My husband is from Hawaii and his father who was also born in Hawaii was a teenager when Pearl Harbor happened, right before church and he ran up and got on the roof of his grandfather's house and watched the planes go over.
My grandfather built my first hoop. It was a peach basket up against a tree, and we played in the dirt. I couldn't have been more than 6 when he put it up, and I just started playing.
After my grandfather's plane took enemy fire, he was denied permission to land at the first available airstrip. In that classic British bureaucratic way, they said he had to go back to your own airbase in the Midlands. They crashed between the coast ...
For one year, I was Keith Mitchell Coogan on my headshots. The next year, I was just Keith Coogan. And I have gone by that ever since, maybe 1984 or 1985. That is my mother's maiden name, and it was out of reverence for my grandfather.
That was kind of scary. You got the sense as a little kid that you might be at risk now, and then you're like, 'Why are we at risk? It's because my grandfather is in charge of all of this.' You can't really realize the magnitude of a job like that wh...
I was fortunate to have a grandfather who was an optometrist. Vision therapy was something that we routinely did to strengthen our eyes and give us better focus. I was fortunate that he could teach me techniques that are still paying dividends for me...
Of course it would be hard. But I remembered what my nurseryman grandfather used to say when I didn’t want to go to school: half the work in the world was done by people who didn’t feel so good today.
Now that I'm a grandfather myself, I realize that the best thing about having grandkids is that you get the kid for the best part of the ride - kind of like owning a car for only the first 10,000 miles. You can have your grandchildren for a couple of...
My grandparents went through a bad experience themselves; they invested money in a church and got burned - the pastor had his own agenda - and my grandfather lost interest in the church after that. That was when I had the option to not go. 'Grandpa a...
I think there is a heritage which I'm proud of, which is a fight for democracy, a fight for social justice, a fight for freedom. My grandfather went to jail or exile six times in his life, fighting for his principles for democracy, or for his country...
Fortunately, I grew up in a traditional family where questioning was encouraged, particularly by my pandit grandfather. We are all voracious readers, seeking knowledge. I learn a lot from discussions with my wife, siblings and parents.
I had a great childhood. Even though I never had my own room - I shared the porch with my grandfather and kept my belongings in one drawer of a dresser that was jammed next to the piano - I never went hungry and was always supported by my family.
My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents, which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.
My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt ...
I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.
On occasion, I like to reread my grandfather's letters. While leafing through them, I'm saddened by what is being lost in modern communication. Soul-baring sentimentality isn't typically poured into text messages, tweets and emails. All too often, pe...
My grandfather lived across the garden from us, and in his attic he had a lot of radios, appliances and inventions that he had made over 50 years, such as a keyboard called a clavioline, which can be heard on some Beatles songs - it was popular in th...
It's strange because you - your life goes so swiftly. You look up one day you're a teenager, the next day you're a grandfather and you want to decide, 'I sure hope my kids don't make the same mistakes.'
Several years ago, I was creating a Christmas present for the family, a self-published cookbook featuring recipes my grandmother had collected and created over decades. While interviewing her for the biographical section, she began to talk about her ...
My dad's a bodybuilder. My whole life I've been taught to train the hard way. I believe in earning strength, not buying it. My grandfather raised me old school: In baseball, you work for whatever you get.
My grandfather was a really, really tough no-nonsense factory worker who emigrated from Ireland in about 1900 to Bridgeport, Conn. He had a big effect on me. Those guys who took a great leap out into what they knew not were the ones who were the real...
