Through eyes long since gone
A photo taken by my paternal grandfather of the fire at the Purina headquarters in February 1962. It was so cold that the water was frozen by the time it hit the building and turned it into an ice palace. I put a few more of them into a small gallery of grandpa's photos.
My brother-in-law has started scanning in pictures, given to him by my 95 year old grandmother, which were taken over the course of my grandfather's life. It's so strange to see these images taken by a man who was always remote and stoic. He was a brilliant mechanical engineer and mathematician who introduced me to cryptography when I was 7 via the cryptoquip in the newspaper. He patiently explained letter frequency and how to make a crib. Every time I pick up a draw-string bag from a store, I think of him since he designed the machine to make them but, being an 'Organization Man' straight out of Whyte's book, he shared none of the profits that the company reaped from his design. Grandpa was also the guy who, on Christmas, would take a pocketknife and slowly, carefully unwrap the paper from each gift and fold it.
While I respected his intelligence, I never really liked him very much as he made it impossible to warm up to him. I have an exceedingly vivid memory of him talking to me on my 10th birthday about 'niggers' and my immediate reaction of thinking much less of him for it. My mother always remembers him taking back a box kite he had made for me only to give it to my cousin. I didn't think much of it at the time since Robin was only 1 week younger than me, but he had been born retarded due to a negligent doctor with a pair of foreceps and I thought maybe he needed the kite more than I did in the guileless näive way that children tend to see such things. Later in life I would come to understand that he and my grandmother had a long history of playing favourites - from my father's brother, to my oldest sister, to Robin.
I spent several summers over at their house and can't really recall that I learned anything about them as people aside from what was obvious and already known; they loved bridge with friends, he was a type II diabetic and they were active Masons. They used to take me to various Masonic functions and even then I was cynical enough to think of it as a creepy cult-like organisation. They were inscrutable in many ways. It's is particularly odd to see these photographs that he took not only because I didn't know that he liked photography, but that he took more than just the usual family snapshots and appears to have been reasonably good at it. My father bought an Olympus OM-10 at one point and I don't know that he took many photos with it since work was his life. I imagine that had he lived to enjoy some of his retirement that he would have taken a lot more pictures. I started getting interested in photography about 10 or 12 years ago and I wonder now if it might be hereditary. :)
George, my grandfather, died from a massive heart attack at the ripe age of 84 while roofing his house, which wasn't a bad way to go all things considered. I cursed him at the time since it was right before my Calculus 2 and Differential Equations exams and he was helping my understanding of them tremendously. Looking at the few pictures my brother-in-law sent to me, it makes me wonder if he might have had some redeeming qualities as a human being that I didn't or couldn't see when I was much younger.
12 May 2004 at 14:57, Helsinki
