Family Photos: Grandpa as a Boy

When I was going through my old family photos, this one quickly became one of my favorites:

I'm pretty sure that my maternal grandfather is the boy in the light-colored shirt, sitting on his friends' shoulders.

I never really got the chance to know my grandpa. He died when I was around two years old. I have two of his old high school yearbooks, and they indicate that my grandpa was a quiet and watchful youth. As an adult, he became a police officer, and later a security guard. Many who knew him during his security guard days would later describe him to me as friendly and likable. My mother adored him. My father once told me that he was terrified of him. While my father never was a reliable source of information, I believed him.

My grandpa was also a carpenter who made beautiful things and a photographer who produced hundreds of slides. When we were kids, we were always desperate to see a fabled slide that Grandpa had (for some unknown reason) produced of a dead body. Of course, my mother never let us look at it. While I'm now in possession of all of his slides, I've yet to search through them at all, let alone to look for that one. It seems that, now that I'm an adult, I have little desire to see dead bodies. (Note: most of the slides are of far more innocuous things, such as flowers and places where he went on vacation.)

Anyway, I often wonder, who was my maternal grandfather? The sad truth is that I'll never know for sure. Like most of us, I suspect that he was many things. A police officer and a photographer; a security guard and a carpenter; a father who loved his daughter, but disliked the man who wasn't good enough for her. I'm sure different people saw different aspects of his personality. Although I never got to know him, I feel lucky to have these pictures and scrapbooks, a small part of his life.

I like him like this: a boy, looking triumphant and a little defiant, sitting on the shoulders of his friends.