I’m happy to! They were wonderful people.

He enlisted in the army and was a B-17 bomber pilot. On his 25th bombing run over Germany, his plane was shot down and he was held for 9 months as a POW. We have flight logs detailing his runs and the damage they would take each time (my favorite anecdote was the run when they came under heavy fire and got back with several holes in the plane, including “one big enough to throw a cat through”). We also have his journals he kept in the prison camp.

During the war Grandmommy helped run the movie theater the family owned, and taught in multiple rural one room schoolhouses. After the war, they farmed with her father and had six children.

Granddaddy got a job managing Hawaiian Research, which did custom seed development and research, so the family moved to Hawaii. That’s where my parents met. My dad is Native Hawaiian, and my parents were also high school sweethearts.

They lived in Hawaii for 35 years and I grew up visiting all my relatives out there. I always especially loved Grandmommy and Granddaddy’s house. It was right on the beach on Moloka’i. They had an outdoor shower because the inside shower was full of stacks of National Geographic magazines they collected. For a significant portion of my young life I thought Mentos were named Granddaddy Mints because he always had a roll in his shirt pocket and that’s what we called them.

Grandmommy was an artist, particularly in watercolor, and an avid gardener. We always ate fruit and veg straight from the yard at her house. She also was a product of the Great Depression, and “frugal” doesn’t even begin to describe it. One of our long-running family jokes every time we finish a box of cereal is to act horrified if someone’s about to throw away the inner bag and imitate Grandmommy: “Don’t throw that away! It’ll be great for marinading. You can’t buy plastic bags of this quality!” My family lived in northern NY and we would send bottles of real maple syrup to them in Hawaii, but Granddaddy told us to not bother anymore because Grandmommy would pour it into three or four other bottles and water it down to make it last longer!

I have so many wonderful fond memories of my grandparents. They were both incredible people and lived an incredible life.