Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

A grandson becomes a grandfather and wonders

Lately, I have been thinking that if we are the sum of our ancestors, as we are supposed to be, I wonder what my grandfathers have contributed to my psyche.

I suppose that may be because, like them, I'm now a grandfather and becoming the same thing to my grandchildren.

My grandfathers were as unalike as it is possible to be, a fact which may make for a certain set of conflicts in my own personality. And yet, in some ways, they were a lot alike.

All Grandpa Heintze's working life was as a station agent for the Pennsylvania Railroad, a job for which there is almost no comparable occupation these days. In his retirement he came to California to sort of farm 20 acres near Sacramento. I say "sort of" because I don't know how he was as a station agent, but as a farmer he was barely passable.

Grandpa Chapman, my maternal grandfather, was born in New England, came to California over the Isthmus of Panama in the 1860s and, after a brief stint as a cub reporter and printer's devil in San Francisco, spent all his working life as a grocer in Napa. He was a pretty good grocer, I guess. At least he managed to acquire and retire with three rental houses.

But it was my grandfathers' personalities that I remember as being very different.

Grandpa Chapman was a big, silent man when I knew him--in his 70s and 80s--mostly because his wife did most of the talking.

He was one of the last members of the Prohibition Party in Napa; never swore (at least aloud), drank or smoked; was good at mending small things, but never really mastered big things like his Model T Ford (others, for safety's sake, always drove the car); prayed on his knees every night and was the model of consistency, habit and thrift, a true son of New England.

Grandpa Heintze, on the other hand, was born in Philadelphia, used to brag that he smoked five pounds of tobacco a month and chewed another pound, saucered his coffee and blew on it, believed you could learn almost anything from a railway schedule (of which he had many) and bellowed when he talked, mostly because Grandma Heintze did not talk much, but also because he was deaf. I assume he wanted to be sure everyone could hear what he had to say.

I don't remember his drinking habits, although he probably drank beer after Prohibition was repealed. But unlike Grandpa Chapman, he hated authority. He never learned to drive a car, which probably was fortunate, and lived in a house without electricity, hot water, refrigeration or a flush toilet and never seemed to require it.

His one avocation was to raise German shepherd dogs, all of whom seemed to live in terror of his voice. After he raised them, he sold them. If he ever prayed, I never heard him, but if he did he probably told God what to do, rather than the other way around.

Both these men were married for life, lived into their 80s and, I suppose, represent the descendants of the yeomanry of the 19th century that made America what it became in the 20th century.

And I also remember that both had facial hair. Grandpa Heintze wore a drooping handlebar mustache that gave him the look of a dejected basset hound. Grandpa Chapman acquired a gray mustache and beard that gave him the appearance of a banker or judge. Neither ever grew bald--a somewhat comforting thought if baldness is related to genetics--and both died of the accumulation of the ills of old age, another characteristic of some cheer to an aging grandson.

Both were rugged individualists, living their lives pretty much the way they wanted. Neither was ever prominent in civic affairs, nor did either one, so far as I have been able to learn, ever try to write. So much for that aspect of genetics.

So what, I wonder, did they leave me?

Well, I don't swear much (at least aloud); I haven't a mustache or a beard; I neither smoke nor chew, though I will admit to an occasional beer. I do drive a car, but don't like to much, and I like to think I'm an individual, although not necessarily rugged.

But I also like to think I inherited something else from both of them, something that's hard to define. It's the remembrance that they were determined to be what they became; the knowledge that freedom to choose and to speak was important; that loyalty to wife, country, family and community was necessary.

Maybe that's legacy enough for anyone. Anyway, that's certainly part of mine.

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