Grandpop's 100th Birthday

Depending on whom you talk to, today, June 28, 2009, would be my grandfather's 100th birthday, were he still living. My mother would emphatically tell you that James Wood, my namesake, was never my grandfather. She learned in her late sixties that she was the illegitimate offspring of my grandmother and some mystery man she tried to track down through genealogy for the rest of her life. In fact my grandmother may have never been married to anyone, a secret she thought had gone to the grave with her. We learned this too late, as there were no people from that generation left to talk to, and Grandpop had advanced Alzheimer's and didn't even know who he was by then.

I don't care what all the facts may be. I claim Jimmy Wood as my grandfather. He was the only one I ever knew. I have only one memory of my grandfather Baker. That may never have even happened. We were at his house, so it had to have been in 1964 on our way from New Jersey to San Antonio. We had been living in England for four years, and re-entered the country at either Fort Dix or McGuire AFB in New Jersey. Grandmom and Grandpop Wood met us at the airstrip. I remember very little about our stay with them. On the way to our new home at Lackland, we stopped in Toledo, Ohio. I don't remember anything about that stop except my grandfather standing at the foot of the stairs showing Patti and me a bible that had belonged to our grandmother, Eula Mae Baker. Mom told me once that it may have happened, but she did not remember it. Anyway, he passed away when I was eight or nine, so I know that I never saw him again after that one visit.

My Grandpop Wood was a wonderful man. Whether or not he ever married Grandmom legally, and, even though he was not my mother's birth father, he stayed around for her entire life. There was never anything about either of my grandparents that would ever have suggested that there was scandal lurking below the surface. Anyone who knew about it respected them enough to keep their secrets. To all appearances, they were a solid, moral, hardworking couple who struggled to raise two daughters during the depression.

Grandpop was the first of his family to be born in America. His parents and older brother, George Jr., had come from England not long before his birth and settled in Nanty-Glo, Pennsylvania where my great-grandfather worked in the coal mines. My great-grandmother died when Grandpop was ten years old. His father, having nobody to look after him, was forced to take him into the mine with him, where he worked for four years alongside his father and older brother.

When Grandpop was fourteen-years-old, family living in what was then called Woodtown, New Jersey, invited them to move there and escape the unhealthy mining life. Woodtown was a small part of what is now called Somers Point where about twenty members of the Wood family lived in a cluster of five or six houses. Grandpop worked with his father and brother to build a tiny little four room house. It was so tiny, that when my Great-Great Aunt Violet complained that it was putting her flowers in too much shade, the three of them picked it up and carried it twenty feet away. There it still sits to this day as shown in the photo below.

Grandpop worked doing odd jobs and learned many different skills. He was a ship builder, brick layer, and carpenter among other things. When he met my grandmother, he was running a ride on the Ocean City Boardwalk. She had come down from Philadelphia for a day at the seashore with her best friend, Henrietta Borraci and her family.

Grandmom and Grandpop became a couple and moved to Camden, New Jersey so my Grandfather could work at the ship yards building ships for the US Navy. I have been told, but could not in any way prove it, that my grandmother had a job singing in a saloon during this time. When Mom was five-years-old, the young family moved back to Somers Point, but did not live in the Woodtown area. This would have been in 1937, and times were hard. Mom told me that wherever they were living, they packed up their stuff and snuck back to Woodtown during the night because they couldn't pay the rent.

Sometime after that, probably in the mid-forties, Grandpop and his brother George built a small shed across the road from Aunt Violet's house and started hand mixing and pouring cinder blocks, which were being used in the area to build the basement foundations of homes. Their little shed eventually grew into the Shore Block Company, which Grandpop owned until he retired and sold the business.

In the early sixties, my grandmother needed something to do, so Grandpop built her a twelve room motel on New Road. She called it the Sea Lure and had it painted a very loud pink. They ran a small cafe in the office at first, but my grandmother developed a heart problem, and they shut that operation down. At around that time, they moved into a room above the office area, and my mother's younger sister and her husband moved into the little house by the block company. They lived there for quite a while, but later moved to another home on shore road. The house must have been rented out or something, because it still belonged to my grandparents, and they moved back into it in 1981 when they retired and sold the motel. When their health deteriorated and caused them to move in with family, I think my cousin Wendy moved in.

Anyway, it strikes me funny that I am fifty and on the day I was born, my grandfather was about six months shy of being fifty himself. I know that I am old enough to be a grandfather. Heck, I could actually be a great-grandfather, if I had followed the fifteen year plan that one of my students in Waeldar was following. Her grandmother had her mother at fifteen. Her mother had her at fifteen. And, she was fifteen when she had her first child making her grandmother a forty-five-year-old great-grandmother. So, yes, I could be a grandfather, but I think of myself as being so much younger than my grandfather would have been at this age.

My first memory of Grandpop was in 1964 the night he and Grandmom picked us up at the airstrip. We were hungry after such a long flight, so they took us to the flight line cafe. I remember being given cantaloupe for the first time that night. But, sadly, that is all I remember of that brief visit to New Jersey. I know that they came to visit us once during the two years we lived in San Antonio, but the only memory I have of their visit is one meal that we had at a Chinese restaurant and the gifts they gave us when they returned from a day in Mexico.

It was during the Viet Nam war that I really got to know my grandparents. When my dad got shipped over there, we went to live with them at the motel. My mother, sister, and I shared room twelve for the first year that we were there. During that year, Grandpop was building a new apartment for  Grandmom and him, so that she would not have to climb the stairs so much. I probably was not much help, but I did hang out at the construction site and did whatever I could. I remember holding some T-shaped thing that held the sheet rock for the ceiling in place while Grandpop and my Uncle Paul, Mom's sister's husband, nailed it in place.

When the apartment was finished, Mom, Patti, and I moved into my grandparent's suite above the office. They called it room 14 after we left, and rented it as an efficiency apartment. They had this cute little mini kitchen set up in there. We thought we lived in a palace after staying in a small room with two double beds taking up all the space for a year. The suite even had a bath tub!

I already said that Grandpop was a good guy. He was a pretty good substitute for my dad, too. He even went with me to the Cub Scouts. It was him, not Dad who helped me build my first pinewood derby. He also took me in his truck whenever he had to go somewhere for business. The only problem with that was that he would always buy something for me. Then Mom would get mad at me and accuse me of asking for things. Patti and I learned not to look at anything when we were with either grandparent, because they would always buy it for us. I remember standing in a restaurant parking lot once in my twenties saying, "I hope you see me looking at that Mustang, Grandmom!" Of course, it was just a joke.

I have so many rich memories of Grandpop that there is no way to even begin to mention them here. I guess that's because we really made the most of the limited time we had with our grandparents. They would visit us every once in awhile, or we would go to New Jersey for a visit, but, being military brats, Patti and I didn't grow up with a hometown experience. We only had those two years during the war to actually live with our grandparents. Because of that, any time spent with them was savored. How could I not remember the time Grandpop got the two of us stuck in the middle of the bay at low tide, the time he took me to Smitty's dock to watch him and Smitty work on his old Evinrude boat motor, the time he took me to Philadelphia on a building supply run, the time he kicked my butt with every step I took after I kicked a hole in a neighbor's screen door, or all the times we used to walk out back and get those awesome hoagies at Joe's? Yes, there are so many rich memories that I could write a book.

I wish my mom had not died upset with her parents for not telling her the truth about her personal history. I wish she could have just let it go like I did. I'll be honest with you. It used to upset me when Mom referred to Grandpop as "the man I thought was my father" or "my mother's husband". I knew my mother well enough to know that, even though she was hurting over all the secrets, she died knowing that Jimmy Wood was a good man. She died knowing that he treated Grandmom, my Aunt Shirley, both of his sons-in-law, all four of his grandchildren, and her wonderfully. I know that she loved him as much as Patti and I did. And, I know she would not have let this day go by without somehow honoring his memory on what would have been his 100th birthday.