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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx SEQ 2
Growing up on the border and playing with the local children, both my grandfather and
his brother spoke excellent Spanish - the local conversational Spanish. My grandfather
had the gift for learning languages.
Serving in France in WW I my grandfather was trained as a machine gunner, an occupation
with a limited life expectancy. No one dealt more death on no man's land than the machine
gunner; thus he was a principal target. That's why so many stories of heroism from WWI include
things like "he single-handedly took out a machine gun nest..." However, at the last
moment, being a railroad man, he was tapped to fill the shortage of rail men in France
- so many Frenchmen already lost. By that stroke of luck he avoided the battlefield.
In that occupation he quickly learned to speak very good French in a conversational manner,
a faculty he kept all his life, and which proved useful when a kinsman's marriage after
the war brought a Belgian woman into the family.
(Now, I have no facility for foreign languages. I've had quite enough trouble with English
alone! As any persnickity grammarian will point out my sentences demonstrate.)
In 1911, my grandfather and uncle had learned from talk amongst the boys at school, of a
scheme - a plan - for the upcoming Cinco de Mayo dance, and insisted the whole family
must attend and *could not miss it*.
You see, it seems the older boys were paying their younger siblings a penny a piece for
every individual of a certain species of insect that they could collect...