Good Grandpa

Lost in the Amazon

March 6, 2024 4:16 pm March 6, 2024

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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.

The insect world delivers its own house of horrors: Bullet ants, Brazilian Wandering Spiders, venomous fanged 10-inch-long Amazonian Giant Centipedes, the Tityus Scorpion and the Goliath Birdeater — at about 12 inches it’s the largest spider in the world.

The Brazilian Wandering Spider

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.

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BUCKET O' WISDOM

Letters from Saba — Time Capsules of Wisdom for Our Grandchildren

grandpateddy1

February 21, 2024 3:00 pm February 21, 2024

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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.

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BUCKET O' WISDOM

The Profitable Lemonade Stand: Enlightened Capitalism for the Next Great Generation.

grandpateddy1

January 28, 2024 4:45 pm January 28, 2024

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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!”

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Peace on Earth in 2024

grandpateddy1

December 30, 2023 4:43 pm December 30, 2023

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While my family enjoyed a peaceful Christmas—opening presents, having lively dinners with all the grandkids, and napping, I knew that I could take none of this for granted. Everyone on…

While my family enjoyed a peaceful Christmas—opening presents, having lively dinners with all the grandkids, and napping, I knew that I could take none of this for granted.

Everyone on Earth wants peace, but history has shown that it is extremely difficult to achieve. This year, we’ve seen horrific devastation in two major wars, with thousands of children killed or maimed. These kids have no political affiliation. They do not pick sides. They don’t deserve this.

As parents and grandparents, we’ve often used the term “misbehaving” with our offspring. We speak of “consequences” for bad behavior. And yet we, the grownups, are allowing flocks of the most innocent souls to be crushed. Sometimes I think if 5-year-olds were put in charge of governments they’d do a much better job than us. They might argue now and then about who gets to play with which toy, but they’d never invade another country.

My dad, who survived a relentless week-long series of Kamikaze attacks at the battle of Okinawa, always described war as the stupidest thing he’d ever seen. There was no arguing with him about who was right and who was wrong. He’s just shake his head and say, “There’s always a way to rationalize cruelty.”

When I was a kid, I saw his post-traumatic stress surface on occasion in terrifying ways.

I recall the time my mom gave him cereal in a red bowl. When he saw the redness of the bowl his whole face contorted into a fierce grimace and he screamed “Blood!!” Later in life, my dad finally found peace in the abundant nature and deep verdant forests of Vermont.

So, I ask myself now, how do we bring more Vermont to the world in 2024?

One thing we grandparents have gotten very good at is setting clear boundaries for behavior.

When a grandkid does something out of bounds, we pull them aside and say, “I love you, but what you did is not ok. Apologize to your brother, and do not do it again.” They tend to get the message. I don’t want to oversimplify what it will really take to bring about lasting world peace. This stuff is complicated. But we can start by putting our foot down, a collective, enormous grandparent foot that spans countries and continents, and say, “It’s never ok to harm children. There’s going to be a consequence. Just stop.”

As grandparents, we have a level of life experience and moral authority that gives our voices greater gravitas. We’re not the young Instagram “influencers” pushing the latest trends. What we say can actually matter, if we choose to speak. Isn’t it time for a global “time out”?

I wish you and your family a joyous, purposeful, and above all peaceful 2024.

Love,

Grandpa Ted

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STORIES

A grandchild’s catastrophic illness. A grandfather’s path back to God.

grandpateddy1

December 15, 2023 3:24 pm December 15, 2023

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When someone asks, “What’s it like to be a grandpa?” the response is usually “Fantastic! The best thing ever.” I’ve spoken with men who jumped for joy in the middle…

When someone asks, “What’s it like to be a grandpa?” the response is usually “Fantastic! The best thing ever.”

I’ve spoken with men who jumped for joy in the middle of a restaurant, or wept openly, when they heard they were going to become grandpas. The whole world changes, exploding outward in a way that the word “joy” can barely contain. Many of us thought we could never love anyone, or any single thing, as much as our kids. Grandkids, however, take the cake. Suddenly, the circle of those we care deeply about expands. Love expands. And the more grandkids we are lucky to have, the larger that circle of loving care becomes.

But as with all things tied to this thing we call love there is complexity, and sometimes heartbreak.

With each new addition to our family the possibility of pain and sorrow grows. The yin and yang of grandparenthood are inseparable. We all know this is what we signed up for, which doesn’t make it any easier.

The need to learn about the full range of grandpa experiences led me one fall day to a coffee shop in Newton, Massachusetts, to talk with Eric Behr. I’d heard a little of Eric’s story from my brother, Nick, who conducted Eric in a gospel group called the Mystic Chorale. What Eric shared with me that day added a new dimension to my understanding of what it truly means to be a grandpa.

Eric Behr

Eric, 76, is lean and fit, with a lined and thoughtful face, grey hair, and a melodious baritone voice that no doubt was a great addition to my brother’s chorus. Eric is the father of three, grandfather of six, a successful folk musician and newly retired accountant. I started our conversation at the beginning, diving into his family history, seeking to find the influences that helped shape him into who he is today.

Eric never knew his grandfathers (although he did recollect that a brother of one grandfather survived the Titanic; that’s a whole different story that may require its own book). Eric’s father was outgoing and charismatic, a frustrated actor who finally found his stage as a diplomat, serving as the first liaison between the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Quiet by nature, Eric’s mother absolutely hated being a diplomat’s wife.

The two things Eric’s parents had in common were that they were listed in The Social Register, and both drank heavily.

Eric described his dad, Frederic Howell Behr, as a “world-class womanizer,” made worse by the fact that he flaunted his infidelities. “He rubbed my mother’s nose in it.” On more than one occasion, Frederic took his mistress on an overnight trip on the family yacht, and brought Eric along.
“My parents were constantly screeching at each other,” Eric said. When punishment was meted out to Eric by his parents, his dad used a belt, his mother a silver hairbrush.

“My childhood,” Eric said, “was completely overcome with anxiety.”

Eric’s father died of lung cancer at the age of 41, when Eric was just 14. For Eric, this was a major rupture at a critical time of his life. Deeply flawed as his father was, the man still had a tremendous influence on him. “So, I walked away from God. I knew that God existed and God was supposed to be good, and when God took my father that was the end.”

Bereft of spirituality, and inheriting his parents’ love for booze, Eric struggled with addiction for decades. Attending college at Goddard with fellow students he described as “brilliant fuckups,” Eric delved into a life of alcohol, drugs and cigarettes. But Eric also did everything possible to turn his life around. He became committed to rigorous 12-step recovery programs in 1986, and within a year he kicked alcohol and drugs for good. Eric became a musician, co-founded and grew a successful accounting firm (what Eric calls his “side gig”) got married to his lovely wife, Nancy, and together raised their kids.

For Eric, the trauma of his childhood has informed his loving—and sober—approach to being a good parent and grandparent.

He’s been there for his grandkids’ soccer games and all kinds of family gatherings. There is no screeching in his long marriage. And every new grandchild to appear on the scene has added a new layer to his happiness. His granddaughter, Molly, was born in 2017.

One sunny summer day in 2018 when the family was vacationing in Martha’s Vinyard, Molly’s mother, Cassy, noticed that her daughter was walking with her head tilted to one side. A doctor said the issue was likely muscular, but after further tests they heard the kind of news that every parent dreads. It was not just any cancer, the disease Siddhartha Mukherjee called The Emperor of All Maladies. Molly had a rare form of brain tumor, an anaplastic ependymoma.

Surgeons were able to remove ninety-eight percent of the tumor, but the remaining two percent was wrapped like a serpent around Molly’s brainstem.

No treatment known to mankind in one of the best hospitals in the world could solve this problem. The doctors could offer no hope for a cure, other than potentially keeping Molly alive long enough for new treatments to be developed. Eric and his family were of course devastated. It’s one thing to lose friends or family who are older to disease, but the prospect of losing a child is nearly unbearable. Some people give up. It can be too easy to accept what doctors predict. But for Eric and his wife, the crisis was a clarion call to dig deeper and find a way to break down the barriers to what’s possible.

“Around the time Molly got sick I started listening to a Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, said Eric. “She got me thinking about energy—healing energy—and energy in general. Because when you break it all down to particles, that’s all we are. Energy. And it seemed to me that was my path.” Nancy enrolled in a school of energy medicine, and soon Eric joined her to learn all they could about healing energy practices. At the same time, Nancy—an ordained pastor with a degree from the Harvard Divinity School—began tapping into her network to let people know about Molly and pray for her.

The effort started out small, but as word spread the circle grew and before long thousands of people were praying for Molly. Close family. Friends of friends. Complete strangers.

Molly underwent thirty-three rounds of proton radiation followed by metronomic chemotherapy. The goal of the chemo was simply to keep the tumor from growing. But when the follow-up scans were done, Molly’s doctors where astonished to find the tumor had actually shrunk. “They were stunned,” Eric says. “They just didn’t understand how that happened.”

Eric and Nancy, however, did understand. “You’ve seen pictures of the Sun with a gazillion rays, right?” Eric asked. “Each one of those is a way in and out of God.” A man who had walked away from God at fourteen had found a new pathway in his 70s towards deep spirituality, a foundational energy with extraordinary power. Today, Eric starts each morning with a comprehensive program of yoga, meditation, reading and prayer.

Five years after Molly’s diagnosis she has defied all expectations. The tumor has not grown. And yet challenges remain. In July of 2022, Molly came down with a pneumonia which very nearly took her life. During her month-long hospital stay, bloodwork showed that Molly had developed chemotherapy-induced acute myeloid leukemia. Once again, the family persevered. Molly received a bone marrow transplant from her mother. After more months in the hospital, Molly finally came home in the winter, living in a virtual bubble to avoid infection.

In November of 2023, happy and smiling and for all the world seeming normal and healthy, Molly went back to school.

Before Eric and I parted ways, I asked him the question I ask of all grandpas. What’s the number one thing? The essential wisdom he’d learned from his long life that he wanted his grandchildren to understand. For grandpas, this is no small matter. After all, grandpas don’t live as long as grandmas, leaving us an even briefer time window to impart vital wisdom. Many of us may never have a chance to sit down and talk with our 18-year-old grandkids. I asked, “If you picture yourself years in the future and you’re talking to Molly and your other grandkids, what would you say?”

Eric thought for a moment then said, “Trust yourself. Trust your instinct. Your life is your responsibility. It doesn’t help you or anybody to blame the way you’re feeling on somebody else.”

When I probed deeper, Eric explained that the need to trust our instincts and take responsibility is driven by his greatest fear, the thing posing an existential threat to our grandchildren. “The childhood they are going to have,” Eric explained, “is much briefer than the one you and I had. And that’s predominantly driven by the Internet. I’m scared to death of the crap that’s available on computer screens.” For Eric—and I suspect for many grandparents—it’s startling to realize that we worry more about toxic media than toxic cancer. What does this say about the direction of our modern hyper-technology-driven world?

Today, Eric spends lots of time with his grandkids, practicing mindfulness to be fully present. All of his storied ancestry and life experience is built into the fabric of his being. It’s a quilt comprised of many individual ideas and values that add up to a larger vision. It’s loving, loyal and steady. It’s sober and powerful and spiritual. There’s joy, laughter, pain. A gospel chorus that gives you chills. A map for doing the right thing. A soul that will always find ways for family to survive, and never give up trying. No matter what awaits, there’s always a lifeboat available somewhere in the starry night. You just have to pray.

Molly

Publisher’s Note: Eric’s family created this GoFundMe page to raise money to cover the high cost of Molly’s medical care. I encourage you to share the story and the GoFundMe link so we can help Molly live a full life. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

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STORIES

Heirlooms of Wisdom

grandpateddy1

November 29, 2023 8:54 pm November 29, 2023

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When is something passed down from our ancestors more than just an antique? Can an idea be an heirloom? These questions come to mind because I’m writing this story on…

When is something passed down from our ancestors more than just an antique? Can an idea be an heirloom?

These questions come to mind because I’m writing this story on the desk that belonged to my great-grandfather. When my father inherited it, he used it as his personal desk at home in his “inner sanctum,” an office on the top floor of our house outside Boston, the place where he did his deepest thinking.

As a kid I would sometimes sit at this desk and look at the note cards dad had pinned on the wall. He’d created a compendium of wisdom gleaned from his voracious reading, one profound statement per card written in his neat all-capital lettering. The idea that stayed in my mind is a quote from George Washington Carver, the most prominent African-American scientist of the early 20th century. “Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough.”

I love this desk. I love it so much it has given up its greatest secrets, which I will share with you.

This matte black 19th century antique is solid as an icebreaker, with drawers painted inside in the particular red of British phone booths. Its lines are simple and angular, unadorned by flourishes. This is a desk for work.

Its family origins date back to the Civil War. My great-great grandfather, Albert Kidder Page, served with a Massachusetts regiment. In July of 1863—the same month as the epic battle at Gettysburg—Albert was fighting his way through North Carolina when he contracted a severe case of malaria. When Albert’s father, Luke, learned that his son was extremely ill, he traveled by train from Boston to retrieve him from the army hospital and bring him home. Albert’s wife, Maria, was nine months pregnant. No doubt the family held out hope that Albert would recover and live to see his child born. But it was not to be. On July 3rd, Albert passed away in Maria’s arms. Three days later, she gave birth to their son. She named him Albert Kidder Page (curiously, he was not a ‘jr’).

Albert grew up, studied hard, and became a doctor. The desk was his.

Boston, at the time, was a destination for Chinese immigrants and Albert would accept them as patients regardless of their ability to pay. He often received china in lieu of money. I’m guessing Dr. Page was right-handed because there’s a small spot on the top right of the desk where the paint is worn away due to repeated pressure from a writing instrument — his hand filling out prescriptions for all those in need of care.

The china Dr. Page received from patients is still in the family, its value not measured in dollars.

Nearly one hundred years after the Civil War, when the desk was in my dad’s office, he flew to California to attend a scientific conference. On his trip back to Boston, on June 30th, 1956, an unknown woman approached him at the ticket counter at LAX and said, “Excuse me, I was wondering if you’re on the earlier flight. It’s urgent that I get home to my family faster and I was hoping you’d consider switching flights with me.” My dad was unfailingly kind and considerate of others, and he never seemed to be in a hurry, so it’s no surprise to me that he agreed. She took his seat on the earlier TWA flight.

That plane collided with another over the Grand Canyon. All lives were lost. It was the worse civil air disaster that had ever occurred in the United States.

My dad arrived home safely and went back to work, continuing to read voraciously and write down new nuggets of wisdom to pin on the wall, including a new one: Life is a gift. Whenever my dad told the story of the switched flights, he’d finish by saying, “And the moral of the story is, if someone asks you for a favor, do it!”

I was born three years later.

The only reason I’m here, the reason why I’ve been able to live, to raise children, to know my grandkids and to write stories on this old desk, is because of pure chance, and kindness. The gift of life that a total stranger gave my father—and by extension to me—must be somehow repaid (I did try to track down the identity of the woman who switched seats so I could contact her surviving family members, but it was not possible).

Life went on. The desk was put to good use by my dad over the following decades, with countless letters written, scientific papers perused and annotated, wisdom captured.

An underlying current of all my dad’s thinking was the need to promote world peace.

Having lived through the horrors of Okinawa, he believed all war was incredibly stupid. We could do better. The imperative for peace was infused into our family life in myriad ways, such as hosting exchange students. Building bridges of understanding with people from many countries would, in his view, create a more loving family of mankind.

This is how a young student from Kenya came to live with us in the mid-1960s. His name was James Odhiambo.

While James spent time with us five boys—expanding our world view in the process—it was really my dad that he bonded with. The full extent of that bond didn’t become fully clear until recently. A month ago, one of my brothers discovered a letter written to my father from James’ wife in 1983. In my mind’s eye, I picture dad opening the letter as he sat at this desk. Below is verbatim what she wrote:

12-10-83
Mrs. Dinah Odhiambo
P.O. Box 30101
Nairobi, Kenya

Dear Mr. Page,

It is a really long time since you read from us and also read from you. I remember, the last time was, I sent you our family photo, you never mentioned whether it reached you or not.

I thank God who has given me this chance to remember you. The [?] had come because of ups and downs, and thereafter, to give you a surprising news, I got my fifth baby. This one came after 7 years and I had not planned. God gave me a baby boy and my husband named him you, thus William-Page Odiwuor. Odiwuor means from midnight up to 3am and my baby arrived at 12:45am at night on 28-2-83. So, this means my husband together with me have not forgotten you.

I have been troubled every now and then that I have you in our family, but I have never let you know. I don’t know how you will take it but my husband insisted we must name you in our family, and I think that is why I got this one after many years.

I’m sure your wife is doing well together with the rest of the family. Please pass my warmest regards to all and may God bless you.

Sincerely,
Dinah Odhiambo

Later in the 80s we heard that James had died of AIDS.

My dad likely sat here when he wrote a check to help pay for William-Page Odiwuor’s college education. Since my dad was, like his grandfather, right-handed, the scratched paint on the desk was partly due to the tip of his pen bearing down as he wrote the check for young William, as dad did for so many other people and the causes he cared about.

So, here I am today, writing here at this old desk. It’s the nature of the publishing business that books are sold, not given away. But it’s not possible for me to write this and not think of those who wrote here before me. The prescriptions. The wisdom. The checks. Every fiber of this wood is imbued with the kindness of my ancestors and the gifts of strangers. I feel their presence as I sit here and type. To honor them, and simply to do the right thing, when my book is published a donation will be made to a non-profit that benefits children across the globe.

I’m fortunate to know the secrets of this desk, passed down to me by spoken word and a letter found by chance. Through this book, the stories will be available to my children, my grandchildren, and hopefully everyone else. Heirlooms are nice things to receive. They are even better to give.

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BUCKET O' WISDOM

From The Boys in the Boat to Head of the Charles, with Fred Schoch

grandpateddy1

November 20, 2023 8:21 pm November 20, 2023

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On August 14, 1936, rowing crews from six countries competed for the gold medal at the Olympic games in Berlin, Germany. Adolf Hitler was in the stands, cheering on his…

On August 14, 1936, rowing crews from six countries competed for the gold medal at the Olympic games in Berlin, Germany.

Adolf Hitler was in the stands, cheering on his team along with thousands crowding the stands at the Grunau Regatta Course. There were eight rowers and one coxswain per boat on the 2000-meter race, one oar per rower, with a photo finish that became legend as the American team took home the gold. The story of the team’s journey from their humble origins in Washington state to becoming heroes is brilliantly told by Daniel James Brown in his classic book, The Boys in the Boat. A move adaptation directed by George Clooney is coming out in December 2023.

But there is another story here that’s important to tell. One that spans generations that lived before 1936, and after, and will extend into the future.

The nine American rowers in the boat that day had an extra teammate, an alternate ready to replace anyone injured or ill prior to competition. His name was Delos “Dutch” Schoch (according to family lore, at one point when Dutch was filming the team, he was standing in the way of Hitler’s view and was summarily asked to move; when I learned this it made me wish a lot more men had stood in Hitler’s way in 1936).

Fred’s dad, Dutch Schoch.

After serving in the navy in WWII, Dutch became head rowing Coach at Princeton. The love of rowing was passed on to Dutch’s son, Fred Schoch, who’s played a leading role in building one of the great sports competitions in the world today, the Head of the Charles Regatta held yearly in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I’m talking with lots of grandpas these days as I conduct research for my book, The Good Grandpa Project, and when I found out Fred is a grandpa, I knew I had to meet up with him over coffee.

I wanted to know how his upbringing has guided him through life, and what lessons he’s learned. And I sought to ask him the question I’m asking of all grandpas: what is the #1 piece of wisdom that will help today’s kids become the next great generation?

The following are some highlights from our conversation:

How did your upbringing shape who you’ve become?

My dad was this heroic Hemingwayesque figure. Big as I am, burly. A revered coach. He was a man of few words, but when he spoke you really paid attention. I grew up in this kind of storybook town of Princeton [New Jersey], back in the 50s. Princeton was a sleepy little town of probably 30,000 people back then. But we used to go to the basketball games and see Bill Bradley play. I think I was shaped by not only my father, but the impressive young oarsmen at Princeton. As I got bigger, I got to go on trips with them and the kids would playfully throw me up in the luggage rack of the charter bus when we went to New Haven. I started as a coxswain when I was 10 years old and even steered one of my father’s crews in the 1960 Olympic Trials in Syracuse, New York. So, I grew up around them and could be a part of the workouts. And later, when I got big enough, I started rowing with them.

What do you remember about your dad?

One of the fondest memories I have of my dad was on wintery Sunday afternoons; we had an open Willy’s jeep, and we lived on 15 acres with lots of oak trees and we burned a fire all winter in our prerevolutionary farmhouse. We’d go deep back into the woods, and we’d cut fallen trees. We didn’t have to say a lot. But I was the splitter and he was running the heavy Sears and Roebuck chainsaw. And so, I learned how to split logs and actually wrote a poem to my son, Willard, about that experience, the father/son relationship. And I gave it to him for his birthday probably 10 years ago. Your relationship with your kids is so important. I took my youngest son to the airport recently and he said, “Dad, I’m really glad you gave me a ride because it’s more than that. It’s symbolic. I want you to know how important you are and how much I want you to be in my life.” Wow.

Did you have a chance to know your grandfathers?

Both of my grandfathers died in their 50s before I was born, and my dad died of a coronary at 56. There is a big hole in my history in terms of knowing my grandparents, and I want to pass on as much as I can to my grandchildren. You begin to think about the uncertainty of our own lives when you hit 70. As the saying goes, “The lights can go out at any time.” Having time together is important. That’s why I’ve just made a commitment to retire and start consulting part time.

When you think of a creating a lasting legacy for your grandkids, what things come to mind?

I think it’s important to pass on the basic building blocks of being a good human being and being honest. A tireless work ethic was something both my parents passed on to me. As a late bloomer I had struggles, you know, but I stuck with it and came out the other side academically, and even started my career as a secondary school English teacher. It seemed like it was never going to happen, but it did. While I didn’t know my grandfathers, I’m sure they had to work hard for what they achieved. I think a sense of humility is so important in life and to respect other people. I want to make sure they’re grounded. And I think that’s something that I can pass on that I received from my father.

What lessons are there in sports for our grandkids?

Rowing has given me so much because there’s no hiding in this grueling team sport. There’s no superstars. It’s like the total teamwork demonstrated by The Boys in the Boat. I have a recent example. An aspiring rower applying to colleges told me he had achieved a certain score on an indoor rowing machine used to test fitness, and I found out later he lied to me. It’s B.S. I mean, he lied to me but he’s lying to himself. He’s afraid. I believe in redemption, but he’s going to have to turn it around. A friend of mine is a coach at Marietta College who’s a philosophy major and he talks about an analogy of a lamp; the shadow outside of the lamp shade is where you have to go as an athlete, into that pain cave. When you’re competing it can really, really hurt. You have to you be able to peer into that darkness and not be afraid to go there. You have to prepare yourself mentally to embrace the unknown. It’s true in all sports. Some people take shortcuts. And some people refuse to take shortcuts — the successful ones. It’s about loyalty to your teammates and being honest with them and yourself.

What’s the #1 thing?

In life, you’re going to have so many ups and downs. Trust who you are and that you’re going to figure it out. It’s going to be okay. Just be resilient and keep marching forward. In grad school, I kept a piece of paper taped to my bulletin board with a saying from the German poet Goethe that read “work and despair not.” That pithy aphorism kept me going many late nights. I hope my grandchildren will absorb some of my wisdom and benefit from my experience.

My thoughts on Fred’s story: It brings to mind the idea that all of us are living history. From one generation to the next there is a bond that outlasts time, with evergreen lessons we can build on and shape into our own, and give again. And sometimes it’s the really simple things, like cutting wood in a forest—without talking—that says how much we love our children.

What are activities that you do with your grandkids that they will remember? Please post your comments to join the conversation.

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