When I was a kid we lived in a rental in town, and my dad had put a down payment on an old farmhouse to use for a medical office, then promptly died, without life insurance. We got evicted within a week of his death for rent owed, moved to the old farmhouse, and widow mom worked herself to the bone and paid it off eventually.
My older brother had a friend from high school who would come out to help my brother hunt rabbits (and groundhogs) to supplement our food, and after they were off to college, he would still come over even though my brother was farther away and seldom home. I was just a first-grader, but as ‘man of the house’ my brother’s friend thought I should be proficient in arms, so started me out with s 22, but quickly escalated to a Springfield 03, 1911, and all sorts of classics.
As a kid in that situation he served as both brother and father-figure, and when he’d show up on his motorcycle with some new gun I’d never seen before, I knew he’d teach me the history of it before letting me shoot it.
He eventually became a science teacher, but aside from that he had eight siblings and each one had bunches of kids and eventually grandkids, and my friend took them and their friends all out to launch model rockets, collect tadpoles, learn to set traps, build fires, learn the history of our nation and culture, and perhaps most importantly, to shoot guns.
With my own kids, he baptized them, and made a custom downsized ‘kid rifle’ they all learned to shoot with.
His funeral was yesterday, and there were probably a hundred individuals there who he had taught to shoot.
What a great legacy.
He will be missed, but lives on in all the many lives he affected.
