After reading this story * yesterday about tracing birth families and the two Chicago men in their 80s who discovered just last year that they are brothers, I decided that it’s finally time for me to write down my father’s story. In full. I can’t let any more time go by or it might never be told. Got to do it now, if for no other reason than I owe it to my sons, who never had the chance to know their grandpa Gunnar and have never realized how much and in how many ways I see him in them.
See the shoulders? My dad is 14 or 15 here and already well on his way to his full height of 6′ 2 1/2″. Yeah, he’s doing that Ugh I’m Sitting Between Ma and Pa slouching thing, but even so you can see the breadth of those shoulders. A few years later he made All-City as a defensive lineman for Mpls Roosevelt. Now jump forward to 2008: my oldest son is 6’2″, my youngest is nearly 6’3″, and both of them have that same silhouette, the same broad shoulders as the kid in the picture.
This story is going to be a while in the telling. It’s too much for one post, so I’ll be asking for your indulgence and patience as I roll this out piece by piece. It’s a really good story, tho, and well worth the telling, and for far too long now all of it has needed to be written down. Or at least as much of it as we know.
*h/t to the ‘Sippifarian for the link
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