Wingtip Shoes

Suppose [a man] has a son who sees all the sins his father commits, and though he sees them, he does not do such things… - The prophet Ezekiel

By all accounts, one of my great-grandfathers was a complete and utter scoundrel. He was a whiskey distributor in the Deep South, which was not ipso facto the thing that made him a scoundrel. He lived in one city, while his wife and children, one of whom was my own grandfather, lived elsewhere. He would periodically show up where his wife and children resided, impregnate his wife, beat the children viciously, and then leave them all again to fend for themselves as he pursued his independent life far away.

He provided his wife and children with little to no support. As a result, my grandfather spent his childhood in poverty. And not poverty as we conceive of it today, where people who possess smartphones and enormous TVs are considered “poor”. He had nothing. He dressed in ragged clothes and went about without shoes, even in the wintertime. His schooling was intermittent and fragmentary because he often had to help find food to put on the table for his mother and his siblings. He was forced to quit school at a young age to help provide for his family and he never went back again. But that is not the entire story.

My great-grandmother — she of the neglectful husband and needy children — was not a woman lacking her own kind of gritty virtue and wisdom. This was a boon to my grandfather, who was extremely intelligent and bitterly resented having to quit school before receiving a complete education. Instead of pampering him in his misfortune, his mother told him his bitterness was wasted. She said that if he wanted to learn, there would be a library in almost any community where he chose to live. She told him he had no excuse to be uneducated, notwithstanding his childhood difficulties. If he really wanted to learn, she said, he should get himself a library card. She understood, there in that remote backwater of rural Mississippi, that formal credentials were one thing, but an actual education was something else entirely.

As a young man of around twenty, he left home to find his way in the world, ending up in a small town in Texas working in a local gas station. His childhood, filled as it was with poverty, taught him the importance of frugality. He was an absolutely ferocious saver his entire adult life, refusing ever to buy anything for which he hadn’t already saved the money. He simply went without until he could afford to pay cash.

After many months of hard work in Texas, he had saved up enough money to buy a used washing machine, which he crated up and shipped to his mother in Mississippi. He wanted to ease her burden of caring for his siblings. This was the first major purchase he ever made. It was also a clue as to who he was becoming as a person.

My grandfather, through many twists and turns, eventually ended up working at the Hanford site in the southeastern corner of Washington state, where much of the plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program was being produced. He started there as a laborer and ended by the late 1970s as an operator in one of the nuclear reactors. Great secrecy surrounded the work being done at Hanford. Many of the people who worked there in the late 1940s didn’t understand what was being produced. My grandfather was not in the loop, but by then a voracious reader, and regular patron of the local library, he began to check out books on physics. He eventually figured out, through his own reading and initiative, what was being done at Hanford, and why.

Possessing only a grade-school education, he amassed a small fortune by investing the savings he was able to put aside as a byproduct of his strict frugality. Notwithstanding having had an abusive father, and having grown up shoeless and poor, my grandfather educated himself and provided for his family. In her final years, my grandmother spent a decade or more in need of skilled nursing care. Almost to the day that my grandfather’s small fortune finally ran out, my grandmother died. His exertions and frugality provided for his wife until, quite literally, she drew her final breath, long after he himself had died.

As a child, I knew nothing about my grandfather’s past. I only knew that I had a quirky granddaddy who hilariously, in my view, made a spectacle of himself by cutting the lawn in a crisply pressed suit and tie, walking behind the mower in a very expensive pair of wingtip shoes.

He was oddly possessive of, and devoted to, those shoes. He polished and cleaned and cared for them as if they were a precious possession. The shoes hung on elaborate shoe trees in his closet. He fussed over them and pampered them with such dedication that they lasted for years.

We all make our choices. But here in the 21st century, we are constantly bombarded by messages telling us that choices aren’t real and that difficult childhoods preclude moral development and personal achievement. My grandfather was a living, breathing refutation of this modern notion. Notwithstanding a childhood of paternal neglect and physical suffering, he became a man who provided for his mother and devoted himself to his own wife and children. And somewhere in his heart, he had apparently resolved that not only would he never again go about in rags, but there was no job so menial that a fellow couldn’t do it while tromping about in a first-class pair of wingtip shoes.