Pappy

This was a speech I wrote for speech class in college. Pretty awesomely, it went on to win a prize at the inaugural writer's symposium of that college a few months later.

I think everyone has a relative that stands out, someone who has done things that happen to be a part of what we call "history". As an aspiring historian, I wrote this speech really trying to commemorate, to record, to remember, a unique individual who lived life on his own terms.

There’s a story in our family (completely true, by the way) that my father’s grandfather once knocked out the Golden Gloves boxing champion with one punch. For a long time, I got this story mixed up: I was sure my grandfather had done it.

Williams Byron Gilmore —Pappy, to me—has always been a fighter; both by trade and by personality. He was a bomber pilot, racking up 127 combat missions, mostly in the Vietnam War, and ultimately retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. And, as he never tired of reminding us, he wasn’t just any bomber pilot: Pappy flew the B-58 “Hustler”, the world’s first supersonic bomber, capable of over Mach 2. It took a special breed of pilot to work with a plane that could pass 8 football fields in one second. You didn’t fly these things without serious skill, serious smarts and serious guts. You didn’t fly these things much, period. B-58 crews were the Air Force elite, handpicked from other strategic bomber squadrons. Pappy, with his “take no prisoners or guff, either” attitude, seemed born for the job.

Pappy was born in 1930, on November 18th. I, of course, wouldn’t meet him until much later. My first memories of him (forever captured on videotape) are images of him at play: my brother and I are wrestling him to the carpet, shrieking with laughter punctuated by his growling “Rowf! Rowf!” That is Pappy: he throws himself into life, and if it involves a fight along the way, so much the better.
Beyond these memories, it can sometimes be hard to say how well I actually know my grandfather.


Pappy’s a man that kept his business to himself and expected you to do the same. Most of my knowledge of him comes from stories—stories that my dad told me, or much more rarely, stories from Pappy himself. The Bill Gilmore of these stories is quite the character: a man who could outsmart, out-fight and out-cuss anyone. But these stories, as does the time spent in the company of the man himself, also reveal a steel-bound determination, and above all, a giant personality. Pappy, in his own way, is a legend.
In fact, even before he took to blasting around in supersonic bombers, one of his hobbies was racing cars. One day, some poor sap pulled up and revved his engine at Pappy in his bright red Austin Healey Sprite. Pappy, in true Bill-Gilmore fashion, let the guy stay neck-and-neck for a stretch, then flashed a wicked grin at his hapless opponent, put the car in fifth gear and tore off into the distance.


Much of our relationship has been at a bit of distance, both because Pappy has never been one for sentimentality and because he was never very thrilled about my parents’ decision to raise his grandkids on the mission field, least of all in Pakistan. I knew him then mostly through the rare letter to the family and the semi-regular birthday card. He usually signed them “Love, Pappy”, or sometimes “Love you fiercely”. I always loved it when he did that; it seemed so in character. Even his love was fierce.



To me, Pappy has always been a figure to respect. His gritty self-reliance is remarkable. He never asked anyone for anything. That’s why, even after his wife died, and his drinking raged out of control, he never asked for help. And that’s why, when his long history of drinking caught up to him, it was strange to see him so helpless. He had always been rightly proud of how he kept in knotty good shape – he didn’t stop lifting weights until he was well into older age, and regularly won seniors’ golf tournaments—but the drinking sucked the life right out of him. His weight dropped to 120 pounds, clinging loosely to his shrinking 5’3 frame. His insides, inflamed with drink, refused to function, and he would yell with the sharp pains that shot through his stomach.
Pappy, like every other time he faced a challenge, beat this one. My parents drove to his home in Florida and brought him to ours in Franklin. Pappy started to kick his addiction, sitting in a recliner like some wizened autocrat and watching Westerns, all the while giving his incomparable commentary on the weather, the food and the fact that his rations of Scotch were getting steadily smaller. His appetite came back, and he was more often, in his particular parlance, “hungry enough to eat the hind end out of a rag doll”. His pugnacity seemed to seep into his life, as if no such puny thing as a drinking habit could stand in the way of the force of nature that was Williams Byron Gilmore. He might get knocked down, but you could put down money that he’d answer the next bell. And that is what I respect about him.

Pappy has made a life out of fighting. His classic threat “I’ll kick your butt until your nose bleeds” sums up so much of his character, but also the way that that character has powered him through the challenges he’s faced. He’s not afraid of a challenge; he relishes it. Pappy meets life head on, full-speed at Mach 2. He doesn’t just live life—he sits immovably in the pilot’s seat, and let me tell you: he’s done it with serious skill, serious smarts and serious guts.