JULY 7, 2023 – (Cont.) There was nothing more emblematic of the long history of the Holman business than a petrified banana that Grandpa had found one day in the drawer of a dresser, which had been abandoned close to 75 years earlier—and which Grandpa was only then in 1980 getting around to moving out of a storage vault. How a banana found its way into a dresser drawer is anyone’s guess, but there it was—a hard, shriveled, darkened banana with a withered stem. The mere existence of such an oddity was strange enough, but what Grandpa did with it was stranger yet.
After showing me the excessively dried fruit, Grandpa proceeded to mount it on a square of cardboard. He then used a black Magic Marker to write under the mounted banana, “A banana stored in 1905. We keep things in good shape, don’t we?” Then he placed the banana sign in the office window next to the sidewalk on the Park Avenue side of the building. I wondered how many passers-by would see the irony in the sign—the banana was in decidedly bad shape; it was, after all, three-quarters of a century old. Or would they just think that my grandpa was just plain very weird?
But maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh. For a man whose life was purely about bihness, why shouldn’t Grandpa be credited for that attempt at a lighter moment?
If one could laugh about the banana sign, however, the thousands of newspapers and magazines in the warehouse were quite a different matter. Over the years, Grandpa must have subscribed to dozens of periodicals and received other, unsolicited multitudes, more that came with membership in all sorts of industry associations. Not a single newspaper or magazine had been tossed. The farther I explored, the more stacks upon stacks of musty old publications I found. Most were in dark corners of the warehouse—the basement and upper reaches never penetrated by sunlight—but the seldom-visited rooms of Gaga and Grandpa’s house had also become overflow repositories for Grandpa’s periodical collection.
One day, after clearing the project with UB and Gaga—Gaga being an enthusiastic supporter of the mission—I began loading the periodicals into the back of one of the old delivery trucks owned by Holman, Inc. I’d deliberately chosen a time when Grandpa was off at a board meeting at the local Boiling Springs Savings & Loan. The diversion promised to a two-hour absence on his part, and I figured this would give me adequate time to make substantial headway. I’d located a recycling center not too far away, and without Grandpa knowing a thing, I’d be able to load up one, maybe even two truckloads of old papers and magazines, haul them away, and even bring a few hundred bucks of revenue into Holman, Inc. (back in the day when recycling firms would pay for inventory).
However, no sooner had I begun the task of piling magazines from the house into the truck, when Grandpa’s Cadillac pulled into the driveway. Busted! I thought. Grandpa alighted from the car and strode over to the back of the truck, which was parked just outside the house. “No, oh, h, h, h . . . wht r y dng hr? Y cn’t do ths.”
“Grandpa!” I said, “what are you doing here? I thought you had a meeting?”
“It gt pstpned. Wht r y dng?” he said, with a tone of strong disapproval.
“I’m getting rid of all these old magazines and newspapers.”
“Nh, oh, h, h, h . . . y cn’t do tht!” he protested.
“Grandpa,” I said, still rattled by the fact that I’d been caught in the act. “These are all so old and musty, they just need to be tossed out.”
He would hear none of it. He stooped to pick up a copy of Trucking News[1] from the early 1960s. “Y cn’t throw ths out!”
“But Grandpa,” I said, trying to pull the magazine from his iron grip, “this is from 1960-whatever!”
“Ys, bt thr might be n artcle I wnt t rd agn.”
I decided to abort the mission—for the time being. A few days later, another opportunity—the rescheduled directors’ meeting—presented itself, whereupon I swung into action and hauled two whole truck-loads of magazines and newspapers to the recycling center. If Grandpa missed them, he never said a word. Gaga cheered my success and told me to keep the couple hundred bucks I’d received for all the paper. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1]Not its actual name, but it was some sort of trucking-related industry periodical.
