Grandpa’s favorite

Something special happened between Shelley Hergett and her grandfather. She attributes that to their personalities, the timing of family events and chewing tobacco. She knows he online invited her to watch Disney on his (then rare) color TV. He made her popcorn and let her sit on his ottoman – the only person allowed to do that.Her status solidified over chewing tobacco. As Hergett recalls, “I was like six years old. I was in my Sunday best with my hair in banana curls. My grandparents still lived down the hill from us. I visited them a lot. I had on a white dress, so it had to be around Easter.”“He kept his snuff cans in the refrigerator. Whenever I asked ‘what are they?’ My grandmother would say, ‘it’s nasty.’”“I would see him take one out of the refrigerator, take out whatever was in the can and put it into his mouth. Being six, I thought it was candy.”“I asked him, ‘what is that and what do you do with it?’ That is when he explained ‘It is snuff. I put it in my mouth. I’ll show you.’”“He took me outside. He must have asked if I wanted to try it. He taught me how to chew and spit so it would not go down the chin and all over the white dress.“We stood out there, chewing, spitting and keeping it off ourselves. We got into a contest to see who could spit the furthest. Because what else would you do?“My less than five foot grandmother came out the door and saw us. She used his full name and just chewed him up one side and down the other. He was about 5 feet 10 inches. After she got done, she went inside. I don’t understand why she didn’t take me in with her.“I was scared. I had heard so many stories about him losing his temper. I expected him to yell at me. He didn’t look at me. He kept looking out the back yard. Then he said, ‘You want to go out back behind the garage?’ It was in an alley. So we went back there and spit.” They had other spitting contests behind the garage during other visits. “I never won any contest. If I won, he would have abruptly stopped the spitting contest.” Her skill in spitting paid off after she earned her engineering degree and began working as a petroleum engineer on an offshore oil rig finishing the wells and bringing them online in the early 1980s. “Being a Yankee and a 22-24 year old girl, they didn’t expect me to know what to do in a spitting contest. I stood on the edge of the rig and spit. I won. I earned a shark head.” A few years later, she returned home when her grandmother died. After the funeral service they pointed her grandfather to the funeral car. He refused, “I have a car.” “No one ever drove any of his cars except him,” Shelly recalled. But that day, he tossed her the keys, opened the back door, climbed in and told her. “Just drive around for a while.” “They will be expecting us at the cemetery,” Hergett answered. “I’m paying for this funeral. Just drive.” he said. She drove. He sat in the back and cried, mourning his wife. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he said, “Okay, let’s go to the cemetery.” At the cemetery the rest of the family wondered, “Where were you? What did you do?” “We just drove around.” Hergett said, leaving out that her grandfather needed time away from prying eyes to do what he wanted to do just as they had done years before behind the garage.“That’s how I know I was his favorite,” she concluded.