My Grandfather, Floyd Bailey, often used the expression "...man enough..." as in "I wasn't man enough to throw that hay bale into the hay loft." or as in a question to me, "Are you man enough to make a B in algebra, even though you don't like it?" Every week I would hear another "man enough" statement from him and it helped me know what a man was, even while I was a boy. When he was old frail, he poked fun of himself about not being "man enough" to work a full day in the heat. But it wasn't hard for me to figure out that he was man enough to accept his condition and man enough to to be happy in spite of being old and frail.
Floyd was known to his grandchildren for "making trouble" or "making mischef" as one of his grandkids calls it. He would tease and bait people so that they would have to respond, sometimes with anger, and then he would act very serious and somber, but he secretly thought that was funny. A good example is the story on this web site called Sam�s Eagle Gets Loose. In this instance he tormented Sam's dad until he got told off. Of course he thought this was great fun..
Floyd was a farmer all his life and he only left Carleton for a few years at the business college in Beatrice..
His wife, who he affectionately called "Lu" was the love of his life and I remember him singing a love song to her in the last year of his life. The song was "When you and I were young, Maggie" and it nearly brings tears to my eyes to hear it sung today..
Floyd loved music, and his favorite tunes were the sweet Irish ballads, as well as some other popular tunes of the day. He taught himself to play the harmonica and to chord on the piano. He would sit on his front porch summer evenings and play a verse on the harmonica and then sing the verse, moving through the whole song this way. Some evenings he would be inspired after singing a song to go back in the house and play it on the piano where he could sing at the same time he was playing. He freely admitted to singing while working on his tractor, even though the sound of his singing was dround out by the roar of the engine. He played the harmonica at square dances in old country schools. He saved his money and bought a wind organ, the kind you had to pump with your feet while playing..
My grandmother told me the first time she saw him he was on horseback and he was an excellent rider and he "rode proud". He kept his tractors and farm equipment in tip-top shape, but was reluctant to do repair or maintenance on his cars. The cars, therefore, were rattletraps of great renoun. Lu told me that the steering wheel came off in his hands one time while he was driving, and the car turned by itself off the road and rolled to a stop in somebody's garden. The husband came out to the garden to see the mess and told him, "Floyd, you'd better get that thing out of here before my wife gets home!".
Floyd rolled his own cigarettes and his brand of tobacco was Prince Albert in the red tin cans. When he was finished with a can of Prince Albert he would throw it on the ground. When I was a child I thought the barnyard around his farm would eventually become totally paved with Prince Albert cans..
Floyd was a life-long Mason and the Masons were important to him. He kept his thoughts on God and religion to himself, but I know the Mason's were the source of his beliefs..
Floyd was man enough to sing a love song to his wife, man enough to sing on his front porch on summer evenings, man enough to love his grandkids to pieces..