{"id":786,"date":"2007-11-19T03:55:52","date_gmt":"2007-11-19T09:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/11\/19\/grandpa-oscar\/"},"modified":"2007-11-12T14:47:09","modified_gmt":"2007-11-12T19:47:09","slug":"grandpa-oscar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=786","title":{"rendered":"Grandpa Oscar"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written a lot<\/a> about my mother’s father, Don Hall.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his almost ninety years, I learned a lot about him.\u00a0 He’d been a superstar athlete at Jamestown College in the thirties; he’d worked on a CCC project to build the college stadium that still stands there.\u00a0 He coached the last undefeated regular season\/playoff\/championship string (1940, Grand Forks Central) in the history of North Dakota high school hoops.\u00a0 I drove with him at least once as he drove about the hinterlands of western North Dakota, selling drugs [*].\u00a0 I had the benefit of being nearly forty when he died; I spent plenty of time with him; long enough to introduce him to his great-grandkids.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was never that lucky with my Dad’s father, Oscar Berg, who’d be celebrating his 114th birthday if he were alive today.\u00a0 He\u00a0– along with my grandmother – was the proprietor of “Berg Studio”, a photography shop in Jamestown for\u00a030-odd years.\u00a0 Oscar\u00a0was a great photographer; some of his work still floats around central North Dakota, in thousands of senior photos and wedding pictures hanging on walls crammed with shots of peoples’\u00a0grand and great-grandparents,\u00a0and panoramic shots of towns and National Guard units and Masonic Lodge picnics hanging in local museums and city halls.<\/p>\n

He died, apparently of a heart attack, in March of 1942, leaving my grandma to run the photography studio and raise Dad.\u00a0 I know him only from photographs; my brother Jim inherited the looks, the lucky sod\u00a0(and my son Zam got his eyes, I think).\u00a0<\/p>\n

He’d done a bunch of other things – I’m still not entirely sure about what, although I know he lived in Saint Paul for a while; my Dad has an old photo of him in a streetcar conductor’s uniform.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0He was born on this date in 1893.\u00a0 It’s strange, sometimes, thinking I’m just two generations removed from the nineteenth century.\u00a0<\/p>\n

[*] to pharmacists, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written a lot about my mother’s father, Don Hall.\u00a0 In his almost ninety years, I learned a lot about him.\u00a0 He’d been a superstar athlete at Jamestown College in the thirties; he’d worked on a CCC project to build the college stadium that still stands there.\u00a0 He coached the last undefeated regular season\/playoff\/championship string […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoriam","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}