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

to marry, he and his sweetheart, Gladys, tied the knot and expanded their family. In 1968, in order to give his children a better education, Rodriguez, who didn’t speak any English, moved to West New York, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and got a job through a friend making glasses at the American Optical Society. “I had a good salary in Colombia, and I moved here and earned less. I used to cry, because I felt so stupid,” he said. Still, he persevered, working hard at two full-time jobs and earning promotions, and in 1970 he was able to bring his wife and five children to America with him. They had one more child together, and in 1995 Rodriguez became a proud American citizen. Thanks to his dedication and handiwork, thousands of New Yorkers can now see clearly. Since his retirement, Rodriguez can often be found in Brooklyn at the home of his son, a Grammy-nominated jazz musician, where he and his large family, including thirteen grandchildren, love to boogie into the night.
    Philip Spooner Sr.
    Philip Spooner was born on a potato farm north of Caribou, Maine, on January 2, 1922. As a young boy, his chores included feeding the horses and milking thirty to forty cows at five o’clock every morning before school. He attended a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade, but since the nearest high school was twenty miles away (and his family didn’t have a car), his education was cut short. Rather than continuing on, he became a janitor at his grade school, where his duties included lighting the stove and fetching water for a dollar and a half a month. At age eighteen, Spooner traveled north, ten miles shy of the Canadian border, to harvest lumber for thirty-five cents an hour. After that, he joined a road-building crew outside Bangor. “We lived in tents, and the boss’s wife was the cook and I mean she really cooked: homemade pies and baked beans,” he told me. Then he worked for a private contractor in the navy yard, and fell in love with a waitress named Jenny at a nearby restaurant, before being drafted for the war in November 1942. “It was love at first sight. We got married on Saturday night, and I left Monday morning for the army,” he said of his late wife of fifty-four years. During the war Spooner became an ambulance driver and medic and saw action in all five major campaigns, participating in the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of Paris. Not only did he carry injured soldiers to hospitals during battle, but he also transported Allied prisoners of war home from Poland, Yugoslavia, and Hungary and hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany. His unit earned the Presidential Citation. “I’m probably the only guy who sat with Eisenhower in France,” he said. “He and a British big shot came to see how the bombing was going to go, so they put us ambulance drivers out back of the hospital tent, because we weren’t all spruced up, and all we had to eat was K-rations. Eisenhower got out of the car and instead of going into the hospital and having chicken, he sat down in the grass with a K-ration and talked to us.” After the war ended, Spooner returned to Maine, where he raised his four sons and one daughter and made a living driving trucks and delivering newspapers. In April 2009, Spooner, a lifelong Republican, made history once again when he made a speech to Maine’s Judicial Committee. He said, “I am here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, ‘Do you believe in equality for gay and lesbian people?’ I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, ‘What do you think I fought for at Omaha Beach?’ … For freedom and equality. These are the values that make America a great nation, one worth dying for.” He’s a hero not only to his two granddaughters and several great-grandchildren, but also to all those Americans who believe in equality for all