Honoring the original ‘Gris’ on his birthday

I try to honor my parents every day.

It was one of those commandments Moses brought down from the top of the mountain. Honor thy father and mother. 

Although my dad died in 2006, two days after his 82nd birthday, I still find ways to honor him. I reflect on something he said or did. 

His name was Jennings Melvin Grisamore. Folks called him “Gris” long before it became my nickname, too.

I especially wanted to honor his memory today, which would have been his 100th birthday. He was born on November 1, 1924.  Appropriately enough, today is All Saints Day.

(Fittingly, it is also the birthday of The Macon Telegraph, where I began my newspaper career. The Telegraph began publishing on Nov. 1, 1826, and is the city’s oldest business.)

Over the years, I have enjoyed sharing the story of the night my father was born because it didn’t happen the way it was recorded a century ago. 

There was some creative editing.

On Halloween night in 1924, the country doctor rode his horse to a farmhouse 13 miles from Jamesport, Missouri, to deliver a baby boy. He was summoned on a neighbor’s party line from a battery-operated telephone. 

My grandmother’s labor was long and difficult. It was complicated because the baby – the youngest of her three children – was delivered by frank breech an hour before midnight.

“Dr. Harris, I don’t want my baby born on Halloween,’’ my grandmother told the doctor.

“That’s no problem,’’ he said.

There was no birth certificate, and November 1 was fixed as the date of my father’s birth in the family Bible.

My dad attended school in a one-room schoolhouse. (I keep a framed photograph of it in my study.) When he was 10, he almost died of scarlet fever. His family had to be quarantined for several months.

In the 1930s, their farm was swallowed and choked by the Dust Bowl. They sold their livestock, equipment and household furnishings for $200. They loaded their old Nash and drove Route 66 to California, like in a chapter right out of “The Grapes of Wrath.” 

(Sadly, when they reached the agricultural inspection station at the Arizona-California border, they were not allowed to take across a ham they had brought. They had to eat it along the side of the road.)

My father was 17 and was barely shaving when he went into the Navy for World War II. He became the first in his family to go to college – and later medical school – on the GI bill.

He came South for his internship at Grady Hospital in Atlanta. Grady was segregated in those days, and his first duty was delivering black babies. There was a tunnel under the street connecting the two hospitals. 

Dad later worked at the VA hospital in Atlanta. He met and married my mother, a stewardess for Delta Airlines, at the First Baptist Church in Hawkinsville in August 1954. 

They had five children in nine years. He was 43 years old, and a doctor in the mill town of LaGrange, when he re-enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Vietnam.

 He was chief of surgery at the 600-bed hospital in DaNang. When injured soldiers were brought in from the jungles, their uniforms were covered in Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide. His exposure to it contributed to his cancer later in life, but he never blamed anyone.

He lived an amazing timeline. He traveled to all 50 states and all seven continents, even Antarctica. He was a rock hound, drove an old pickup and enjoyed going to the movies.  He was so cold-natured, he had the “ultimate dad joke.’’ He wanted to be cremated, so he could finally be warm. He had a green thumb and a hard head. (Yes, he had a stubborn streak. I have stories.)

He was a staunch Midwestern Republican who put sugar on his grits and had an affinity for Vienna sausage. It wasn’t until several years after his death I pieced together why he loved it.  The Grisamore farm was located a few miles outside of Trenton, Missouri, which was once the world’s largest producer of Vienna sausage.

He and my mom moved to Macon in 2002, and the four years he lived here were among his happiest. He made new friends and made a difference in the community. The banana trees now growing in the community garden at Mulberry United Methodist came from a single banana tree he bought at a Florida nursery when we were on a family vacation more than 60 years ago.

One of my favorite dad stories was when he worked on the NASA medical teams for Gemini 10 and Apollos 9, 10 and 11. He was a captain in the Navy and a surgeon at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station hospital in Florida. For the Apollo missions, he was on standby at a nearby military hospital in the event of an emergency during one of the launches.

Apollo 11, of course, was the first moon landing. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first to walk on the moon. Michael Collins, sometimes known as the “forgotten astronaut” orbited the moon 30 times in the command module.

 Three years earlier, Collins had made his inaugural space flight on Gemini 10 as part of the two-man crew with John Young.  My dad was part of the team of physicians aboard the USS Guadalcanal after Gemini 10’s splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. As the senior medical officer, he was assigned to give Collins his post-flight physical. 

When Collins removed his space suit, a small bible was strapped to his left thigh. 

That made a tremendous impression on my dad, a man of great faith.  

Years later, I learned Collins shared a birthday with my father.  

It was October 31 … the date my father straddled with the first day of November.

My grandmother had it written at the front of the family bible.

I guess she knew he was going to be a saint. And he was.

Ed Grisamore has been a newspaper columnist in Middle Georgia for more than 45 years. He is the author of nine books and received the 2024 John Holliman Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.