T GAMBLE: Nuggets are where you can find them with family historian

As a child, it seems things were much different in how we dealt with the elderly and death. There weren’t really many “old folks” homes, and the ones that existed were really pretty bad. In many cases, the grandmother or great-grandmother would be cared for in the end by an adult child. Some of that seems better to me than being stuck off somewhere that no one wants to be, but I do also recognize that at times a person can’t handle the situation and would be better off in a facility that can.

Anyway, when I was very small, my Grandmother Gamble had her mother living at home with her in a hospital bed. She was my great-grandmother, and we called her Granny. She was not in good shape and slept most of the time, but my grandmother took great care of her until the end. She died there in the home with her family, as it should be, I suppose. It strikes me that my grandmother was born in the late 1800s, and my great-grandmother was born before the Civil War. My word, what changes she must have seen. I wish I had conversed with her about such things, but I was too little and whatever she knew died with her.

So that left me with my father as the Gamble family historian. He often mixes up names and places, so who knows its accuracy when you get family lore from him. The general story will be true, but maybe it was really Granddaddy Gamble, and not cousin Sam, that did it, or vice versa. My father will ask, “Are Conrad Johnson and Jim Conrad brothers?” I will say, “ Not that I know of, why do you ask?” He will say, “Well, they have the same name, so I thought they might be brothers.” I don’t even bother to explain one has a same last name as the other’s first name.

But my dad did tell me how, when he was a child, he attended Parrott Elementary School. Back then, each little town had a school. The school year was ending, and the school was having sort of a field day festival. There would be little vendors, and games, and a talent show. My father told his teacher he had a trick dog and wanted to enter it in the talent show. The teacher was enthusiastic about a well- trained trick dog and said bring him on. Never mind the dog knew about as many tricks as my father, which I think equaled somewhere around none.

To my knowledge, my father has never had a dog that would even sit, much less perform tricks. We Gambles are famous for setting unrealistic expectations, and this was about to become another one. My childhood goal was to become an Indian. So far, I have been unsuccessful, but with people identifying as the opposite sex and all the rest, I may finally be closing in on my goal by identifying as an Apache.

My dad said he went home and practiced a little with the dog jumping through a hoop and a few other tricks. Apparently the dog was not an especially quick learner, and my father was not destined to become a dog trainer. Hope springs eternal, however, in the mind of a third-grader, and he showed up with the dog ready to ooh and aah the crowd with his faithful companion’s skills.

He got on stage, pulled out a hoop for the dog to jump through, and called the dog to bound through the circular sphere. Instead the dog looked startled, viewed the grade-school crowd, leapt off the stage and headed for parts unknown. My father’s entertainment career leapt off with him.

He spent a good deal of time searching for the dog. A happy ending occurred when he found the dog and the dog lived happily ever after, out of the glaring spotlight of fame and fortune. And I got one more jewel of a story from the family historian.