I am lucky I know. Not everyone has had the chance like I have to know and love and be loved by all of my grandparents.

My Fathers side
Above pictured is my fathers father. I loved to visit him and my grandmother when I was a kid. Not only was it good to see my grandparents but they also lived in Pacific City, Oregon which is a beautiful little beach town. It was about 7 hours from where I grew up in La Grande, Oregon and we visited a couple of times a year. As I got older I would spend some weeks in the summer there and it was always a great time. My grandpa had a fishing boat and we would go on the lakes, rivers, and bays around Pacific City and do plenty of fishing and raking for a type of clam.

The stories my dad told of my grandpa he was a very had working man and bread winner for the family. They traveled all around the Western part of the US where my grandpa would be taking on different well drilling jobs. One I remember being told about was a job he did at Hanford, Washington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site. This was a nuclear processing facility which made one of the two Nuclear bombs that were dropped in WWII. Also the origin of one of the nastiest experiments done on radiation to the public in the US. They allowed tons of radiation to enter the jet stream and blow downwind from here to see what it would do and the results were devastating for future generations that have dealt with a lot of cancer. There was one job he did where he was up on the drill rig for hours in an area that you are only supposed to be outside for 30 minutes max.

My grandpa came down with a rare cancer in his 80s. It started with horn like bumps growing on his head and then a rash that spread out from that. There is some belief in the family that it is possible that this could have been a result of that work at Hanford. He passed away at around 88 and was dearly missed by the family, and his wife my grandmother.

My grandmother was a second generation American from Sweden. Her dad died when she was very young and her mother died hen she was 21. She was the oldest of 6 siblings and managed to raise them and survive on her own even with complications like their house burning down about a year after her mothers death. This woman was tough as nails and sweet as ice cream. I don't think she even ever felt physical pain even later in life. There are some nice memories of her, her waffles, strawberry jam, the candy jar on the coffee table, and always getting a potted plant from her to take home. She was my last grandparent to pass away. She passed away about 5 years ago. She lived until 96.

My Mothers side

My grandfather on my mothers side was a cowboy and he came from a different time. He was very much the quiet type but when you could get him on some stories they were sure to be good. He grew up in a small Eastern Oregon town, Baker City. It was a town taken strait from the western films. Infact Starbottle an old western was made not far from there. His family was into cattle ranching and he probably rode a horse every week up until his mid 80s when his back started having problems.

He was old enough he remembers bank robbers ridding horses through town. He won an award from a local feed shop when he was a kid for shooting the most amount of jack rabbits in one shot. He said in the spring they came down a train from the mountain in one line and he lined himself up to be able to shoot 8 in one shot. In his late teens he ran a trapping line in the mountains in the wintertime. Hiking between all the traps on snowshoes, a real mountain man.

As a man he was instrumental building most of the freeways through that part of the country spending hours and hours on dozer. He even built the first road out to where the farm that I grew up on was. There was an abandoned rock quarry up on the mountain which had filled with water and me and some friends as kids would go up to and horse around. He told me one day that they built that one and used the rock to build the road we were driving on. He even told hem how the boss even died there crushed in a rock crusher, this definitely added a new spookiness to the place for me as a kid.

I will always be thankful to him for taking care of my dog lilly for a number of years. They had a special bond. He was always a good fishing buddy and liked to drive into the hills even until his last years. There was one time in his late 80s he was driving in the mountains and got his truck stuck. So he walked a ways and came across a big road grader. Since he had worked on them so long he knew where the keys were left and he borrowed it pulled out his truck and returned it to were he found it and put the keys back.

He also passed away at the great age of 96. And remembered fondly by all.

I can not find another good pic of my grandmother from my mothers side. But she is in this whole family picture second from the left. My grandmother also came from another time. She came from a long line of cattle ranchers in Eastern, Oregon going back generations, and came from a well known family in the area from history. She was a school teachers and rode a horse to teach a few hours each day to a one room school house.

She always like to host us grand kids and do lots of cooking. She loved to travel around the world with my grandpa in their later years. They had a camper and we once when up in the mountains to do some camping and fishing when I was a kid. One morning she made pancakes, and I took one bite and refused to eat them again because they tasted gross. She was not happy, and my grandpa just kinda choked the pancakes down with a straight face. Eventually I pointed out that grandma was using the bug spray on the skillet rather than the spray oil. That was the source of the bad taste. I was happy that I refused to eat them and I think she was happy also, we had to call poison control from my grandpa though. They did not think that the dose would be too harmful.

She was my first grandparent to pass away when I was 14. She passed away due to lung cancer which is strange because she never smoked.

As you can see it is impossible for me to write about just one grandparent as I have nice memories of them all. All of the pictures are from digitized family archives, little me is in a number of the pictures.