My two grandfathers could not have been more different. My father’s father was very quiet; so quiet that he almost wasn’t there. He’d come home from the mill every afternoon and eat dinner in the kitchen by himself, still wearing his hat. Although I was thirteen when he died, I don’t ever remember him ever saying anything. I’ve always thought that his keeping grandmother pregnant nine months out of every 24 for twenty years was his form of creative expression.

My mother’s father, on the other hand, was not quiet. He always had a lot to say, and some of it was true. One of his co-workers told me when I was about twelve, “If Pop Upchurch had had all of the jobs he said he had, he’d be 107.” He wasn’t 107.

However, I never thought of him as a liar. In fact, I still don’t. I can’t remember any of his non-factual statements that were designed to improve his position or decrease anyone else’s. They were entertaining stories told in an entertaining way. Admittedly, since I was his oldest grandson, and he tended to dote on me, I may be a little biased.

Granddaddy—generally known as Pop Upchurch—was a story teller, and I found early on that I enjoyed them more if I didn’t worry about whether they were true. Generally there was some truth lurking in there somewhere; however, he overlayered it with so much invention you’d be hard put to find it.  I think that the theory was that you shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

There were the stories of his service on the Mexican border in the Pancho Villa days. I have a picture of him, young, tall, spiffily uniformed and wearing a sidearm. Somebody had written across the bottom of it “a real soldier boy.” However, I learned some years back that he had borrowed the side arm and never heard a shot fired in anger. However, it provided fodder for some real entertaining stories.

And there were the stories of his being on the road. Granddaddy was a driver. He was a partner in a trucking company with his brother-in-law until he decided the business wasn’t going anywhere and quit. Uncle Claude went on to build it into a very successful business. Then granddaddy drove busses for Queen City Trailways, running between Raleigh and Myrtle Beach. He drove for them until he was almost ready to retire; then they fired him. He said it was because they didn’t want to pay his retirement. They said it was because of something he said to a female passenger. Both of those things may have been true.

However, his millions of miles on the road gave him a lot to talk about. He even made the newspaper when he flunked the driver’s license examination. The reporter wondered how somebody who had driven literally millions of miles could fail the license exam. That was easy: he was a good driver, but a poor reader. It was a written exam.

I’m not sure now what part of my memories of him are the real Grover Cleveland Upchurch and what part are memories of his inventions. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter. He was a figure that still looms large to me. And he left me with a couple of important life lessons.

One was that, although he had very little education, he had a Whitmanesque ability to comfortably hold contradictory ideas. For instance, as a Southerner born in the 19^th century and raised by people who lived through the reconstruction, he was a racist, about on a par with other people of his age and region. He got very upset when I hired a black singer for one of my bands. The fact that the guy sounded just like Nat King Cole didn’t really impress him. However, he closed his business and spent days trying to help a black mother with several small children who lived in an apartment behind his gas station. He got them fuel and food and then got the Salvation Army involved. So far as I know he neither asked for nor received any credit for his efforts, except maybe in my memory.

The other thing was that if there’s something you want, you just keep on keeping on. Granddaddy, the driver, always said that when he died he wanted to be behind the wheel of a new car. A bout of prostate cancer made that unlikely and caused him to close the gas station. But then he went to work for the Pontiac dealer. They couldn’t pay him much because he was on Social Security, but they did furnish him with a demonstrator. One morning, when he was 75 years old, Granddaddy got into his new Pontiac demonstrator, backed out of the driveway, pulled across the street, stopped the car and died. He’d had a massive heart attack. I imagine him with his hands on the wheel, looking out the windshield at the sleek hood of the new car, and smiling.

Would he have been a better man if he had adhered more closely to the truth? I don’t think so. His inventions were as much a part of him as his soldierly erect posture or the flat top he wore right up until he died. One of the things he left me was the conviction that you shouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. And that’s served me well for a long time.