Quite a story, Steve.
I love delving back into the family tree. My father's father, Williard Giberson, was a very successful farmer, and also a bit of an inventor. He concocted a tarnish remover, made of honey, milk, and other natural ingredients, and got quite rich off the stuff. In fact, I found an empty bottle of it in the old homestead barn when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, the old guy had a liking for a few slugs of whiskey, several times a day. He died at age 51... his liver just couldn't take the abuse.
I still hear stories about him all the time. Like the time he was trying to teach Gram to drive, and she drove the Studabaker through the side of the barn. Another time, he hung a deer's head in a tree, and sat there and laughed his head off every time someone took a shot at it.
He used to walk up and down the railroad tracks and hand money out to the hobos, and then sit down with a bunch of them to slug down a couple of 5ths of whiskey.
He had one of the biggest funerals in the history of Ft. Fairfield, with a line about 3/4s of a mile down the street, all people waiting to pay their respect. The sad part, by the time he died, he had very little money left. Gram had to sell the farms just to survive.
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