the great Pottawatomie and other heritage fiascos

Grandpa Bob liked to explain that the high bridge on his nose - he claimed it was a bump - was a result of an ancient Indian (native american) lineage. He told us grandkids that he was related to the great Pottawatomie Indian tribe of Illinois. The Pottawatomie really were in Illinios a long time ago (I once lived near Pottawatomie Park in Chicago), but no one has been able to prove Bob's claim to an indigenous heritage. Well, most of the adults laughed about the story, anyway, but I don't thing folks realized how much the grandkids believed it. One day, Bob's grandaughter Amy was called into the principal's office at her gradeschool because she had marked 'native american' on a school form. Amy is a very light skinned red-head, about as far from indian looking as one can get, and when her teacher contested her claims to native ethnicity, she insisted that she was part Pattawatomie until her folks came down and sorted it out, explaining that her gramps had been telling her about her indigenous nose for years. Grandpa had to cool it on the Pattawatomie stories for a while, but they came back full force a few years later. (Personally, I think Bob bears some resemblance to the Pottawatomie chief pictured above.)

Bob has a bit more conceiveable of a claim to an Irish heritage, given that his great great (great?) grandmother came on a boat from County Galway long ago. When I was in graduate school I tried to turn that heritage into cold hard cash. A friend of mine had received a scholarship for a couple thousand from the Daughters of the American Revolution. All you had to do was prove you had someone fighting against the English and you could get funding from DAR. I phoned grandma and grandpa, remembering that we had folks coming over here and back even before they settled from Ireland - I thought surely they might have fought alongside their American rebel friends. Well it turned out we did have some of grandpa's relatives over here fighting -- however, they fought for the English - the wrong side. It wasn't exactly the romantic irish rebel heritage we had told ourselves about, and DAR respectfully declined my application for funds. Later I did travel to Ireland (Dot and Bob travelled there in the 80s as well), and visited Galway, from where our turncoat relatives might have sailed long ago.

Bob was KING of the One-liners

Few could escape Grandpa Bob's sense of humor. He was the king of the one-liner jokes. For whatever reason, I remember a lot of Bob's jokes centered around monkeys or lawnmowers. I remember three in particular that he re-told so many times that part of the joke was that, well, he would re-tell it, knowing you were going to groan afterward.

Q: What did the monkey say when he got his tail caught in the lawnmower?
A: it wont be long now! (*groan*)

Q: How do frenchmen say they are going to cut the grass?
A: mowa-dee-laun! (*groan*)

Q: What do you call a car that doesn't run -- in Spanish?
A: No-va. {as on chevy nova. get it? "no va" means "doesn't go" in Spanish. Get it now? har!}
(*ay...carumba...groan*)

Bob West: Superhero ?

Amy and Anne Marie West have long suspected that their Grandpa Bob might be a superhero. To acknowledge this secret identity Amy created a superhero t-shirt for Bob -- much like Superman's(tm) -- when she was about 6 years old. Many people told the grandkids that the superhero identity was just a silly old story grandpa went along with. YET, it is also true that **NO ONE had ever seen Bob IN THE SAME ROOM AS SUPERMAN** Therefore, it would be irresponsible and illogical of us to seriously eliminate the possibility that Bob was a superhero.

This guy had too much of an impact on us to ever be really gone

Robert West passed away on April 28th 2007. He was 87 years young and lived an amazing life. We miss him and are commemorating his life on Wednesday May 5th, and yet it would be difficult for any of us to forget Bob. Bob made life better for all of us in his nuclear-ish family - his wife Dorothy, his children Timothy West and Bobbie West, Tim's wife Valerie, and his grandchildren: Caroline Yezer, Amy, Anne Marie and Robbie West. Bob will also be remembered by numerous cousins, nieces, nephews, great nieces, great nephews and probably a whole bunch more folks I am forgetting to list right here. Many of these folks live in South Bend, Indiana - from where Bob got much of his anecdotal material about living "on the farm". He came from a big Irish Catholic family, many of whom still live in the Chicago/Indiana region. Bob is very close to the heart of the most recent addition to his home: his adopted family member, Honey, a Jack Russell terrier who devoted herself to keeping Bob's charitable snackie handouts flowing.