38. Grandaddy

Grandaddy was tall and quiet and had a stillness about him. And as a kid, I loved being with him, because he would give me his full attention.

I remember holding his hand and going for long walks on the beach near his house in Georgia. And when I would find a shell, he would tell me all about it is his slow southern drawl that always wrapped me up like a snuggly blanket. “That’s a common jingle shell. Oh, that’s a rough pen shell, I hardly ever see those.”

And he taught me to look for 5 little holes in the sand, and if you slipped your hand under and scooped it up, there was a sand dollar!

That was the Grandaddy I knew as a girl. But I later came to learn that there was a lot more to that tall and gentle man.

He was a Methodist missionary in Japan. He organized the Layman’s Movement for spiritual values in the workplace. And some of the members of that crazy little movement were John D. Rockefeller, J. C. Penney and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

He convinced a Canadian countess to donate her mansion and he, with the help of Norman Vincent Peale, started Wainwright House which was a holistic learning center.

And the coolest of all is Grandaddy wanted to have a Meditation Room in the United Nations, so he and the Laymen’s Movement kept after Dag Hammarskjold until they got it done. They also introduced the practice of opening the U.N. General Assembly sessions with a moment of silence.

Grandaddy had a motto that you can get anything done if you don’t care who gets the credit.

And I think that sums him up perfectly. He was not about the credit. He was about the getting things done. Real things. That mattered to him. And that helped the world.