MAY 30, 2021 – When he was old, my Grandpa Holman liked to joke about his age when someone stopped for idle chat.
“Know how old I am?” he’d ask with hardly any lip or jaw movement.
“No,” the person would say.
“Neither do I . . .” Grandpa would respond, adding, “because my birthday used to be on Memorial Day, but then Congress changed it from May 30, so now I can’t keep track.”
At 90, Grandpa hesitated too long after “Neither do I,” leaving the mistaken impression he’d lost his marbles.
In his prime, Grandpa had all his marbles and then some. If he was inscrutable in many ways, my mother worshipped him, and I knew he’d accomplished a lot in life—in business, particularly, but also in civic affairs. By the time I was old enough to appreciate his accomplishments, however, they’d faded, as had many of the people of his generation. Soon after turning 15, I decided it was time to know him better. I wrote him a letter, and he wrote a long one back.
For a few months after law school, I worked for Grandpa. By that time, he was really old, and though he retained an iron grip on his affairs, it wasn’t always for the best. I grew frustrated with his increasing ossification. I was 20-something and more eager to look ahead to the last 20 years of the 20th century, than to hear Grandpa reminisce about the first 20 years of it.
Recently, I came across the cache of letters he’d written to me when I was young. They’d been dashed off in the moment, but they revealed a brilliant mind and command of the written word. The letters prompted a recollection: Decades earlier, my grandmother (who lived to be 100) had asked me to organize Grandpa’s voluminous papers. Among them I found a stash of speeches he’d written or dictated then delivered at various civic gatherings and business conventions. I read many of them and realized how much he’d contributed to the bustling life of our country.
It was from Mother—not those speeches—however, that I learned how during the Great Depression, Grandpa had quietly helped the extended families of his employees. He helped others in need as well, but never with fanfare. And I saw him stand up to two bullies who thought they could push an octogenarian around in his own warehouse. Grandpa was as fearless as he was generous, and he didn’t need to try hard to be either.
When cleaning out my parents’ house, I found among my mother’s things, Grandpa’s diary from his years at the Wharton School of Business at UPenn. To my surprise, it revealed that he’d been a bit of a prankster and liked attending plays. I wasn’t surprised, though, that Grandpa graduated a whole year early and that he supported women’s suffrage.
So here’s to the memory of a great man; a mover and shaker, who believed that civility and civic mindedness always went hand-in-hand.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
