world.
The challenge to each of you is all the greater because you have these things with which to work. What are some of the things that challenge you Calvin and you Charles and you Bill and you John. When you read this letter later on, you will be able to state them as well as I. 1. The successful completion of a world community where the same cooperative spirit that exists across the United States exists throughout the world. 2. The elimination of disease. 3. The pushing back of boundaries of scientific knowledge, both in the physical and the social fields, and the application of that knowledge for the good of everybody who breathes oxygen and those yet to breathe it (your children).
You will come to know that the greatest contribution that each of you shall make to this progress shall come by using your minds — by thinking. The greatest contributions to human welfare are not made by those who serve the people, but by those who determine how to serve. One of the most important contributors to the progress of the United States had this to say, “The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life. He not only misses the greatest pleasure but he cannot make the most of himself. All progress, all success, springs from thinking.” That was Thomas Edison.
When you grow older, read. Read Edison’s biography, his own notes, Ernest Dimnet’s “The Art of Thinking,” Osborn’s “Applied Imagination,” Leonardo DaVinci’s “Notebooks,” Newton’s “Principia,” Abraham Lincoln’s letters, Bertrand Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy.” Read what you love to read. Great men will speak to you. You can get their thoughts for the price of a book.
Calvin and Charles and Bill and John, feel deeply the value and the purpose of the thing you are striving to create. Question, question, question! What is it good for? Who will benefit? How? When? Where? Why?
Each of you will come to feel that you have a great task before you. Be a fighter. Choose your weapons carefully and fight. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter. And remember, that the most powerful weapon in the world is clear thought.
With all my love to you boys,
Dad
What immediately struck me after reading this was my dad’s heartfelt portrayal of America. I could barely recognize his positive 1956 vision of our country versus the toxic divisive mess we live in today. How and why has America come to this juncture, and what can we do about it? How can our grandkids have any hope of becoming the next great generation if our country lacks a hopeful unifying vision for the future?
It wasn’t until Bob shared with me his #1 wisdom that an answer, a sliver of light, began to gleam in my darkness.
Bob smiled and said, “Rabbi Hillel was asked to summarize the Torah standing on one foot and what he says is some version of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do onto you; the rest is commentary. Now, go study! So, my first answer to your question is, try to be a good listener. Because if you can be a good listener, the rest is commentary, right? If you can be a good listener, everything else is possible.”
When I read my dad’s letter—and the letters from Bob’s Saba—with this in mind, it bought home to me that conveying wisdom in our ethical wills is only the beginning. What matters is actually listening to the amazing things that are written, and then taking action. I had read my dad’s guidance to think and read, I had seen the list of books he told us to read, but I’d never read them.
Last week I went to the library and took out Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Leonardo DaVinici’s Notebooks and I’m devouring them like a man who’s been starving in the wilderness.
I’m listening to Bob’s Saba’s advice, too, and will finally read the Bible (the whole thing versus the bits I read in Sunday School). And I’m saying the Peeing Prayer on a regular basis!
I’ve started conversations with my children about what it means to be American, and we are planning a family trip with all the grandkids to visit the Statue of Liberty. I want them to know that America can still be a beacon of hope to the world — if we get our act together. I’ll tell them that I have traveled to many countries, and they are great countries, but to this day I would still choose to live in the U.S., despite its many flaws, because we are the only country that has a dream — the American dream. Anything is possible here. Anything. But to Bob’s point, the full range of what’s possible depends on our ability to listen to each other.
We may not agree with the political views of others, but that doesn’t make them bad people.
We can find pleasure—and ultimately common ground—through thoughtful conversations and intelligent dissent, versus bloodthirsty cage matches on Facebook and cable news. In his letter to his grandsons Saba Morris wrote it better than I can: “Broad-mindedness, as against being fanatic or addicted to habits and ideas, leads on to the correct fashioning of one’s own life. Tolerance and patience, as added virtues, help to prevent much of bitterness and suffering, from disappointments and frictions with society and surroundings.”
The writing of letters meant to be read by future generations has one additional and critically important value. Simply writing down our thoughts helps to crystalize them today. For me, this entire book is a letter to my grandchildren, all the richer thanks to the wonderful ideas other Sabas have shared with me. If indeed the most powerful weapon in the world is clear thought, I hope the collective wisdom here will prove in time to be an arsenal that unleashes extraordinary potential. Question, question, question! If the answers don’t come to us right away, we’ll keep trying and never give up. We’ll fight like hell, because this dream is worth it.
Bob Halperin hiking in New Hampshire with his growing family. July 2022.
Author’s note: I’m grateful to Bob Halperin for reaching out to me and sharing his story. If you’re a grandpa who’s writing letters to your grandkids, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Wisdom is the best kind of heirloom.
One Christmas, a year when three of my brothers were in college, my parents were feeling especially strapped due to the simultaneous tuition payments. These days, most people would…
A lemonade stand staffed by very young entrepreneurs.
One Christmas, a year when three of my brothers were in college, my parents were feeling especially strapped due to the simultaneous tuition payments. These days, most people would take out college loans. Not mom and dad. We came downstairs Christmas morning to see the usual festively wrapped boxes under the tree.
When we opened the boxes, we found that each was empty except for a notecard with an IOU; mine read “IOU one Monopoly Board Game” signed, “Love, Mom & Dad.”
It turned out to be my favorite Christmas ever because I missed my older brothers and it was great to have them home for the day.
A few years after the IOU Christmas, my mom discovered that a large bag of brown rice she’d purchased a long time ago was crawling with worms. I begged her to throw it out, but she refused. “It’s perfectly good rice!” she said, handing me and my brothers tweezers to pick the wriggling worms out — a maddening task because the worms were the exact same color and size as a grain of brown rice.
My parents’ extreme frugality manifested itself throughout my childhood, including my Dad’s habit of draping used paper towels to dry in the kitchen so he could use them again later, mom making her own clothes at her Singer sewing machine, and my having to wear only hand-me-down shoes from my older brothers.
Growing up, my feet were often scrunched in shoes one or two sizes too small for me, resulting in permanent hammer toes.
All this despite the fact that my dad was a successful executive with Polaroid at a time when it was a high-flying company. We weren’t poor. We just acted that way. Having scraped by in the Great Depression, my parents saw waste as a cardinal sin and saving money as Godly in some agnostic Unitarian way. Within the mythology of Brokaw’s greatest generation, hard work and skimping pennies were valuable weapons in the arsenal of our economic battle for a better life.
Having lived like a middle-class sharecropper as a child, I swore my kids would indeed have a better life, even if I went broke making it happen.
When our daughter was in middle school, she begged us to go on a trip organized by People to People, a group founded by President Eisenhower to foster better relations with other countries. We ponied up over $3,000, which was a lot for us to spend back then. And the country Abigail visited in order to improve global relations? Australia.
My wife and I have been knuckleheads in many ways with our money (or lack thereof), but we did save on the road to retirement thanks to a recurring character in this book: my Gramp. I never inherited money from him. I did, however, take lessons from him that I’ve carried with me to the bank.
Gramp was an independent sales rep who traveled around New England selling retail displays. These were the early days of three-dimensional plastic signage that could be affixed to glass storefronts. The trunk of Gramp’s Rambler was always packed with these signs (for some reason the penguin smoking a cigarette display stuck in my mind). Gramp made decent money and saved what they could.
Once when talking with me about investing, Gramp grinned and said with a wink, “Oil stocks.”
All through the 1950s and beyond they socked money into stocks in the booming post-war energy sector. When they retired, they could afford to keep their place in Vermont and buy a nice condo in Tucson, Arizona.
Why do these stories matter? Earlier in the book I wrote about the first grandparents 30,000 years ago, the ones who began the tradition of teaching their kids and grandkids the everyday tips needed to survive and thrive. The grandparents could, for example, demonstrate the best way to plant seeds for successful crops — marking a shift towards agrarian versus nomadic communities. The wisdom imparted by these grandparents had a snowballing benefit as more and more techniques for living longer and more productive lives became broadly shared.
Thinking metaphorically, what are the seed planting tips that will help our grandkids become the greatest generation?
One area they need help with, desperately, is finance. The United States is considered a wealthy nation. Yet roughly half of Americans aged 65 and older get at least 50 percent of their family income from Social Security, and 25 percent of them get 90 percent. The Social Security Administration projects that the funds will run out by 2041. In that year my youngest granddaughter will be 19. How and when will she ever be able to retire?
Social Security’s woes wouldn’t be such a huge problem if people saved enough to sock away money in their retirement accounts, but they don’t. The average median retirement savings in the US is a meager $87,000. Saving for retirement, of course, is only one part of the financial challenge our grandkids face. About half of Americans have no emergency savings whatsoever. Zero.
Inspired by Gramp, I bought my first stocks when I was a junior in High School and have kept at it.
My wife and I never seemed to have much left over after paying for things like the kids’ braces—not to mention my daughter’s visit to the Great Barrier Reef to repair relations with the Australians—but we put away money each year in our 401k plans and that has grown over time. Following Gramp’s independent work example, I started my first company—a housecleaning business—when I was a High School Senior. Making money cleaning toilets seemed like magic, literally turning shit into gold, and I could set my own hours. After starting out as a copywriter with an ad agency in New York City after college I founded my own marketing agency and never looked back.
And now—shazam—all these grandkids are running around. The Fundamentals of Finance classes are not taught in their schools, not even at the best high schools.
Which means it’s up the parents and grandparents to get the job done. How, I wondered, could I as a grandpa help them learn from me as I learned from Gramp, but take it up a notch. Maybe, like a second language, entrepreneurship is best learned in childhood. While I was ruminating on this idea I happened to be visiting my daughter and her boys in Connecticut one day when they decided to set up a lemonade stand. The other grandpa in my grandsons’ lives, Jack Moore, was visiting as well. Jack, 75, headed up State Street Bank’s pension fund division before retiring in 2017.
“Great idea!” said Jack. “I’ll help.”
Everyone threw in ideas for getting started. Abigail and her husband, Ryan, said they could pick up some lemonade mix and cups at Costco. The boys would draw a sign. A card table was carried up from the basement.
I said to the boys, “Make sure you write down the cost of the lemonade and cups so you can keep track of your profits.”
“What?” they said in unison through mouths full of breakfast.
“It’s not about how much lemonade you sell,” I explained, “it’s about how much money you actually make per cup of lemonade after you take your cost of goods into consideration. The money you have after you subtract your expenses for lemonade and cups will equal your profit.”
The boys stared at me, chewing, digesting this concept thoughtfully.
“Ordinarily,” I went on, “you’d have to pay someone to sell the lemonade for you. That would be your cost of labor and you’d have to subtract that from your profit, but since you’ll be selling it yourselves you don’t have to pay anyone else.”
After some initial head scratching they were all over the idea of making a profit.
When Ryan returned from Costco with the supplies, they boys examined the receipt and did the math, then we discussed how much they should charge per cup of lemonade. How much would people reasonably want to spend per cup? If they paid $1, how much would be left of each dollar after the cost of the cup and the Lemonade mix was subtracted. Doing this real-world math was really fun for them.
Jack helped them set up their stand on the street and soon, like Tom Sawyer painting the fence, they were joined by other kids up their street. They were all hopping up and down with their sign to get cars to pull over – which they did, in droves. At one point, the kids flagged down a firetruck from the local fire station. Grinning and evidently thirsty firemen hung out with the kids, and my grandsons got to try on their helmets.
The kids got to wear the fireman’s helmet.
As the afternoon wore on, the dollar bills in their bucket grew like leafy green plants in a fast-motion time lapse film. Stepping back from it all, seeing them boisterous and laughing in the sun, I saw these boys and girls growing in fast-motion, too, spouting up before my eyes. They had one foot in childhood. The other in business school. They rocked it!
We grandpas played our role that day, but the ultimate lesson came courtesy of their dad.
Ryan encouraged them to set aside a percentage of their lemonade stand profits to donate to the local fire department. They loved this idea. I loved this idea. What a fantastic lesson: pull money out of thin air, make people happy with a refreshing roadside beverage, earn a video game versus begging for it, and allocate a percentage of profits to help others.
Capitalism is by no means perfect, but at its best it is the greatest engine of prosperity. The Captains of Industry of the 19th and 20th centuries built their vast summer “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island. Yet they also established philanthropic organizations that to this day benefit millions of people every year. Paul Newman famously allocated all of his Newman’s Own brand profits towards charity. “Give it all away!” he said.
To create large-scale positive change in their lifetimes, our grandkids need not become fabulously wealthy. They can start by simply making a decent living, regardless of the color of their skin or what town they grow up in, and along the way do the small things that matter — modest donations to their fire department or a local charity. The littlest gestures repeated by millions of young people will add up to the better world they will live in. We need to help put this power in their hands, one cup of profitable lemonade at a time.
If there is a heaven—and I strongly suspect there is—Gramp smiled and chuckled at the site of his great-grandsons jumping up and down with excitement at the lemonade stand, their whole lives ahead of them. “That’s just dandy,” he said, “wonderful!”
