January « 2011 « W+J Family Blog

Celebrating Grandpa Wachs

Sunday, January 23rd, 2011 by Amy

My beloved Grandfather, Miller Wachs, passed away peacefully at home yesterday, having lived almost 99 wonderful years. Others in my family have written eloquent things about Grandpa, but I’m struggling to come up with anything cohesive to say. All my memories are jumbled…..rather than try to write the perfect thing, which will never happen, I’m just going to write. And not judge myself for how it turns out. Because although Grandpa was a highly educated man that appreciated a well-written essay, he pretty much thought all the things his grandkids did were terrific.

One of the great gifts he and my grandmother gave me as a young girl was a sense that the world was a big beautiful place with countless interesting places and people to visit. My grandfather, the son of Methodist Missionaries, was born and spent the first 14 years of his life in what is now North Korea. He and my Grandmother literally travelled the world to places like India, Africa, China, Japan, and Norway—just to name a few. Everywhere they went, they bought me a doll that represented some important aspect of the country’s culture to teach me about the place they had visited.

Grandpa taught me many other of life’s important lessons: how to ski, how to play chess, a love and respect for the earth and how to tend a garden, and a love for music and education. Grandpa graduated from Dartmouth College and got a Master’s degree in Engineering from MIT. When it was time for me to apply to college, he and my grandmother took time to accompany me and my mother on a college tour through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. New Englanders to the core, I think they were very happy that I chose Clark University, as opposed to going to college in “the deep south” as they called it. Grandpa, with his beautiful baritone voice, was a member of the Dartmouth Glee Club and the Silver Moon Quartet when he was in college. Even though they lived a few hours away, my grandparents attended many of my choir concerts. They even came up to Worcester, MA for my last Clark Bars concert during my senior year of college.

Perhaps because my own father passed away when I was 11, Grandpa and Grandma took special care to be present for all the important events in my life. I don’t have a scanner, so I had to take the low-tech route to posting these pictures—I took photos of the prints with our camera and cropped them. I actually think it gave them a nice vintage look.

Grandpa and Grandma at my HS graduation May 1996