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MAN WHO COULD RECITE          NORRICK

he went fishing instead of going to the parade.  I was only five or six years old, but that made a big impression on me.

"And so did the parade.  Four horses pulled the cannon-every town that wanted one got a Civil War cannon.  You've seen them on the courthouse lawns.  Back of the cannon came the bigwigs on their fine horses-the captains and the like.  Then the carriages with more of the bigwigs.  But some of the carriages and the buggies had war veterans, those so badly shot up and crippled they couldn't walk.  Then came the paraders, and that's something I'll never forget.  Peg-legs and other crippled; men with only one arm; men with an eye gone.  I tell you that war cost something, and the people who were around then knew it.  Most families had some one killed or maimed.

"Your great uncle-my mother's brother Johnny, 19 or 20 years old at the time-he died in a prison camp in Florida.  Your great grand-father Graves-his father-there in Clyde was at the planning mill-he was a carpenter-and some one came in with a paper, and started reading the casualty list.  When he read John Graves your great-grandfather, not thinking, threw his hand forward, and it got caught in the machinery.  A tendon cut, and from that time forward he could never open his right hand, and him a carpenter.  So that's how it was.  Every one had a reminder then, and your grandfather-Pa, that is-all his life took a big part in veterans' affairs.  The GAR-Grand Army of the Republic-it was what they belonged to-the power in the land, and that is what it was.  Nobody could get elected President then without the GAR.  Good thing it was around, too, looking after the veterans' interests, getting pensions for them and the like-setting up soldiers' homes.  They'd sure earned everything they got, in that war.

"After the war your grandfather learned the glass-blowing trade, there in Philadelphia, and from there came to Clyde, a glass factory town then-and married your grandmother, and you know the rest."

old grandfather

Yes, I knew the rest.  That boy who had gone to war three times for some one else, his father getting the money, was the grandfather with that big heavy mustache, the one who took us for buggy rides.  That was in Muncie, Indiana.  He was someone we could brag about, for he had been in the Civil War.  

"He wouldn't talk about the war, though"-let my father take up the story-"except we all knew he'd been in the battle of Gettysburg.

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:30:10