The Best Man I Ever Knew
Growing Up As A Girl Child In America: Part 13
My brother Sam said that our grandfather only raised his voice to him once. In all my growing up years, he never raised his voice to me.
Everything I have in my life today, I owe to the lessons taught by my grandfather, E. Norton “Nort” Sturtevant. My brother and I and our cousins called him Bampy.
I’ve known many good men. I’ve known geniuses. I’ve known great bosses. I’ve loved men from fine families and men of honor.
But none of them were my Bampy.
He was a 4-letter athlete in high school and a 6-year star football player at the University of Redlands. He worked at a men’s clothing store for years before becoming foreman of the Sunkist Packing House and eventually buying his own 10-acre orange grove, the place where I spent my first five years.
He was married to the “most beautiful woman in Redlands” — years later, this is how my mother’s school friends described my grandmother, Nana, Lyda Doak Sturtevant, to me.
He was the most respected and loved man in our hometown of Redlands, California, for all the years I knew him and for many years before that.
John Wayne always reminded me of my grandfather.
Only John Wayne was an ersatz cartoon copy of the real man who raised me.
Bampy’s best friend was “Blackie” Wilshire, a founder of the nearby mountain town where apples grew, Oak Glen. I remember Blackie well also; both he and Bampy liked to read picture books to me when I was small.
Which man had the deeper tan from working outside from dawn to night? It’s hard to say. Years later I heard a rumor that “Blackie” was called that because he had Black ancestry.
So do many of us.
Bampy’s dark tan came from his Welsh ancestry. A relative traced him back to medieval French and Welsh nobility. He’s not my blood grandfather, by the way.
That’s important.
My mother was not his blood daughter; her father was Bob Roberts, my grandmother’s first husband.
Bob Roberts’ father was reportedly a Scottish sea captain and his mother, a snob. When my grandmother became pregnant, he brought her some tea and said, “Here, drink this and you won’t have to worry about the baby.”
Nana refused and soon divorced him. At the time she met Bampy, she was a young single mother in the 1920s in Southern California. For several months, she dated both Bampy and Brett, a wealthy banker from Los Angeles. Then Bampy proposed to her on the porch at the Sycamore Inn on Route 66 in Rancho Cucamonga.
This is the same Nana who told me years later, “It’s just as easy to love a rich man as it is to love a poor one.”
Bampy wasn’t rich when they got married. Brett was the wealthy one, and he died not long after of a heart attack.
But Nana and Bampy were married for another 50 years until Bampy died in 1975. I was 13 years old, but in those years I was raised by him, he imparted to me every good value and life lesson that I ever knew.
Bampy gave me the values, the rules for life, that have enabled me to successfully survive — and even to this day — thrive.
The First Value: Always Tell the Truth
I don’t know how old I was when Bampy told me “Always tell the truth.” It’s one of my first memories. I don’t even remember what little childish lie I told.
I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never lied or do not lie. But every time I’ve been in a situation since where I’ve been tempted to lie, I hear his calm voice saying, “Honey, always tell the truth.”
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
His eyes were clear and innocent and grey. He was a beautiful man in all ways.
I remember touching the back of his thick steel-gray hair above his deeply-tanned neck, nestling my head on his strong shoulder.
“Always tell the truth. Don’t make things up to get out of trouble.”
So, for the most part, I’ve obeyed this instruction and it has served me very well.
It’s what kept Art Seidenbaum from firing me way back in 1982 at the LA Times Book Review.
Most of all, I’ve obeyed this rule in everything I’ve written.
The Second Value: If You Can’t Say Something Good, Don’t Say Anything At All
One day I came home with a story about another kid getting in trouble at school.
We were working outside and Bampy listened politely. When I was finished, he said, “If you can’t say something good, don’t say anything at all.”
We talked about why the kid might have acted up. Bampy gently reminded me that I didn’t know their family or any reasons for their behavior. He never failed to remind me that bullies always bullied others because that’s how they were treated at home. He also never failed to tell me that I shouldn’t judge others unless I wanted to be held to the same standard.
Ever since, when I’ve been tempted to talk about someone else’s problems, I’ve remembered his gentle words.
The Third Value: Nobody’s Candle Ever Burned Brighter
I felt the need to be perfect since early childhood, and much of this feeling is probably just as innate as my grandmother’s strict rules about behavior, appearance, and actions in even the smallest way.
One day, a kid got a prize at school that I thought I should have gotten. I came home and once again, was weeding in the garden with Bampy and I told him about it.
“I know you did a great job, honey,” he said, “but nobody’s candle ever burned brighter because they put someone else’s out.”
This bothered me at the time, because I didn’t like the other kid and thought they were a brown-nosing apple polisher who was unfairly chosen over me —
and likely, this was even true
At the same time, this difficult lesson has also served me well in later life. Now, I can look at others’ success and see it as separate from myself. I can let everyone else’s candles burn as they will.
The Fourth Value: Treat Everyone Else As You Would Want To Be Treated
We know this worldwide as “The Golden Rule.” I’ve written it as Bampy said it to me.
Bampy demonstrated this lesson in his actions and daily behavior. I never saw him treat anyone with less than respect and dignity.
In 13 years, I never heard my grandfather talk down to anyone. I never saw him fail to listen respectfully. I never heard him interrupt — anyone. He would listen to my grandmother’s emotional outbursts and wait for her to quiet before saying anything in return. And when he did speak, it was quietly and calmly.
Every day, I saw him politely and respectfully address every man who worked in the grove, including his foreman, Mr. Beltran, my school friend Johnny’s father. Mrs. Beltran took care of me often, along with her own children.
I did not grow up in an orange grove where Spanish-speaking people were treated as less than me, less than my family, and less than my grandfather. I never saw or heard anyone ordered around or asked to do work that my own grandfather would not and did not do. As a little kid, I was out in that grove working as much as a small child could or would do.
He and Blackie had a close friendship, but I never heard the men curse at each other or put each other down. There was none of the fake back-slapping bullshit I’ve watched so many men engage in over the years.
I sat quietly in the brush, watching them work together in the silent drama that was real hunting, back in the day — for deer, dove, and quail.
I understand now that these lessons were enforced on my grandfather on the football and baseball field, in the Sheriff’s office, in his relationship with his boss Sheriff Joe Rivera, and over the years in our hometown , in the myriad relations that go on in a small town — lessons that he had learned, and in turn, was passing on to this little child who his beloved wife brought home after her mother, the daughter he’d raised, had died.
Other things he said: “God gave you two ears and one mouth — ” so you’ll listen twice as much as you speak. We all know this one.
I’ve heard the phrase “ACAB” many times, and I’ve never been fond of police though I’ve known some very good cops and some kind cops and even a few honest ones. My grandfather was a good cop, and he quit the service because he realized that outside of wartime, it wouldn’t be possible for him to continue that work and remain the kind of man he was.
My grandfather, without being explicit, taught me the problem with cops, and the problem with bad men. His lessons may well have saved my life when, as a young woman, I was pulled over by a man who became known as a notorious CHP killer.
I grew up in a time where there were no computers.
Television was on for no more than an hour a day, and when it was, it was going to be Walter Cronkite or Lawrence Welk. I remember the day Bampy brought home a big color console television to take the place of our small black and white one. I remember the ice box in the kitchen at the grove house and even the ice man who was also the milk man.
I spent all my waking hours either playing or hiking or working outside under the Southern California sun, in the foothills of the big mountains, along the Santa Ana riverbed.
I looked for Indian arrowheads, for a glimpse of a bobcat or a cougar, for the silvery flash of a trout in the stream.
Sometimes we would sit and listen to Bampy’s console radio.
I had a tiny white transistor radio and I’d listen to the Dodgers’ game on it, beside my bedroom window where one morning, I opened the curtain to see a redtailed hawk sitting on the fence crying in joy and eating a squirrel, not three feet away from my astonished face.
After Bampy died, the calm voice of Dodger announcer Vin Scully comforted me. I heard my grandfather’s goodness in that voice, even though they were very different men.
I only heard Bampy raise his voice once.
I was riding my little red tricycle around the circular driveway at the grove house.
You will see a photo of me riding my pony Dapple around the same driveway, and I’m wearing a little cowgirl outfit. Our neighbors the Price boys, a little bit on the rowdy side, taught me how to ride and care for Dapple. Years later, I wore Bampy’s gunbelt from the Sheriff’s office, and rode Dapple in the front of my tiny rural town Fourth of July parade so proudly.
The gunbelt was tooled with a message on the inside: “To Nort From the Girls of G Street” — not everything was so wholesome at the Sheriff’s office — but I didn’t know what that meant, as a 12-year-old. To this day, G Street is where the working girls walk.
I was riding my tricycle around the circular drive — around and around — and Bampy’s friend Dale from the Sheriff’s office was on the front porch with him, drinking beer.
I saw the banty hens in their pen next to the screen porch. I saw Bampy’s garden. And we were right in the middle of the orange grove.
Bampy and Dale were talking about someone named Cassius Clay, and I heard the name “Lew Alcindor.”
That’s a funny name, I thought.
Then Bampy stood and loudly said, “Get the hell off my porch until you can take that word out of your mouth.”
He was pointing for Dale to get up and leave.
I stopped and looked, amazed. Bampy was never angry.
“What the hell?” Dale said. He repeated the word, and I heard it then, for the first time.
It was the “n-word.”
“Get the hell out!” Bampy said again, and Dale left.
It was 1968 and I was five years old. The men were talking about Muhammad Ali and his opposition to the Vietnam War. It would be several more years before Lew Alcindor, then a huge college basketball star, became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
It was not my non-racist father who taught me racial equality although he greatly enforced it in both word and deed.
Bampy had other lessons too, like “Don’t start a fight you’re not prepared to finish,” and showing me how to clean a fish and dress a deer. He showed me how to clean his service revolver and oil his rifle. He said, “Never point a gun at anyone unless you intend to use it.”
I have lived my life by these values that he taught me. Never perfectly —
I do not think these values I was raised with are exclusively American.
But wherever they are obeyed, is a place where people can and do live well together. And they’re the values everyone should practice for healthy, happy lives that do as little harm to others as possible and as much good for our selves.
He was and always will be the best man I ever knew.
A lovely tribute and wonderful memories.
What a tribute. I was born in 1970, so still remember running around in the woods, making up games, having adventures. Computers have certainly quashed much of childhood.
"I’ve known some very good cops and some kind cops and even a few honest ones." A great sentence.