did your grandfather everspeak of his time as a Seabee?
may i ask... why would you pick the plane and name? give it some meaning as to your why...
He did, in a general way. I was pretty young, so I think I was given the G rated version of things.
When my Grandmother passed a few years ago, my father let me go through several cedar chests that were in my grandparents basements. They arefull of highly organized photo albums. My grandmother always had a camera in her hands when I was a child. Apparently, she devolped the habit very young. She was also a very early scrap booker. There are albums that have photos of my grandfather at the train station leaving on his way to Pearl Harbor. There are pay stubs. Even a pack of Camel cigarettes that he had bought at the base exchange (or whatever they were called in 1942) in Hawaii and sent home. The cigarettes have always been a bit of a mystery in the family since we discovered them, since neither of my grandparents ever smoked cigarettes that we know of... In fact, my grandmother was diagnosed with TB during the war and was isolated for just over a year at one point. Dad still remembers the lady who he had been sent to live with taking him and my aunt and uncle to the sanitarium (what they called the TB ward) to visit on Sundays. They would stand in the yard and my grandmother would come to a second floor window to talk with them for awhile. Both of my grandparents had a slightly wicked sense of humor. We think that the pack of cigarettes may have been a joke between them while GG (what we called her when I was young) was in the TB ward. Eventually, my grandfather was granted a hardship discharge and allowed to come home to care for his three kids and sick wife.
The two of them were almost never apart after that. My grandmother's hair went white at a fairly young age, perhaps a result of her health issues. My grandfather drove her to the hair dresser every week and dutifully waited while she had her hair colored. When I was a kid I once asked him if that was boring, he told me he liked watching her get beautiful. They celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary shortly before my grandfather passed. My grandmother passed a few years later, both lived well into their 90s...
I try to treat my wife like my grandfather treated my grandmother. I hope to have the marriage they had.
I'll save it for another time, but they both enjoyed telling the story of how they first met.
