Grandpa’s Path to Simplicity

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My interest in sustainability started with my fun-loving grandpa.
My interest in sustainability started with my fun-loving grandpa.
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Creativity and simplicity guided my grandpa’s life, from his wagon wheel fence to his ceramic chicken yard art.
Creativity and simplicity guided my grandpa’s life, from his wagon wheel fence to his ceramic chicken yard art.

My grandfather’s name was Wad Blake. “Wad” was a nickname, of course, but no one ever called him anything else. He signed his checks John W. Blake, but his birth certificate read “Wylie Rose Blake.” Later on, his parents must have thought better of the “Rose” part. The nickname made it a moot point.

Raised in Oklahoma by Okies and Texans, he was a storyteller. As was the tradition in that part of the country, his stories were loud, entertaining and occasionally factual. His father was a slight, blue-eyed cowboy who never weighed more than 130 pounds. His mother was dark-skinned and big, topping 300 pounds. Physically, Wad took more after his mother. Among his towheaded siblings, he claimed he “looked like a rat turd in a bowl of rice.”

He greeted everyone with a booming “Well, howdy!” or “Que hubo?,” depending on their native language, and an enthusiastic abrazo. He spoke Spanish and taught me the rudiments. He also taught me how to say “Kiss my ass” in Choctaw. I thought he was brilliantly fluent and articulate. I can still hear his confident Mexican slang delivered in an Okie drawl. It makes me smile.

Most of the stories he told were about the animals, people and scenes of his youth. They took place on or around the small subsistence farms of the Ozark Mountains, where simple living was the way of life. He chased stray mules through the brush and camped out with his family’s cattle on “borrowed” land in the mountains.

His horse, Twenty Grand, was the fastest and meanest horse in the country. Twenty Grand once bucked so high that Wad and the horse landed in the bed of a wagon. Wad’s Uncle Will was so strong he could lift a 500-pound cotton bale on his back. His dad, while riding the trail drives between Texas and Kansas, was once thrown into a tree by a herd of stampeding cattle.

  • Published on Jul 22, 2011
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