JULY 2, 2023 – Except for Mother, who called Grandpa “Dad,” and my three sisters and I, who called Grandpa, “Grandpa,” the rest of the world (including Gaga) called Grandpa, “Griz”—short for Griswold—or “Mr. Holman.” I never heard UB call him anything except “Grandpa,” and that was only when UB was talking about him.
Gaga and Grandpa knew each other from the age of their earliest memories. They went to kindergarten together. Their families knew each other. But from all that I could observe, Gaga had little interest in any of Grandpa’s many civic and business affairs, and he showed little interest in any of her diversions, except going to Hamburg Cove, Connecticut on summer weekends and eating dinner out on Sunday afternoons.
Whenever I play a game of Scrabble, I think of Gaga, because she loved to play that game and could beat me at it when she was 99 years old. Whenever I see a Allied Van Lines or United Van Lines 18-wheeler, I think of Grandpa, because he was a founder of each of those companies. He was also president of George B. Holman, Inc., a moving and storage company established by his father, and Grandpa was president of the American Truckers Association, president of the New Jersey Motor Carrier Association, charter member of the Rutherford Lions Club, Rutherford Borough council member, author of the “Holman Tariff,” which Congress passed for the moving industry. He was president of his Masonic Lodge, a practitioner before the Interstate Commerce Commission, a ringleader of the Bergen County Republicans, conservator and later director of the Boiling Springs Savings and Loan Association, and a member, president, and all around shaker of a host of other civic and business organizations across most of the decades of the Twentieth Century. This all after he graduated at the age of 19 from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
Even when it came to family matters, Grandpa was an organization man. He was an active member and president of the Huntley National Association, a formal entity established by his mother, neé Ethelyn Huntley, for the purpose of organizing annual reunions of the “Huntley clan” and preserving the family history of all descendants of the Earl of Huntley, who had emigrated from Scotland to America in the first half of the 17th Century. The Earl, Grandpa told me, was the only “Huntley” to have moved to America, and therefore, all “Huntleys” in America were related. When we were kids, every July my sisters and I would receive our annual “junior” membership cards, compliments of Grandpa. He was proud of his heritage, and he wanted us to be proud too.
But that was about as close as Grandpa seemed capable of expressing any kind of grandfatherliness toward us. I never remember as a child sitting on his lap or him holding my hand. I never remember him engaging in small talk or uttering any terms of endearment. He was strictly business, and the two toys that Grandpa gave me unceremoniously were promotional, desktop, model “United Van Lines” trucks.
To this day, my sisters and I laugh whenever we recall the driving routine so familiar to each of us: Gaga and Grandpa seated in the front seat of their Cadillac, with one or two of us (never three or all four of us) in the back. We’d be driving on a busy freeway somewhere—either bound for Hamburg, Connecticut or on our way to dinner somewhere near Rutherford. A Bekins moving van or a Consolidated Freightways semi would roar past, prompting Grandpa to talk “business.”
“Hhhh!” he’d start with a grunt. This would come out as “Hey!” for anyone else, but Grandpa barely moved his thin lips when he talked, so his vowels didn’t get much air time. He talked very slowly, deliberatively, and if you wanted to, you could let your mind wander this way and that and still track his monologue when you returned to it five minutes later. “Bkns. Hhhh. I rmbr bck ’n nineteen frty-sevn whn Bkns ’n I tlked about sttng up a ntional dspatch systm fer contnentl trckng. At the time thr were lots of trcks wth loads going frm say Joisey to the Wst Cst and no load cming bck. So, wht to do? Wll, y see, Bkns and I thght maybe we cld get a cntrl dspatch station to link up ’n mpty truck wth a load wtng for trnsit bck to Joisey.”
Then, just when you tired of feigning interest by uttering strategically placed “Huh”s and “Uh huh”s, Gaga would save you by saying to Grandpa uncharitably, “Oh shut-up, will you! You’re boring and no one wants to hear about it.” Whereupon, Grandpa would let a chuckle through his barely parted lips, gently tap the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and dutifully terminate the monologue—until the next time a large semi bearing a familiar name passed the Cadillac. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
