How I became a raconteur — or — growing up with bullshitters and liars — Part 1: Grampa Bowen
To be a good storyteller, especially if you’re going to be pullin’ on your listeners’ legs, you need to believe the bullshit you’re puttin’ down. I come by this naturally. I grew up around people like that all my life. Grampa Bowen was one of the best at this.
Grampa and Gramma were married sometime during the Depression, and for most of their marriage, Grampa did all sorts of different jobs — mostly, he was a heavy equipment operator building roads, bridges, and such, but he was also an entrepreneur. He did tree trimming, auto body work, opened a clothing store, road construction company, and helped found a few banks. In a few of these cases, though, he’d start the company, then leave it to Gramma to run as he went ramblin’. They had a raucous marriage, and he usually left the house with Gram in a fit.
By the time I came around, they were going through a messy divorce. I didn’t know what was happening (hell, I still don’t most of the time, but, I like it that way), I just knew that Gramma and Grampa were never at our farm at the same time…
Anyway…
Grampa was an elite level bullshitter. Often, you didn’t know if a story he was telling was the truth, a lie, or most likely, a combination of both. One story he told me when I was 12 or 13 occurred during the early years of World War II. Grampa worked on the Alaska-Canada Highway (The Al-Can), and told me about the muskegs they went through. Now, the farm I grew up on had a peat bog that at certain times of year, you could drive through, but you didn’t stop. Wet peat is like a non-Newtonian fluid and once you stop, you start to sink. I had just told him about getting the Oliver stuck a few days before and he chuckled and told me about the day he lost his bulldozer.
We were building a corduroy road through this muskeg. We stopped for lunch one day — and it was a day they’d take us into the field kitchen for a hot lunch. I parked my dozer on what I thought was a good parking pad, jumped in the gang wagon, and off to lunch. By the time we got back, all I could find of my dozer was the flapper cap on top of the exhaust pipe.
Guess I wasn’t on a pad after all!
The rest of the crew and I grabbed shovels and started digging while our foreman headed to a different crew to get their dozer. He came back with two — which was good — and by the time he got back, we had the cockpit and two hitch points exposed. One of the guys drove a pipe around the machine, too, to break any of the suction. My Cat? Well, even with the motor caked in mud, she started! And with all three dozers working together, we broke mine free. Took the mechanics two days to get it cleaned up and checked over, but, after that, I never trusted a parking pad.
Now…how do you believe a story like that? For the longest time, I though he was lying to me…but…I found out years later through independent sources that it wasn’t an uncommon to lose machines from time to time.
After the Al-Can, Grampa stayed in Alaska building airports and airstrips for the military until 1943 when he was sent to Great Britain to do the same thing. He was pretty much gone until 1946 when Gramma wrote to tell him it was time to come home. If Grampa could have, he would have stayed in Europe to help with the rebuilding.
I have a few more stories of Grampa that I’ll be sharing later, including the day he took me to my first Twins game. But, I think this is good for now. Thanks for reading!
