My Dad's mother did not ever get to know her father because her mother took her and a trunk of clothes one night, and left her father sleeping in bed. She said she never saw her father again after she was seven years old. Her mother, my Great-Grandma Dot, was by all accounts a bitch of grade-A caliber who smoked and drank and swore like a sailor, who had a bluebird tattood on her shoulder. She ran a speakeasy for the mob on the banks of Lake Michigan, Wisconsin-side. I've seen the photos of the huge riding stables, the ice boats, the big studebaker cars, the multitude of full-length fur coats and smoking jackets. She got thrown into jail but kept her mouth shut, and when she got out of jail 2 years later, she had the deed and title to a ranch in Gabbs, Nevada, and partnership in a restaurant in San Francisco.

Dot's daughter was lost in all this, sent off to live with nuns for a while, then with an aunt, and finally she eloped with a charming blue-eyed soldier she met at a dance, who had three days before he was sent to Attu. They got married in Reno and she got pregnant, and then he was in the army stationed far away. She went to live with her husband's parents in the California foothills, and had her baby there. The baby was my father.