My grandfathers

 

If you were born in a different time, with the same aptitudes, skills and interests, what would your life be like? If your chosen career did not yet exist, what would you do? My own profession has existed for 60-70 years, the way I spend my days (staring at a computer) a way of life for 20-30 years, with most of the scientific specifics possible only for the last 10-15. 

My grandfathers' dreams are lost in the pre-digital cloud. If they ever wrote letters expressing their plans and ambitions, I have not seen them. No journalists or bloggers described their noteworthy accomplishments. My sister has recorded the critical dates of births, marriages and deaths in the family genealogy. Otherwise, there are only black and white photographs in the albums downstairs, vague recollections of the few days I ever spent with them, and the deeper memories of my few surviving aunts and uncles.

My father's father emigrated from Germany to Canada with a woman who may have had another husband or may have been a widow, and her (not his) daughter. They combined their Saskatchewan land-grant quarter-sections into a larger farm. My father was born there. They grew wheat without much help from the sciences of plant breeding or pesticides or soil chemistry or crop rotation, through the rust epidemics and dust bowls that were the Great Depression. The farmers then were scientists, as they are now, experimenting from year to year, checking what happened if they changed this or modified that. They were also engineers and mechanics, taking pieces from one machine to keep another working, designing and assembling goofy gadgets to amuse the young at heart. My grandparents retired to the coast. After my grandmother died, my grandfather took one long, last walk in the cold Vancouver rain so that he could forget.

My mother's father was a Minnesota Swede, who emigrated to Canada and found an ex-patriot Briton for a wife. He did not graduate high school and never learned to write cursive, so his signature was printed. He repaired refrigerators, another experimental, engineering mind. Together, he and his youngest son (my uncle, who eventually earned a PhD) built a six inch reflector telescope that led my uncle and eventually me into the stars. My grandfather ended up in an old folks' home before Alzheimer's had the name, when senility was just a normal, unexplained consequence of old age.

Farmer, refrigerator repairman, then a next generation with an architect, another farmer, a radio recording engineer, a test pilot and rebuilder of crashed aircraft, a research physicist, and then eventually my own generation with its PhDs and MScs and BScs. Actors beget actors, musicians musicians, but there were fewer professional scientists back then to lead their children along their own paths. The aptitudes were there for my grandfathers, but not the opportunities. I know a few multigenerational scientific families, but not many. What might my grandfathers have done in today's world of possibility?

If you were born in a different time, with the same aptitudes, skills and interests, what would your life be like? If your chosen career did not yet exist, what would you do?