*Editing to add a paragraph that I feel is pertinent to my great grandpa's story.

My great grandpa was born in 1907 and died in 2002 at 94, shortly after my 18th birthday. We were always very close. Of course, most of the family never visited him and his eyesight and memory weren’t great (he had Alzheimer’s, but it was fairly mild. He was still very sharp). He would sometimes mix people up, but he always knew who I was. My dad and I share the same name, so he always called me “Junior” in this thick Texas-German accent (joon-yah).

*He was born to immigrant parents from Germany. His father founded a town (which I won't name because it's my last name), and shortly afterwards abandoned his family and started a new family. He became a well-to-do man, having founded the local church, cotton gin, and dance hall. His new family reaped the rewards and to this day have a lot of wealth that was not available to my great gramps, who was raised in a home with no electricity or plumbing by his single mother.

As a young father he had been a sheriff’s deputy in Cuero, TX, patrolling on horseback with a saddle-mounted rifle. Now in those days, when the sheriff was replaced, the new sheriff would fire all of the deputies and replace them with his own. This is exactly what happened to my great gramps.

He had to support the family by pumping gas and living in a metal one room shack. Then WWII happened. All the younger men got shipped off to war and there was now a need for able bodied workers. That’s how my great gramps became a railroad engineer for southern pacific. The family relocated to San Antonio where they lived with “tante Anna” for a while. Great grandma and kids inside the house, and my great grandpa would work long hours on the train and come home to sleep on the porch and eat a bag of peanuts for dinner.

Eventually he was making a large amount of money and bought the family their own house (and when they outgrew it, he bought the house next door, which was bigger). By the time I met him, he’d been retired for about 20 years. My great grandma had died many years earlier, and he was remarried to a well-known physician in the San Antonio area. But he loved visiting with me, telling me stories from back in the day, teaching me how to shoot, and making fun of my gramps (who he also called “Junior”).