December 8, 2024

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com‘

My grandfather would be 125 today, almost twice the age of his passing so long ago. In his lifetime, Arthur Sr. was hard-working, a family man who kept home and hearth together through two world wars and the Great Depression. He was ordinary, and in that extraordinary.

A product of his time, including the Progressive Era when the nation was just beginning to address social, economic and political concerns, he held to optimism, believing that his family was, yes, “progressing” from his Prussian grandfather’s immigration.

Yet the foundation shaking of the Depression, after a world war that pulled America into global politics and which killed a best friend, tempered his outlook. In a way, he – and so many other Americans – were always looking over their shoulders to see if the train was coming.

Arthur Sr. was fortunate in always having a job – he was foreman of the Briarcraft Smoking Pipe Co. in Spring Valley, N.Y. – and was able to rent and then purchase a nice house because his neighbors the Haeras were as decent and community minded as he was. He became middle class.

During the Second World War, with his first son Winfield wounded in battle in the same land as his forebears, Arthur Sr. was an air raid warden and volunteered in scrap drives. He was a participating citizen in a democratic republic that his son was helping defend.

His own life was relatively short, passing at almost 67 because of leukemia, probably the industrial type, from the fine briar dust in the factory.

Arthur Sr. was good to his two sons and wife, then his five grandchildren, to his community, to his job, to his nation. And they were good to him. Not a remarkable story because it is shared by many, at least those fortunate enough in circumstance.

Yet, as my grandfather would say, it was American optimism despite difficulty that gave him an ordinary life. Which makes it extraordinary in a troubled world of dictatorship and oligarchy.

On his birthday, my wish is that optimism and progress for all, now seemingly threatened in our nation, does not wither away from human decency.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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