The Grandfathers Who Taught Me How to Live

Two men born twenty-one days apart in the summer of 1923. Two boys shaped by the Great Depression. Two grandfathers who taught me that a good life is built less by extraordinary moments than by showing up for the ordinary ones.

There are certain coincidences in a family that do not seem particularly remarkable when you are young.

Only later do you stop and wonder at them.

My two grandfathers were born only a few weeks apart in the summer of 1923.

Grandpa Charlie Svagera was born on July 4.

Grandpa Barney Shives was born on July 25.

That means that in 2026, both of my grandfathers would have turned 103 years old.

Earlier this month, on the Fourth of July, I found myself thinking about Grandpa Charlie and the extraordinary American story into which he was born. I wrote about that in Born Into the Promise: A Fourth of July Reflection.

But today belongs to Grandpa Barney.

Today, July 25, would have been his 103rd birthday.

And perhaps because their birthdays were so close together, I find myself thinking not only about Grandpa Barney today, but about the almost unbelievable blessing my brothers and I were given in having both of these men in our lives.

The older I become, the more extraordinary that blessing seems.

Because when I was a child, I did not realize that having grandfathers who wanted to spend time with you was anything unusual.

I thought that was simply what grandpas did.

I know better now.

The Luck I Didn’t Know I Had

When you are seven or eight years old, you do not think about legacy.

You think about whether someone will play catch, whether Grandpa will shoot baskets with you in the driveway, if you are going to the football game Friday night, and whether there might be a Frosty involved afterward.

Those were the measurements that mattered.

And Grandpa Barney was there for so many of them.

He helped get us to and from school, and took us to Papillion Monarch football games and basketball games. There were baseball games, too, and all the little events that seemed incredibly important when you were a boy growing up in Papillion.

I have written before about how deeply Grandpa Barney became intertwined with my understanding of my hometown in Grandpa Barney’s Papillion: The Hometown That Raised Me.

But some of my favorite memories are not really about Papillion at all.

They are about a driveway, a basketball, or baseball glove, warm Nebraska evenings when there was absolutely nowhere important we needed to be.

Grandpa would shoot free throws with us.

Or play catch.

And then sometimes we would pile into the car and head over to Wendy’s for a Frosty.

That was it.

No great vacation, expensive entertainment, or carefully planned “quality time.”

Just Grandpa.

Just us.

And summer.

I would give almost anything for one more ordinary evening like that.

That is one of the cruel and beautiful discoveries of getting older: you eventually learn that the ordinary moments were the extraordinary ones.

We simply did not recognize them while they were happening.

Two Boys Born in 1923

It is strange for me to imagine Grandpa Charlie and Grandpa Barney not as grandfathers, but as boys.

Yet once, more than ninety years ago, that is exactly what they were.

Two farm boys growing up in different corners of the Midwest.

Grandpa Barney near Denison, Iowa.

Grandpa Charlie in rural Cass County, Nebraska.

Neither could possibly have known the other existed.

Neither could have imagined that decades later their children would marry, or that their grandsons would someday carry pieces of both of their stories.

And neither had an easy childhood.

They belonged to a generation for whom the Great Depression was not a chapter in an American history textbook.

It was childhood.

Iowa was already suffering through agricultural recession before the Depression arrived, and across the Missouri River, Nebraska families confronted many of the same struggles. These were times when “making do” became part of everyday existence.

Those descriptions matter to me because somewhere inside those enormous historical forces were two little boys named Charlie and Barney.

History usually gives us numbers.

Family stories give those numbers faces.

Grandpa Charlie and the Farm in Cass County

Grandpa Charlie’s childhood world has occupied my thoughts a great deal lately.

The old farmplace outside Murray.

The creek and storm cellar, his brothers Joe, Red and Eug and their little sister Millie.

His father John, whose health often made keeping the farm operating extraordinarily difficult.

I recently reflected on that family bond in The Four Svagera Brothers: Walking Home Together One Last Time.

Charlie was the oldest.

That meant childhood did not always remain childhood very long.

Responsibility arrived early.

When a farm had to keep going, it kept going.

When animals needed tending, crops needed working, or younger children needed watching, there was no pause button because the person being asked to help happened to be thirteen years old.

You did what needed to be done.

That was Grandpa Charlie.

And perhaps that is why I continue to feel something almost spiritual when I return to that part of Cass County. I wrote about that strange pull of ancestral land in Home Beyond the Crest of the Hill.

The land remembers nothing, of course.

But we do.

And sometimes standing where someone you loved once struggled, laughed, worked and dreamed makes the distance between generations feel remarkably small.

Grandpa Barney and the Farm Near Denison

Grandpa Barney came from another farm world, this one near Denison, Iowa.

Different family, different roads, different soil.

But many of the same lessons.

Hard work was not an extracurricular activity.

It was life.

Families depended upon each other because there often was no one else to depend upon.

Things were repaired instead of replaced.

Food was valued because somebody had worked to produce it.

Money was treated carefully because people knew what it meant not to have enough of it.

And perhaps most importantly, your reputation mattered.

You did not live anonymously in a small farming community.

People knew your family.

They knew whether your word meant something and whether you showed up when someone needed help.

They knew what kind of person you were.

Long before either of my grandfathers became respected older men, they were learning the habits that would eventually make them respected older men.

Both Roads Somehow Led to a Grocery Store

There is another family coincidence that fascinates me.

Both sides of my family eventually became connected to grocery stores.

For Grandpa Barney, grocery stores became a major part of his life. He worked at Ruback’s in Denison before eventually becoming associated with The Golden Rule in Papillion, the neighborhood store that became inseparable from my earliest memories of him.

For Grandpa Charlie, grocery-store life entered through his own family.

In 1937, after the Svageras left the difficult farm years behind them, John and Anna Svagera moved their family to South Omaha and operated Svagera’s grocery. Grandpa Charlie therefore came of age not merely knowing farm labor but also the peculiar world of the neighborhood grocery store.

I explored that family connection more fully in What We Lost When Small-Town Grocery Stores Disappeared.

Looking back, I think grocery stores taught both families something farming already had.

People matter.

The person standing across the counter was not a transaction.

He was your neighbor.

You knew his children, knew whose mother was sick, who had lost a job and might need a little extra time to pay.

You knew whose harvest had been good and whose had not.

That kind of world was imperfect, certainly.

But it understood something our increasingly anonymous age sometimes forgets:

A community exists because people repeatedly decide to care about one another.

Respected Men in Their Communities

Neither of my grandfathers became famous.

Thank God.

I think both of them would have found the very idea slightly ridiculous.

They did something much harder.

They became respected.

There is a difference.

Fame can come quickly.

Respect takes decades.

Respect is earned one interaction at a time.

By keeping your word and treating people decently when there is nothing to gain from doing so.

Through working hard, even when nobody is watching.

By remembering people’s names, by showing up and helping.

By belonging somewhere long enough that the community begins to know the content of your character.

That was Grandpa Barney in Papillion.

It was visible in the grocery store, in his involvement with the hospital and schools, at community events, at Monarch games and in the thousand little relationships that connected him to the town.

It is one reason I think of Grandpa Barney whenever I write about The America I Hope We Never Lose.

Grandpa Charlie carried that same quiet dignity.

His pride was tied deeply to family, work, his Czech heritage, the land his family had survived upon and the people whose stories had shaped him.

Different personalities.

Different paths.

Same lesson.

Know where you came from.

And then live in such a way that the people who come after you will be grateful that you were here.

They Never Sat Us Down to Teach These Things

This may be what strikes me most now.

Neither Grandpa ever announced:

“Today I am going to teach you about courage.”

There was no lecture titled How to Become a Good Man.

They simply lived.

That was the lesson.

Courage looked like getting up and doing what needed to be done.

Character looked like telling the truth when lying would have been easier.

Community meant going to the game, supporting the school, attending the fundraiser, helping the neighbor and knowing the person behind the counter.

Family meant being there.

Again.

And again.

And again.

That last lesson may be the greatest one of all.

Because what do I remember most vividly?

Not philosophical conversations.

I remember presence.

Grandpa Barney in the driveway with a basketball.

Taking us to the game.

Picking us up and asking where we wanted to go.

A Frosty.

A baseball glove.

A ride across town.

Grandpa Charlie telling stories around the table.

Stories about people I had never met and places that existed before I was born.

Stories I did not understand were becoming part of me.

They were putting something into us without ever calling attention to it.

The Inheritance That Cannot Be Divided

Scripture speaks of a good man leaving an inheritance to his children’s children.

For most of my life I probably heard the word inheritance and thought first about possessions.

Now I understand it differently.

I inherited Grandpa Charlie’s stories and Grandpa Barney’s love of Papillion.

I inherited their understanding that where you come from matters and a deep respect for ordinary people doing ordinary work well.

Grocery counters and farm fields.

Football games and family tables.

I inherited an instinct to remember.

Perhaps that is why I write.

Perhaps every reflection about my grandparents is really my attempt to keep spending an inheritance that strangely becomes larger instead of smaller each time it is shared.

Memory works that way.

You do not preserve it by locking it away.

You preserve it by giving it to someone else.

Only Later Did I Understand What They Had Given Me

There are moments in your life when all the lessons people quietly planted inside you finally become necessary.

For me, that became particularly true when my own life took turns I could never have imagined.

Illness.

Loss.

Fear.

A hospital room.

A ventilator.

Coming frighteningly close to the end of my own life.

And somehow, when everything else was stripped away, I discovered that the voices of the people who had formed me were still there.

That realization lies behind much of my new book, 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death.

The book is not really about death.

It is about what becomes visible when you suddenly understand that life is not guaranteed.

Faith.

Family.

Grace.

Memory.

The people who loved us.

The ordinary mornings we once took for granted.

And the strange mercy of receiving one more.

Read One More Morning: Reflections on Survival, Faith, and Grace at Food for the Way

My New Book: 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death

After surviving the experience that changed my understanding of life, suffering and grace, I gathered seven of those reflections into a book.

7 Reflections From the Edge of Death is for anyone who has suffered, grieved, survived something they never expected to survive, or simply begun to wonder what really matters before time takes the opportunity away.

Get 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death on Amazon

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Maybe This Is What Being Lucky Really Means

When I was young, I probably would have defined being lucky very differently.

Winning something.

Getting something I wanted.

Having something exciting happen.

At forty-four, my definition has changed.

Lucky is having a grandfather willing to shoot free throws with you when absolutely nothing important is happening, or having another grandfather tell you the same family story for the fifth time and eventually realizing that you should have listened even more carefully.

Lucky is riding to a football game with someone who has no idea that forty years later you will still remember sitting beside him.

Perhaps lucky is having two men who survived difficult childhoods decide that the children and grandchildren who came after them should know something better, but still wanting their descendants to hear stories about farms they never worked.

Stores whose doors have long since closed.

People buried before you were born.

Lucky is discovering that they somehow became part of you anyway.

Grandpa Charlie and Grandpa Barney were born twenty-one days apart in the summer of 1923.

They entered a world neither could have predicted.

They endured hardship, worked, raised families, and became respected men.

And eventually they became Grandpas.

Our Grandpas.

That may have been their greatest title of all.

So today, July 25, I find myself thinking about a man who should have been blowing out 103 candles.

Happy birthday, Grandpa Barney.

And once again, happy 103rd birthday to Grandpa Charlie.

When I was a boy, I did not understand how lucky my brothers and I were.

I do now.

And maybe gratitude is simply what happens when memory finally grows old enough to understand what love was doing all along.

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