Eulogy to My Granddad: Robert Waldroup 9/7/16 – 2/8/11
Written by his Grandson: Dale Walls
I’ve thought a lot about my Granddad the last few days and the way he lived his life. I read one time that a man becomes what he thinks. Good character does not come by chance but continued effort in right thinking. My Granddad did just that.
My grandfather was from a generation of which most are gone now. They were a tough breed. I always heard the stories of walking miles to school barefoot, working in the fields from sun up to sun down, seeing the chickens under the house through the slats in the floors. I kind of took them for granted but now I know that that hard life made him and many others into men and women like we will never see again. These are the men and women that built our country, worked day & night and sacrificed so there kids could have a better life. I ask myself do we deserve it and my answer is probably not, but we have an easier life than them because of their hard work, unspoken love, many sacrifices, and sense of values. Wouldn’t it be great if that was a requirement to run for office in our country? It is sort of ironic that the hardships they wanted us not to have to endure because they loved us, is the thing that I think made them into the strong men and women that are all but disappearing now. They had no choice about the hard life they had to live. We should be the lucky ones, right? But are we? Granddad continued to smile and make faces, and joke with me right up until his death. I brought him some blueberries I had washed and handed to him just days before his death. He said, what is that? I said it is some blue berries, he laughed and said “Whatever floats your boat. “ Don’t get me wrong, he was always thankful, but he was also funny. Just over a week ago I cooked him a steak. He loved the tender filet piece of the T-bone. I am sure he could not eat it that well anymore but when I asked him if it was good he smiled “better than snuff” It was one of his favorite sayings when he liked something. For a man who probably rarely had the luxury of eating steak growing up, I know steak will never taste as good to me as it did to him. That same day we went through the somewhat run down streets of Lanett which I think definitely saddened him as it does me. But as I pushed him in the wheelchair he just took deep breathes and said things like it is good to be outside and the sun feels good hitting my face.
Granddad grew up with the Model T’s, Model A’s, lived through the great depression; saw the invention of the TV, and much more. He worked hard to take care of our family and that he did. He bought me my first car that allowed me to drive back and forth to college. He bought me an amplifier when I told him I wanted to play in a band, not a little one but an expensive one over 5 feet tall. He knew the value of money because he grew up not having any. I remember the time when he told me him and a buddy were excited because they got a job picking worms off of tobacco at a penny a piece. He and his buddy picked so many that the man told him they had to stop because he couldn’t afford to pay them. He was a man of little schooling but his wisdom was far greater than one can learn from a book. I was working on my final term paper for my MBA degree. The topic was about how the credit card debt had skyrocketed to its highest level ever. This was around the year 2000. I researched and thought about it and came up with the answer. It was that people forgot how to delay gratification. In other words they had forgotten how to wait to buy something until they could afford it. I wrote a nice paper explaining this and got an A on the paper. But you see this wasn’t my brilliant idea at all. My Granddad had told me this principal years ago when he said: when you see something you want , wait a month, if you still want it wait another month, and then if you still want it save up and pay cash for it. I quoted him in my paper and credited him for it in the paper. I was proud of it and showed it to him when I came home to visit (I was living in SC at the time). He took it, read it, and had that, yeah that’s what I said look, like it’s not rocket science, and he was right only our generation just can’t seem to get it.
I remember him telling me one day greed is going to destroy this country, he could see it coming. Later that year we had the collapse of Enron and many more financial scandals to follow until it almost destroyed this country. You see he didn’t need an MBA to see what the results of what greed would do to this country.
My grandfather’s memory was amazing up until his death, long term and short term. He could remember birthdays, names, places, and details of not just family members but even their friends and acquaintances, He remembered when there was nothing but dirt roads and the time he broke his wrist cranking an old Model T. He walked to the doctor; the doctor said shake my hand and jerked into position to set it. By the way there was no pain medicine back then.
He told me of stories of jumping on the train as a teenager with his buddies hoboing to places like TX, MX, and Missouri to see some of the country. There were some tragedies like the time a buddy of his fell between the rail cars and they had to jump off the train and help locate the body parts. And there were funny stories like the time someone got him intoxicated while he was in TX and he woke up with a tattoo on his arm. Remember, he was a teenager. I never saw my Granddad intoxicated my entire life. I have had many a beer with him but it was always just one for him. You see that was another quality he mastered, self control. Without it we start to act like animals, like the robbers that broke into a house on my street last week and held guns to the head of my neighbors and demanded their money.
One of my great uncles called me the other night and said to me “Your Granddad was a good man, I never knew him to have a single bad habit.” I agreed with him. I never really thought about it, he was just a great Granddad, but now I realize he was a truly amazing man.
Granddad loved Westerns, The Virginian, John Wayne, Gene Autry, all men of character. I have many stories that let me know he was a man of character and it wasn’t just acting. My grandfather was a tough man but his heart was as big as they get. Not only did he give almost everything he had to his family, he gave to charities all the way up until his death, using the money from his meager social security. He loved going to the mountains and seeing the leaves turn in the fall. He would point and say how beautiful the trees were. I remember when I was little there was a trellis he built for roses to grow on. Later he planted a rose bush along the fence. He would nurture that rose bush every year and I would come down and see where he had cut a single red rose and placed it in a glass of water on the table. Yes he did it last year also, using his electric cart he got after his last living sister died. And for some reason last year there were more roses on that bush than I had ever seen before. I was so amazed that I took several pictures of it. And last year he also used his electric cart to go through his garden, which he had every year for the last 58 years at his home on 4th ave, and pulled weeds and picked peppers and tomatoes. He could barely walk but he would drag his walker down the steps and go out to the shed and get in his electric cart so he could tend his garden.
He loved his family and being a somewhat impatient man, as some may know; he could and talk with and about family for hours on end. When I was self employed for a few years, we had time to travel to nearby court houses and cemeteries to research some of our family history. We found where his great grandmother was buried in a little cemetery in the middle of a pasture on private land and we went there. We also found a copy of the marriage certificate for his great grandfather who he previously had never knew his name, which was Benjamin Waldroup.
He was fascinated with this as I was. It was like a treasure hunt, but he loved knowing about his family history.
I am kind of a health nut at times and enjoy trying new vitamins and health foods and he was right there with me on that one. When I discovered something new I would always buy 2 because I knew he would want to try it.
I bought some commemorative bricks at the Valley Sportsplex many years back. I got one In Memory of my Grandmother, one In Memory of my Mom, and the other In Honor of my Granddad. I was so proud of them and wanted to show them to Granddad. I took him by there to see them one day. I showed him Grandmother’s, then Mom’s, and then his. He looked at me, with a less than happy look, and said I Ain’t Dead Yet. I then tried to explain that I was honoring him while he was alive.
When Granddad got double pneumonia last year the doctors were amazed when he got well enough to walk on his walker again and was able to leave the hospital. After that we did many things, went for rides in the country, went out and ate catfish, went to visit my cousin’s land on Lake Wedowee, and ate at an old gristmill restaurant. I just watched that video again last night. This was in September. He got weak again after that and he was told that his heart was failing. He said ok what do you want me to do? When he was told he probably would not get any better, it took the wind out of his sails. He lost interest in reading Westerns and the daily newspaper but his will to live did not stop. I guess it didn’t know how after 94 years. On Sunday, 2 days before he died he stood up at his chair and asked me to steady him on his walker. I did not want him to walk because he had fallen several times in the last few weeks. So I said, you don’t need to walk, and he said exercise me, tell me what to do. So I said lift your legs and walk in place. He began to slowly lift his legs, which were badly swollen and blistered from the effects of his heart failure, and he began to march in place.
No they don’t them like that anymore. I did tell him a time or two, but in writing this I realized just how lucky I was to have known a man like that and on top of that to be able to call him “MY GRANDDAD”.
