Tuesday, July 29, 2014
The word that comes to mind when I think of Pop is Generous. When we were little, Pop took us water skiing and fishing often and drove our family of seven to Florida most summers in the tan station wagon (no seatbelts) with Cathy and I in the far back surrounded by luggage. Around age 13, he gave the three of us kids still living at home, three matching electric mini-bikes and created a fantastic path through the woods for us to race around. As soon as we were 15 and 8 months, we each had full time access to a used car with a big engine that Cathy and I used to fearlessly race each other on Route 7 and the beltway. Later on, when I would stop in to visit Pop on a college break, he would take me down into the basement where there were rows of stocked shelves (when the Price Club, now Costco, was a new thing) and encourage me to take as many groceries as I wanted back to college with me.
Pop was a self-educated man who diligently read the newspaper every day, read the National Geographic magazine subscription we received for years, and always tried to coax us kids into watching documentaries with him. He always stressed the importance of a good education throughout our impressionable years saying hundreds of times, "they can never take it away from you." As incentive, he promised he would buy any or all of us a new car if we graduated from college. He also paid for college, which made life very easy for me.
Pop said one line to us kids more than any other, "You know what my ol' Pappy always said…" and would follow it with MANY wise words of wisdom that any of us five kids can repeat today. Funny thing, I chose to repeat Pop's exact words to my kids throughout their entire lives because they are precisely what they need to hear at a particular moment, or they just make us all laugh because they knew I too heard these very words growing up:
· If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right
· I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream
· If you snooze, you loose
· Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
· Big head, little in it; little head, nothing in it
· It's just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one
· You don't get something for nothing
· You can't make a whistle out of a pig's tail
· Look at me when I'm talking to you
· Don't do as I do, do as I say do
· A fool and his money soon part
· Everything you're thinking about doing, I've already done
· If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself
· You can't win at somebody else's game
· Don't count your chickens before they hatch
I admired Pop over the years when he paid for a friend's leg prosthesis, when he ordered his monogrammed Crane Service Co caps and merchandise through a gentleman because he was handicapped, and when he ALWAYS paid for EVERYONE's meals at restaurants throughout my entire life. Pop's generosity has been felt by so many people and I know he is deeply missed by all of us.
