WhatFinger


Survival in Tough Times: My paternal grandfather was just Grandpa Smith to me

Go Back In Time With Oral History





It’s almost summer, so there will be gatherings of family and friends coming soon. With luck you’ll be with friends you know and perhaps some older family members, too. If, like me, you’re getting to be among the older family members present, feel free to initiate storytelling rather than waiting for someone else to ask. Some people will roll their eyes, but that’s okay.

Oral history is just the fancy academic name, of course. It’s pretty much the same thing as talking to older people. Formal oral history has rules and procedures and documentation and lots of other good things, but we can practice the essentials any time and any place. The more you can remember, record, or preserve, the better, of course.

With the gatherings coming up, consider asking some questions.

Talk about who favors one side of the family or another.

Ask/tell about the cars they had.

Ask/talk about where they lived.

Ask how they kept cool in the summer

What was everybody’s favorite meal?

Talk about the stages of kitchen technology in the family.

Tell stories of people and pets.

Tell about dreams and wishes and what might have been.

Look at photos to prompt stories, AND WRITE THE NAMES ON THE BACK WITH A SOFT PENCIL!

My paternal grandfather was just Grandpa Smith to me. Those who knew him called him Fred. I didn’t ask him enough questions, but I asked some, and I listened when he talked about the things he remembered. There were many golden moments, now preserved in my memory. Here’s a sampling.

He was born in 1893, the year of the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the year that Frederick Jackson Turner gave his paper on The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Grandpa Smith was from Clinton County, Kentucky. He grew up when American chestnut trees grew on millions of acres of woodlands across the eastern United States, including his home county. In those days it was common to put hogs to forage in the woods where they would fatten on roots and acorns and chestnuts. When the cold weather came, there would be home butchering and sharing the meat with family members. He said that hogs that had fed on chestnut mast was the finest he ever ate. A fungal blight attacked the chestnut forests beginning in 1920, and by 1925 most of the vast chestnut forest in the United States had died. But he remembered and passed that along to me.


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He was born just 28 years after the end of the Civil War, so he well remembered veterans of the War Between the States. Kentucky was a slave state, and that terrible war came to the county where he was born and left its mark. He told the family story of his grandmother, Alice Florence, who was just five months old in 1865 when a Confederate guerilla came to the door of their house and called her father, a Union officer, outside, where he was shot and killed. The family line nearly broke that day, two weeks after the Civil War ended.

Equally compelling for me was the story he told of associates of the same Confederate guerilla. They found another relative of the Union persuasion, Lt. Rance Smith, near the Irwin Cemetery. They told Smith to run for his life and he did. He ran east along the road toward a fence and as he did the rebel sympathizers shot him down, killing him. Grandpa Smith told me that as a boy, he had put his finger in a bullet hole left in a fence post from that incident. He would not have lied about that.

When Grandpa Smith was a boy of perhaps 10, he was splitting firewood with a hatchet when he had a terrible accident. He cut a middle finger nearly completely off, leaving it attached only by a strip of skin perhaps ¼ inch wide. He showed me the scar that went nearly all the way around his finger. I traced it all the way from one side of the little strip of skin to the other. His mother knew what to do. She went to the tobacco patch and brought a leaf back to the house. She had young Fred lay his finger on the leaf holding the nearly severed tip in place. She poured sugar over the wound, then wrapped the tobacco leaf around it several times, then tied it up with string so the sugar would stay put. That finger grew back like new, and he retained feeling in it as though it had never been nearly severed. He would not have lied about that.


About 1901 he went to a county fair with his father. It was there he had his first taste of a new drink, Coca-Cola. He said it was a hot day, and the sensation of the cold, sweet, carbonated drink was delightful. He never forgot it. Late in the 1950s and early in the 1960s we would go to the big bottom-freezer Frigidaire refrigerator and take six-ounce bottles of Coca-Cola down from the door. Whether drunk straight from the bottle or poured into pink depression glass tumblers with ice, it was cold and refreshing on a hot Indiana summer day, just like it said in the ads. It was over a cold thick glass bottle that he took me back in time to a day just as hot when he tasted the first one. 

Grandpa Smith told me that in the year 1900 his father decided they would pull up stakes and move to a better life in Missouri. They sold the place and most everything they had in Clinton County, then drove mules and wagons to the new place near Kansas City in rich bottom land. It was a dry summer. Their crops failed, bringing a general disaster for their family. They lost nearly everything, and made the solemn return trip to Kentucky that fall. He didn’t tell how his family began again back home. Those details had not stuck in the memory of a boy of six.

When the Great War began in Europe, he was twenty years old. The war and the United States government decided he was needed, so it reached back into his quiet little Kentucky valley and ordered him to camp with the army that was building. When the United States entered the war he was 23, and when he stepped off the ship in France in 1918 he was 24.




Private Smith 1st Pioneer Infantry 1918

He told me about being on the south side of the Marne looking toward Chateau-Thierry in July as the Aisne-Marne Offensive began, and looking up in the sky to see the “cornstalk planes” rolling and cutting (farm and horse terms, of course) back and forth in aerial combat. They could see German troops moving on the opposite side of the valley. His was a pioneer unit, so they worked in logistics and engineering, just behind the front lines. He was injured slightly with poison gas, so his uniform bore a red slash on the sleeve. They loaded and unloaded materiel and they buried men and horses. They endured shellfire. His WWI Victory ribbon bears three campaign stars. When the Armistice came they marched as a unit to the Rhine and crossed over to begin occupation duties, their own Wacht am Rhein, this time against Germans.

Other things gradually began to make sense. He came to visit us often, but he never wanted to be gone from home for very long. He had been sent on a mission across the Atlantic when he was still a young man, a mission he had not sought and did not want to perform. But his country called him and he went. In his unit memoir there was talk of singing “My Old Kentucky Home” and other songs as they looked out at the gloomy Rhine. Until he was drafted into the army he had never been more than twenty miles away from his home, excepting that year in Missouri as a boy, and his family was close the entire time. He never mentioned it, but I have to think he was intensely homesick and occasionally frightened for his life, at least on the two transatlantic voyages with U-boats prowling about, and in the three campaigns as well. He was always much more comfortable at the home place.

Then there was the famous distaste for coffee. Army life had done that to him, too. Doughboys ate lots of bacon and bread and beans because those things could be transported or obtained locally. Local water was synonymous with sickness. Once boiled, it was safe, but Uncle Sam knew that every American preferred coffee over odious British tea, so there was plenty of coffee for everyone. It was boiled and black. When Grandpa Smith got home and could drink anything else, he made sure he never drank coffee again, with the exception of one memorable day in 1962 in a little Kentucky diner when I watched him reaffirm his hatred of the stuff. We still smile at that memory.



He was born before powered flight, but lived past the moon landings. He flew just one time, about 1973, and it was a white-knuckle flight all the way. It astonished us all that he even considered it, but he only did it once. He rode a Greyhound home, then stayed there.

Those who came before us can sometimes tell us what it was like for them when they were there, and in that way you can go back in their memory with them to another time.

He was there. He saw it. He told me what it was like so I could be there with him, though he’s gone now.

I can go back to Chateau-Thierry, or back to the Cook Spring, or to the little house in the valley, or to the site of the forge shop in New Castle, or the house in the hollow, or down to the Farm Bureau elevator. When I’m there, I can look up at the same sky and note how much things have changed. I can hold up the old photos and show people just how it was back then. I can be right where he was, and then I can be there with him. The man behind the counter would say something like, “Looks like you have a helper with you today.” I can still see Grandpa Smith smile and look down at me and say to the man behind the counter, “This is my grandson. The youngest one.”

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Dr. Bruce Smith -- Bio and Archives

Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II,  may be ordered from Indiana University Press.


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