John Grimes

"Moonlight can take the sordid or the garish and clothe it in majesty.  Sometimes a person with a great soul can come upon a commonplace scene and effect an equal transformation." 

"If you find a mistake in this paper, please consider that it was there for a purpose.  We write something for everyone, including those who are always looking for mistakes." 

These lines are taken from a collection of work entitled "The Best of Grimes", a pamphlet published in the 1960s.  John Grimes served as the editor and publisher of 'The Microphone', the weekly bulletin of the Rotary Club of Oxford, New York.  

"The Best of Grimes" collects material from that weekly bulletin.  My Dad was a stalwart member of the Club, and I found a copy of this little publication while cleaning out my Mom's home after her recent death. 

I have large memories of John Grimes for one reason:  he was our 'shop teacher' in junior high school.  He was soft-spoken, erudite, and quietly humorous.  He was full of pithy sayings.  He was clearly a man who had lived a few different lives, had been through a great deal of travail and travels, and whose experiences lent him an air of life-wisdom to  impart to junior high boys. 

Mr. Grimes had an interesting way of assigning work in his shop.  We were supposed to rotate through different types of projects:  something with wood, something with metal, something electrical.  Problem was, there were more boys than tools.  Plus, Mr. Grimes could clearly recognize who had a modicum of skills with woodworking or metallurgy, and who had three thumbs and were likely to hurt themselves once a week. 

So I became a printer. 

The shop included a manual printing press and an extensive collection of print trays with various fonts and print styles.  We printed bulletins for school sporting events, assemblies, graduations, plays – and the occasional 'contract work' for things like Rotary Club bulletins.  There was no lack of work, thus the need for regular operators in every class. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Grimes would do the other projects for us.  I may have done the last sanding on that baseball bat, but he ran the lathe to make it look like a bat.  I probably ran the wire up the middle section of the lamp that I proudly took home to Mom, but I'm sure he hooked the whole thing together so that it would stand on its own and the bulb would glow when plugged into the socket. 

I had too many printjobs to set to be making bats and lamps.

I enjoyed every minute of it.  To this day, I will gravitate to the printer's building whenever we visit the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown. 

I wasn't the only one to learn this skill under Mr. Grimes' tutelage.  My brother Dennis was a printer.  I'm sure there are other classmates who remember inkstains on their hands while sitting in other classrooms. 

Since those days, I have heard other stories about John Grimes.  One story has him playing baseball in the minor leagues.  Supposedly, he was a teammate and close friend of the Waner brothers, Paul and Lloyd, known as "Big and Little Poison" in the Pirates system. Part of the story is that Grimes played under an alias due to questions about some aspect of his past.   

I have no idea whether this is true.  I do know that John Grimes made a mark on my life (and he would have smiled at the pun), and he left behind many thoughtful words in a Rotary Club bulletin. 

"Some of us find happiness in toil, some in art, some in the open air and the sunshine.  All of us find it in simply being alive.  Life is the gift no creature would part with."