I’m lucky that my grandpa survived World War II, the first reason being I obviously wouldn’t exist.
He’s been gone since 2001, but I was explaining to my kids this weekend that grandpa was the closest thing I had to a father. I learned a lot from him, but undoubtedly the biggest things he passed on to me were a love of fixing things and a love of computers and videogames (he also had a volcanic temper, but I’ve endeavored not to pass that on to my family).
I was born in 1982, and my uncle’s leftover Atari provided my first gaming experiences. After the videogame crash, by 1985, new games could be found cheaply since the videogame fad was “over”, so when my mom and I played Mario Bros. (not Super Mario Bros. — the very original 2-player arcade machine) we could pick up the Atari 2600 port brand-new for cheap.
My grandpa was a lifer at IBM, so being on the cutting edge of computers meant that we had to have one, so by 1986 he brought home a new Commodore 64. He was an ace in World War II, so the jump in graphics meant that for the first time a plane could be depicted on-screen by more than like 4 pixels each the size of duplo legos.
I think this is one of the 364th Squadron reunions we went to down at the Dayton Air Force Museum. My mom always said that “Shorty” (as he was known to them) was a totally different person when he was around his war buddie.
That flight sim, Ace of Aces, was too intimidating for me at that age, but I played a bunch of Commodore 64 games, and could even beat a couple!
Then all of a sudden, by 1987, Nintendo was everywhere. I don’t remember a single Nintendo commercial, but every store that sold toys had a playable kiosk of games. Kids were all talking about it.
It’s hard to describe what it was like to see Super Mario Bros. for the first time in the ’80s. But basically most games took place on static screens — like the screen didn’t scroll, meaning when the character got to right edge of the screen, a new screen loaded and your character appeared on the left side of the screen, as if he’d walked into a new room.
Also, you almost never could control a character’s jump. Like if you had Pitfall Harry jump, you better have really planed out the timing of the swinging vine and your distance away from it, because a croc was happy to eat you for the zillionth time when you timed it wrong, since you couldn’t change the height or length of his jump, and you couldn’t change direction in midair.
When you saw Mario in action, and it was like if you’d seen middle-aged white guys play basketball at the Y your whole life, and all of a sudden prime Lebron James came in one day and showed everyone what you could really do with a basketball.
Grandpa, a die-hard Republican, took me to see Al Gore speak in 1994 or ’95 at our local Civic Center. (He refused every sticker and button they wanted to put on his jacket.)
For a year, I really wanted a Nintendo, but “the Atari and Commodore are enough”, said my mom. As all grandparents seem wont to do (and now my mom is a grandma herself and I have the displeasure of experiencing this too), my grandpa decided on Valentine’s Day that I needed “an early Easter present” of a Nintendo Entertainment System Action Set. (I got issue 1 of Gamepro for free at Toys R Us, to boot.)
I still remember how this Easter basket (which my mom hid in the dishwasher) had Super Mario Bros. 2 and The Legend of Zelda in 1989.
I didn’t actually play many games with Grandpa, although we’d sit together to work on adventure games like King’s Quest sometimes when we got an IBM PC two years later. And he played some videogames himself, but he mostly seemed to enjoy setting up the hardware and software of electronics (he was a repair tech and manager at IBM after all, and would have made a great engineer if my great-grandma had let him go to school on the GI Bill after the war). And he really connected with me in a way he didn’t my mom’s three brothers, my uncles — his own kids. I don’t know if I was really different than they were, or his temper had just mellowed a bit. He died when I was in college and I just never asked him those kind of questions. I wish I had.
But he loved seeing me enjoy videogames. I think at some point he did realize he’d created a monster when I did spend too much time at the screen at the expense of going on outings he invited me on like to Browns training camp and stuff, but I did also love playing lawn sports and board games with him as well as when we did as an entire family.
Grandpa got pancreatic cancer when I was in high school, and he didn’t really even slow down until the last year of his life. When he died my freshman year in college, I was happy he didn’t have to suffer anymore or compromise his lifestyle, so I really wasn’t that sad about it.
The more time has gone on though the more I miss him. His siblings each lived into their mid 90s, and grandpa was only 78. He could have seen me get married, run one of the biggest videogame events in the world, start my own videogame-entertainment events business, and maybe even see his great-grandchildren be born.
I don’t want him to be forgotten by my family and my kids, so I talk about my great-grandparents often. My mom framed his World War II medals and we have lots of paintings of his plane, the P-51 Mustang — even a custom one we commissioned of his planes actual serial numbers.
I tell our kids about the stuff Grandpa taught me and got me interested in, and while I otherwise don’t make war so black and white, I could not be more grateful and proud of grandpa to have fought, lived, and succeeded in World War II, one of the darkest times in human history.
Versing Josie in family history!
We were close. He told me a bunch of stories he never talked to anyone else about in our whole family. And when my wife and I visited Grandpa’s airfield in England in 2016, where there’s still a small museum and pub among the unkept grass, neglected structures and cracked concrete of a 1940s airfield, I could relay those stories to the curator and even fill in some blanks about what happened to some of his comrades.
Grandpa in his P-51 Mustang
Even though Memorial Day is a post-World War I holiday to remember those lost in combat, on Memorial Day I think of Grandpa, who was taken prematurely by a different enemy. With ADHD, I don’t think about the past a lot, but a lot of his habits and interested live on through me, some consciously and some less so.
“Now, you’re doing this the hard way!” is one of my favorites, which I use on the kids when they’re metaphorically banging their heads against a way, trying to force something to work in way that won’t yield good results.
Growing up in the Depression, Grandpa saved and repaired everything, from my Transformers’ and Ghostbusters’ plastic limbs to broken tube TVs he got from the side of the road. While I don’t have my Grandpa’s repair skills, I annoy my wife by running everything into the ground and holding it together with Gorilla tape.
Grandpa helped me with everything from Transformers decal application to Nintendo-cartridge cleaning (and I still do it the way he taught me).
And like every good, poor, Eastern-European Catholic, grandpa swore a lot, so “Jesus Christ” is a phrase that my kids hear too much outside of church and religious storybooks.
I wish my kids could have known my grandpa, but I make sure that the good parts of him (mostly) live on through me. Grandpa was always there for me and my mom and her brothers. She says that he might have yelled at you about it and told you you were a dumbass, but he’d show up and fix the problem.
He wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted a math lesson from him. And it was a hard childhood for my mom and my uncles. My mom says she’d give them a C- as parents. But, she says, they always got a vacation, and she always felt loved, even if she cried herself to sleep sometimes because of how fiercely my grandpa and grandma argued all night.
ADHD can be tied to a quick temper, and ADHD is genetic — whatever he had going on in his head, I think it was made worse by the fact that his whole life, he couldn’t really do what he wanted to. Probably the best and freest he ever felt was during the war, being a pilot, doing something highly skilled he was very good at, for a great purpose, with extremely close friends.
After the war, he could have stayed in the military, or bought his plane for the cost of like 10 loves of bread, or gone to engineering school for free. All I know is that “great-grandma wouldn’t let him” do any of those things, and he came home and worked to bring the family money like right then.
That would probably be enough to piss off anyone.
“Swamp Fox, the plane of my grandpa’s wingman, is still flying today at airshows, and the pilot far outlived my grandpa.
Sometimes I feel an extraordinary pressure to realize the dreams of my grandpa and actually my mom as well. And I feel like I have all the tools and resources but not the direction, focus and/or purpose to know what I’m supposed to be doing.
Like I noted already, grandpa seemed to love seeing me enjoy videogames. That first year I got the Nintendo, for actual Easter they got me Super Mario Bros. 2 and The Legend of Zelda (yes, I’m an only child), and grandpa would take the Nintendo when we went on trips and hook it up to the hotel TVs, all so I could play for probably like 15 minutes while someone was taking a shower.
When we travel I make sure our kids have the goofy stuffies and little bits of entertainment that can fill in the blanks, because my family did that for me.
Grandpa’s plane was C5-B; this is a famous Ace’s plane from his squadron.
There’s a lot I struggle with. And I worry I haven’t done enough to be worthy of the praise, love and support I’ve always gotten from my family. But I strive to live up to the core tenets I learned mostly from my grandpa and my mom about being there for your family, and even finding small, little ways you can make them happy or introduce them to new things.
And I’ve seen for myself and others as I’ve grown up that you never know when some small show of support will do some someone’s self-esteem and life direction. I’m 100% sure grandpa didn’t know that by taking me to the arcade in school off days to play Mortal Kombat that I’d have positive interactions I didn’t get in school that I’d remember the rest of my life. Or that by letting me play those games, someday I’d be like one of the main people in the entire world in that community and it would spark creating my own weird business out of it.
It must have made me really happy on some level to see me enjoy these games so much. So I’ve always felt a bit that by staying true to games and to making positive contributions to the hobby and the industry, I’m doing right by something he found value in and thought was good for me. Videogames were not respected in the ’80 in the West. So I guess he felt before almost anyone else what good things can come from computers and videogames.
I wish could ask him how he knew and why he encouraged me with this stuff. But I can’t now. Just like with most of his war stories — outside of what little I remember and what remains in that little museum in Leiston, England — they’re just gone, like “tears in rain” (a quote I love in Blade Runner).
The older I got, the more I realize how lucky I was to have Grandpa, and I hope I’m doing some things that would have made him happy, as a businessman and a family man. Memorial Day is a day about sacrifice, and as incredibly hard as being a wartime pilot must have been, I think my grandpa sacrificed much more after the War than during.
Those sacrifices he made over his pre-Chris lifetime somehow became gifts he could bestow on me. I think it’s our greatest hope that when we die, we’ll have had a positive impact on others that will be felt maybe even long after we’ve long gone.
Even if I don’t explicitly think about him everyday, I carry the gifts of his love and legacy with me every day of my life. So even when I’m having trouble — stuck on a problem or just stuck in life — I hope Grandpa is looking down on me proud, even if he’s saying “Jesus Christ, Chris, you’re doing this the hard way!”