Granddaddy Owl - Grandfather
The other day at work I was talking about Granddaddy Al. Granddaddy Al was my mother's husband (so not a Resau). My mom, always a stickler for who and how we were always related to anymore once said...Al is the best grandfather a girl could ever have. It's true. I still remember the twinkle in his eye when he would could Becky, Linda and Linda, Becky. and of course he did it with Chip and Lester...and we would always fall for it. Al was a cook I guess in the army and nothing he liked better (and of course Grandmother Lenz would have never complained either) when all seven of us would pile into a car on Sunday and come over to the Rockville house for dinner. Big kettles would be on the stove, the biggest turkey, or the biggest ham...whatever Al felt like fixing...and of course there would be all the side dishes. Then after dinner he'd wrangle Becky and me into showing him how we knew how to do dishes.."you girls don't know how to do dishes do you? do you know where a man could get some help?" and of course while at home we'd almost kill each other doing dishes...al had us scrubbing pots and laughing the whole time. Then there was ice cream. My favorite memory of Al is when he sent me down for ice cream. They had this big chest freezer in the basement and I opened it and looked for vanilla ice cream. I could see these other blocks of ice cream...but no vanilla. So i came upstairs and said there was no ice cream. Al just started to laugh. So i explained to him that we always had just vanilla ice cream (my dad likes things simple) and Al asked me if i had ever had strawberry or chocolate ice cream and i said no. So we went down to the basement and he brought up probably 10 cartons of ice cream, got a big bowl and put a scoop of each flavor in the bowl. I liked strawberry best. Every year there after, my birthday....my own carton of strawberry ice cream! Later in life mom showed me a thank you note he had saved that I had written him. Dear Granddaddy Owl.....explains it all doesn't it.
This picture shows all of me, Becky, brother's Lester and Chip on the living room floor of our Hanover house. That's Granddaddy Al holding Mike McGee...hard to tell which of us kids is having more fun eh?