"What have you done for the cause today?"
That was a question asked by my late grandfather, Thomas Caswell Schumacher II, of his first grade son---Tom, III---back in the mid sixties. This was the Hubert Humphrey-boosting, Kennedy-voting, young father of three that is spoken about in gentle tones, albeit rarely.
Obviously this is not the man I knew, and the idea that the man I knew only as Grandpa Tom was a Democrat is any sense at any time is, eh, anachronistic.
This father of two girls and a boy is the same guy who grew up in the Los Angeles area, and who once took his son out on a dirt-bike ride, only to get sideswiped by a drunk driver, landing both he and his boy in the hospital. According to my uncle: to my grandfather the dirt-bike ride sounded like a good time, and he never thought anything bad would happen.
That optimism was reshaped as the years went by.
As a young man, fresh out of high school, my Grandpa was handsome and fresh-faced, jumping at the chance to enlist in the military and join the war effort:
He hit boot-camp within a fortnight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and spent his wartime service in San Diego.
He met my grandmother, Mary, at College of the Pacific in Stockton, now known as University of the Pacific. They had their three kids---my mom, auntie, and uncle---but eventually they divorced. Grandpa Tom soon made his relationship with his new dame Lorraine official, and I've only known her as Grandma Lorraine.
The first time I met him may have looked like this---me with both of my grandfathers:
My paternal grandfather served as a meteorologist in Cairo during the War, and then returned home to start a huge brood in upstate New York and work in the airline industry, devising the logistics of commercial air-flight travel.
Grandpa Tom worked as the boss of the CTA, the California Trucking Association. The group formed, I heard later, as a way to help keep trucking companies in business after deregulation. Many people credit him with helping keep California's heartbeat of commerce flowing up and down the state's interior in the rough and scary years after dereg.
Many people remember him fondly, remember him as a titan of industry, remember him as a political junkie and lover of conversation, or maybe even as a bully.
This is how I remember him, at the house in Cameron Park, playing with my brother:
Or taking us on our first fishing trip:
Now, the figure of "Grandpa Tom" loomed far larger in my childhood than the hulking man himself, which is nearly hard to believe. The 6'5" man was the biggest person I ever knew up close, and one of the first names my young brain ascribed to someone was "Big Man"---what I called Grandpa Tom.
I actually remember the point where I stopped using Big Man and started using "Grandpa Tom." (I had three names that I remember all changing around the same time: Big Ma became Grandma (my maternal grandmother), Big Man became Grandpa Tom, and Big Man-Ma became Grandma Lorraine.)
But the figure---the character---loomed like a volcano over the family. Generous and gregarious with his employees, his family felt the slight that comes with the absence of that same compassion. For reasons best left explained by psychoanalysis, the fallout caused by the divorce and his political shift from "the Cause" to the right to the far-right augured and strengthened the estrangement that lead to the stories I grew up with.
Stories my cousins and I almost never encountered in our lives.
In the last few years Corrie and I would visit, and besides the occasional political baiting (which I never took), Grandpa Tom was nothing but happy and loving. Maybe the end was closer in his field of vision, but still.
When I was fucking up at college, he drove down from Cameron Park to lecture me on decision making. I knew he never approved of my long hair or recreational habits, but I did get the sense he respected my intellect and curiosity.
I often joke that both myself and my cousin were being groomed for politics, and the beef with Grandpa Tom was because I was jeopardizing my position in that. Having been paying attention to politics for as long as I have, I'm confident nothing has been jeopardized.
And I feel that my inclination towards public service in the political sphere, whether seriously or as a larf, could never have been possible without having the figure of Grandpa Tom---a career lobbyist---in my life.
And I feel that if that's the direction towards which either my cousin or I gravitate in the future, my late grandfather would be pleased as punch.
Definitions of Family
During Grandpa Tom's memorial dinner after the service there were conversations concerning Grandma Lorraine. She is not out biological grandmother, but the loss of her husband for forty years doesn't negate her connection to our family.
She was never anything but wonderful to me, at least to my face, always treating me as a grandson. There are things we don't agree on politically, but I'm under forty and she's over ninety, and that's to be assumed.
But I was happy to have her meet and hold Cassius, and happy to have this picture my mother took: Cass and his Great-grandma Lorraine.
Mr grandfather passed away over this summer. He was the middle of three kids and outlived both his siblings. His nephew had a son and named him Tom---technically Tom IV. At that memorial dinner, T3 and T4 (as they called each other) were having a grand time.
T4 is the young man in the white-striped front and center in the picture below. Grandpa Tom's only biological great-grandson, Cassius, peeks out from behind T4's shoulder:
What have I done for the cause today?
I'm doing my best to steer the lives of hundreds of young people everyday, to model the necessary respectful attitudes towards women our society needs moving forward, and to spread the knowledge of systemic oppression existent in the world today. It is a difficult and necessary job, and it's one aspect of my adventure.
I live on the front edge of that cause, and can say that I have a constructive answer to that question. I'm doing my best to do the best, and it makes me happy. I think that's all my Grandpa Tom would have wanted.
