I'm going to tell you about a member of my family, my paternal grandfather, Thomas Raglin. Daddy Tom was at least 97 years old, but I seem to remember celebrating a couple of birthdays twice.
He was an avid fisherman, walking or catching the bus from his home to the site of the then under construction Renaissance Center in downtown Detroit everyday to fish....that is a distance of 3-5 miles. He did this until about two weeks prior to his death. He would clean the fish himself and could cook it so that you could just lift the tail and shake the meat off. Cornbread was a part of every meal, as was his homemade beer, which would explode if you let it sit long enough.
Everyone downtown knew him as "Pops", and nobody bothered him. This is good because when was 90 years old, two young men in their twenties broke into his house while he was there. He had an iron bar he called the "persuader", which he used to drive one of the intruders out of the house and put a choke-hold on the other one. The police had to pry granddad off of the guy. When we got there, Pops was just laughing, his teeth in a jar 40 feet away. Pops never grew too nervous about things, except when it came to freeways. He pre-dated the freeways, thus he wasn't used to traveling at those "high" speeds, but that might have been the only thing that rattled him.
In all the years I spent around him, he never called me by my name... in fact, I wasn't sure he knew my name (he did). He always called me "The Boy". If my father went to pick him up from fishing without me, the first thing Pops asked was "Where's the Boy?" He even had his neighbors calling me that. I'm just sorry that I didn't get to spend more time with him...he died when I was 12.
This way for "For Fathers"