My Grandfather Had Gumption

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Gretchen Barnhill Freshman Composition My Grandfather had Gumption My grandfather, R. G. Russ Jr. was a very quiet man, and when he spoke everyone listened as if it were the man upstairs talking. Growing up in the twenties and thirties an eighth grade education was the extent of what most people received. His father told him at fifteen that he had gone to school long enough and it was time to stay home and farm with him. My grandfather had a different plan. He decided to leave home at fifteen and make it on his own. He was not going to farm, somehow he knew there was so much more out there for him to see, do, and learn. From the time I was four years old, I remember him telling me how important it was to get an education. My grandfather made his way to Canyon, Texas where he enrolled in West Texas Normal College, now WTAMU. He shined shoes to pay for his classes and stayed in a boarding house. After a year in Canyon, he decided to head to Lubbock, Texas. He got a job at a dry goods store in Downtown Lubbock, where he worked in the afternoons and attended his classes at Texas Tech in the mornings. At that time, Texas Tech was two miles from town. He found a boarding house to stay in that was right in the middle of both work and school. He would walk one mile to his classes every morning and then two miles to work and a mile back home at the end of the day, no matter what the weather was. During the winters he would get up at four in the morning to light a fire so the house would warm up before he made his mile walk to school. He did this for three years, and I’m proud to say that he graduated from Texas Tech in the very first 4 year class in 1929 with a degree in Education. During WWII, he enlisted in the Army, but they rejected him because he was a half inch too short. He wanted to contribute something so he came to the Air Base in Amarillo and

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