Words of Grandparents

Grandmothers & grandfathers have remarkable stories to tell. We should get them all talking and then just sit back to listen.

Here’s my grandfather writing about his grandfather, a man who was maybe 60 when my grandfather was born in 1873 and who was closing in on 70 in 1880 when this story is told.

In the wondering game of who-knows-who, one mind touches another down through the years. I knew a man who knew a man who was born about 1813, when the country wasn't yet 40 years old!

I knew my grandfather and he knew his. So, using the rich experience of living memory we can make a quick transit in just two grandfathers and leap-back two centuries in time.

These pages themselves are a half-century old. They’re originals from the reams of canary yellow paper that flowed through the rollers of the old Underwoods used by both my father and grandfather. They're from an unpublished autobiography of Howard Garis.