Clem is holding the ball and looking serious!
Oh my 2021 is coming in with a bang. Who hasn’t been shaken by the seditious rioting, destruction, death and domestic terrorism at our Nation’s capital? It made me start thinking back on how our country has changed over the decades. This led me to think about my Grandfather Clemet John Raymond McGinness, “Clem” but known to us kids as Poppa.
Poppa was the youngest in his Irish family of 11. He started working at age 3, going out nightly with his older brother to earn a few pennies lighting the gas street lamps.
His father was a heavy drinker and a skilled wagon carver. Think ornate carvings on circus and business wagons. It was Poppa’s duty at age 5 to “carry the pole” at lunchtime for the men who worked in the wagon shop. “Carrying the pole” meant that he was assigned a long pole that he carried across his shoulders with buckets on either side. His job was to go down to the tavern and get buckets of beer for the workers’ lunches. If he brought back the buckets without spilling them, he was allowed a sip of yeasty brew.
He had rickets as a kid but that never stopped him. He played sports in high school, excelling in basketball. He played before they invented the dribble. Let that sink in. He told me that it was common for a player on the opposite team to stand on the toes of the guy with the ball to prevent passing.
Poppa’s father died of sepsis from a nasty cut while carving (note to self: no drinking and carving). All the kids quit school to work so the family wouldn’t starve. All except Poppa. They insisted he stay in school and was the only member of his family who finished high school. He loved school and he loved learning.
After high school, Poppa apprenticed to an engineering firm and learned the fine art of making blueprints. They exposed the blueprints to the sun to develop them. Until the day he died he always had a discerning eye for a sunny day. When WWI hit, he enlisted and was sent to New York to study mechanical engineering at a technical school for 2 years. He learned to design airplane engines and, later in life, he designed cooking units, munitions, refrigerators, rocket engines and whatever else Servel in Evansville, Indiana required of him.
I stand in awe of the man. Here he was, an impoverished Irishman, son of a wagon carver. This gas lamp lighter, bowlegged basketball player, lover of learning, WWI veteran, designer of airplane engines who cried when we put a man on the moon.
I tell you this story so that you’ll grasp the enormous scope of the changes in our Country, in the world, that one man experienced over 91 years. What will we see in our lifetimes? What will be our life story causing our grandchildren will shake their heads in disbelief? Will they understand the vital importance, the possible consequences to the test to the power of our democracy we’ve just witnessed? Make sure they do.
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