Grandpa Fearn

It’s really a shame to realize one doesn’t know nearly enough about the history of the people without whom one wouldn’t exist. I’m ashamed to say I know very little about Grandpa Fearn’s, but what I do know I admire.

Chester (“Pete”) Fearn was born the year after the great Chicago Fire, in Pena, Illinois, a town so small it cannot be found on a Rand McNally road map, and quite probably no longer exists. I know almost nothing of his own family: as far as I know he was an only child. One of his grandmothers was a member of the Blackfoot Nation…to whom I am deeply indebted for my Native American genes, which I credit for the fact that I still have a full head of (though very little facial) hair.

His father committed suicide when he was quite young, and Grandpa left home to wander around the central Midwest. I doubt he had more than a third-grade education, but he was far from ignorant. He earned his living tap-dancing for money aboard the riverboat Natchez, sister ship to the Robert E. Lee. At some point he found himself in Rockford, Illinois, where sometime in the late 1890s he met and married Annabelle Erickson, my grandmother, about whom I talked in a previous blog.

Grandpa worked for more than 35 years at various Rockford factories and foundries, which repaid his efforts by giving him the black lung disease from which he eventually died at age 85. I’m sure if it hadn’t been for the lung disease, he’d still be around.

He and my mom shared the same sly sense of humor, which I’d like to think I’ve inherited. Two of his favorite sayings were “...don’t ‘cha know?” and, after a full meal, “My sufficiency has been suffancified.” He loved walking, and he loved his “snuss”—pocket tobacco snorted through the nose. And he never lost his love of dancing. On his 79th birthday, he was honored by Rockford’s Arthur Murray Dance Studio (the same one from which I had been ignominiously expelled), whose dances he regularly attended. His prized possession was his pair of tap shoes, which he kept so polished they glistened. Mom kept them for many years, and I often wonder what became of them.

Like Uncle Buck, he was always there for my mom, but he never interfered in her life or offered unasked-for advice. But if he sensed anything wrong in her life, he was always quietly there.

In his later years, his Black Lung disease confined him to Rockford’s tuberculosis sanitarium (do they even exist anymore?), where he died in, I believe, 1957. One day the San, as it was known, called Mom to tell her that Grandpa wasn’t going to make it through the day, and I took her out to see him for the last time. At one point, Mom left to go to the restroom, and I was alone with Grandpa Fearn.

He looked at me and gave me a small, mischievous smile. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. A few hours later, he did.

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This blog is from Dorien's ebook of blogs, Short Circuits, available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com; it's also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. You can find information about Dorien's books at his web site:  www.doriengrey.com: