Hard Workin’ Man

Everyone has a gift to give. I truly believe that. When my grandfather, LeRoy Oesch, died last week in St. Louis at the age of 96, it seemed fitting to think about the gifts he gave to those of us who knew him. To me he offered two: the gift of hard work and the gift of generosity.

When he was a young man growing up in the Great Depression, there were times when he was the only one in his family who brought in a paycheck. Paid work was hard to come by in the 1930s, and what he earned had to help put food on the table for a family with 11 children.

In the 1940s, during WWII, he poured concrete for the factories in Detroit that supported the war effort. The factories were massive, the concrete was poured and finished by hand, and in those days he logged about 18 hours a day. He’d leave for work at noon, work through the night by the light of electric lamps, return home in the morning, sleep for 4 hours, and then start again. He was one of the youngest foremen on the crew – a tall man for his time, thin then but strong, strong as an ox, with enormous hands.

Those were a working man’s hands. As a toddler, I would walk with him and wrap my entire hand around one of his fingers. It is one of my clearest memories of childhood.

He worked hard all his life, until age finally caught up with him. In his 90s he became increasingly weak, and in the last 6 months he became quite frail. At the very end, he was too weak even to walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. For me, this was hard to watch. And for him too it was difficult. Here was a man who during the Depression walked 8 miles to work each morning and 8 miles home so he could save the 10 cents that it would have cost to take the street car. Back then, he once told me, 10 cents meant two loaves of bread for his family.

The other lesson he taught me was generosity. As a younger man, he was an usher in his church and responsible, therefore, for passing the tray and collecting the tithing that parishioners left after the service. He told me once that there are three types of people who give to the church: those who give what they can, those who give until it hurts, and those who give until it does some good.

Those words stick with me. I carry them and try to keep them in mind when friends and colleagues ask for a donation to support their cause. When money is tight, as it has been for so many of us during this recession, it’s easy to say, “I can’t afford to give right now.” But it’s precisely then that your giving really means something. That’s when your gift is true charity.

As a man who built his own successful business, as the hardest working man I’ve ever met, as a man who scrimped and saved so he could support his family through adversity and hard times, he taught me the value of working hard and giving back. My job now is to make the most of those precious gifts he bestowed upon me.