How to Build a Fire: And Other Handy Things Your Grandfather Knew Read Free

racism at home. Though he’d served in two wars, no American commercial airline would hire him because of his skin color, so he stayed in the military. “The color bar was still there,” he told me. “I just wanted to do what I loved: fly airplanes.” Eventually, a crop-dusting outfit in Central America hired him, and in 1957 a Canadian commercial airline offered him a job, after which he soon met his first wife and started his family. In 1966, he was recalled into service to fight in Vietnam, and by the time he returned to the States he’d found another mission: “When I came back, I became upset that most Americans didn’t know that blacks flew in World War II.” From that day forward, he dedicated his life to teaching history to younger generations, which include his six children, two stepchildren (he remarried in 1990), and seven grandchildren. It wasn’t all lecturing, though. He also loved to travel with them—by air, of course. On June 11, 2010, a few weeks after my last interview with him, Holloman passed away, and the nation lost a hero.
    Robert Kelly
    From the day he was born on October 4, 1927, Bob Kelly knew he wanted to play baseball, which explains why he spent every free moment of his childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, at the sandlot. After he graduated from high school and put in a semester at Purdue, he was drafted into the army in 1946. “They put us on a train to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, where they gave us shots before they figured out where they’d send us. They wouldn’t let us go to bed until we made our mind up whether we’d enlist or stay drafted. I got so tired that finally I said, ‘All right, where do I sign?’ ” Kelly, who’d enlisted for eighteen months, went to Camp Lee in Virginia for basic training, and he stumbled across a baseball diamond where the camp team was playing. He joined the game and was soon offered a spot on the roster. “During the war, the navy and army teams were better than the major leagues, because all the guys were in the service,” he said. In 1947, after he finished his military service, Kelly signed with the Chicago Cubs and played on their minor-league farm team. Soon after, he began dating his wife, Sandra, a high school classmate whom he’d admired but had previously been too shy to approach. Within three dates, he proposed, and within six months the two married. In May 1951, Kelly made his major-league debut, as the Cubs’ pitcher, a position he’d hang on to until 1953, when he was traded to the Cincinnati Reds. He finished his baseball career in 1958 as a Cleveland Indian. After his retirement, Kelly opened a record shop. He then spent the next several decades working various sales jobs and raising his seven children. Now he lives with his wife in Connecticut, where he enjoys the occasional Manhattan cocktail. He also has fourteen athletic grandchildren and one great-grandchild, and he makes a point of cheering them on at as many of their games as he can.
    Angel Rodriguez
    Angel Rodriguez was born on a corn and yucca farm on November 28, 1924, in Palmar de Candelaria, a rural town in Colombia. He was the youngest of five children and son to a single mother. When he was three years old, his sister Paulina, who was thirty-two, traveled in search of work to the port city of Barranquilla, where she met and fell in love with a German optician named Adolf Kinderman, who immigrated to the country after World War I. As part of their marriage arrangement, Paulina insisted that she and Kinderman would raise her little brother Angel as their own, and he agreed. Rodriguez lived with them in Barranquilla, and almost immediately began to apprentice at Kinderman’s optical shop. By age fourteen, he was able to run it on his own and did so for the next six years. Before long, political tensions in Colombia took their toll on Kinderman, and he lost the shop to another family, who kept Rodriguez employed. In 1952, after having a vision of an angel who told him