![]() Just before his real fifteenth birthday, in 1. First World War or from drinking. The drinking, as much as the illness, meant that my grandfather had, for some time, been doing more and more of the work in the family. ![]() ![]() ![]() As an eighth grader, he repaired the cars that came in. His mother sold candy and eggs from a shop at the side of the garage, and they lived with my grandfather. One of the few steady sources of revenue was state auto inspections; eventually, my grandfather did them himself, and his father just signed the form. You will notice that the time passes by slowly in Ishigaki. The 730 (Nana-San-Maru) was the day July 30, 1978, when Okinawa Prefecture of Japan switched back from driving on the right-hand side of the road to the left.My grandfather was good at it, which may be why, when his mother was widowed, she decided that he would be the one to quit school and go to work, though he was the youngest. He had wanted to go to high school with his siblings; he was a good athlete, and one of the coaches had already talked to him about playing. Still, this was his mother. The problem was that, to be a car inspector, you needed to be a licensed driver, and to have a license you needed to be sixteen. My grandfather was a year short. His mother went with him to the office of a justice of the peace, which is where you got a license in those days, and the J. P. Finally, he told my grandfather to go to a particular J. P., a couple of towns over, and just say that he was sixteen and in need of a driver. His colleague would not, he suggested, be as scrupulous about verifying his age. Japan Drivers license, Drivers license, conversion, Nagoya, Tokyo, Japan, driving lessons, driver license eligibility, driving test. 2-13-41 Tsubogawa, Naha City, Okinawa, Japan 900-0025. From Debito's doctoral research: Embedded Racism: Japan's Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination (Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield HB 2015, PB 2016) Click on book cover for reviews, previews, and 30% discount direct. It was the most honest dishonest solution that the justice of the peace could come up with, and it worked. The U. S. S. Mount Hood explodes, November 1. U. S. Naval Historical Center Photograph. My grandfather was still working in the garage when he was called before the local draft board, in 1. He told the draft board that he could fix cars pretty well, but that he wanted to learn to fix planes. A board member was telling him that they. But they put him on the U. S. S. Mindanao, whose mission was repairing internal- combustion engines for the Pacific Fleet. The Mindanao would anchor alongside another ship, and a crane crew would lift whatever was broken into its hold, where my grandfather and other mechanics fixed it. As in every Second World War story, one of his crewmates was a guy from Brooklyn. I heard about him when I was a little girl who was from Brooklyn, too. My grandfather liked the work and his chief officer, and he read repair manuals below deck in his spare time. The plume of smoke was seven thousand feet high, and the explosion damaged ships more than a mile away. Three hundred and seventy- two people were killed, including every man on the Mount Hood and twenty- three on the Mindanao, among them the guy from Brooklyn. It took a while for my grandfather to get on deck, and when he did he found it strewn with bodies. His leg was bleeding, but he told a medic that it wasn. The medic paused just long enough to dump a can of sulfa powder, a basic antibiotic, on the wound. It never properly healed. No one ever figured out for sure why the Mount Hood blew up. It is one of the minor unsolved mysteries of the Second World War. My grandfather and the other survivors of the Mindanao went to work repairing their own ship. They had it ready in time to help in the Battle of Okinawa, which ended, in an Allied victory, on June 2. His mother had rented out the garage to a beer distributor who parked his trucks there, and the lease wasn. He could find another place for his trucks. My grandfather and grandmother moved back into the apartment, and as the nineteen- fifties arrived, and the Carl J. Davidson Esso service station did well, he began building a house on a hill up the road, doing most of the work himself, after hours, with the help of family and friends. Soon, there were four children. Carl and Mary Lou Davidson, 1. But some things came apart. My grandmother left him and married a steel worker, who adored her and who won her a few cars in bowling tournaments; a couple of times, he was on . A woman named Mary Lou, who worked at the Westinghouse factory outside Pittsburgh, lived near the garage, in a house that she shared with a husband who was cruel to her in ways I. It was my great- grandmother who persuaded her that my grandfather would be worth it. They were married by a justice of the peace and were together until Mary Lou died, forty- four years later. Once, they went to a race track across the state line in West Virginia, and she won a few thousand dollars on some combination of races. A regular at the track. In my memory, when we drove to their house. When he was in his seventies, he cut back, and just repaired the cars of people he knew. He kept working there longer than he once thought he. Aliquippa had been a town with an actual company store, where, for some reason, mill workers were often given two- dollar bills, perfectly legal but elsewhere rare, for change. Whenever my grandfather was paid with one, he. After many years, he opened it, counted the bills, and found that he had enough to pay for the first year of my father. When my grandfather died, he had nine grandchildren and ten great- grandchildren. He did pretty well with the time he had.
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