How to find your grandpa in swimwear.

Family legend turns out to be true this time.

“Grandpa John was on the cover of Life Magazine, you know.”

Without getting into epistemology, I wasn’t sure. He was my grandfather, but I wasn’t sure of the man’s first name and was only medium-confident as to his last¹.

I knew he wore a hat with a boat on it, when I was small, and that he’d stop by the house on Saturdays, with little bags of almonds from his trips to the casinos, and misprinted letterhead from the Gillette factory, and anything he’d won at a meat raffle.

“Diving,” the first cousin said. “He was such a diver. A rescue diver², during the war.”

“Was it for that?”

“He was a young man, and he was diving.” She shrugged. “Maybe.”

Life Magazine is no more.³ Its archive, however, is broadly available, including through archive.org, and likely, anywhere they’ll still let you play with the big microfiche machine that smells like an amplifier and goes “whirrr.”

Because the existence of an archive, and the distinct absence of other easily accessible narrative information, made it seem like an answer was possible yet difficult, I figured I’d give it a shot.

First task. What was my grandfather’s name, really?

My own last name is distinctive, and was my father’s. Birth and marriage records would show whether Grandpa John was really named “John,” or alternatively, whether it was a “Wojciech, W, O, J-fuck it, call me Stanley.”

John. His name really was John. His middle initial shifted from time to time, but that wasn’t unusual for the era.

With a first name, and last, I looked for an obituary to give more biographical detail. The one I found went into great detail about his military service, down to the ships on which he served, but didn’t name any of his children⁴ or grandchildren.

There was no caption within the “Life” Archive mentioning him by name, or the ships he served on. There were no male, military divers, in fact, on the cover of Life Magazine during the entire period of the war.

If it was true, it wasn’t during the war.

I found no record that, apart from military service, he’d lived anywhere but eastern Massachusetts. In fact, apart from military service, and high school athletics, he was hard to find, except when he lost a golden gloves match to a fisherman named Whalen.

So I looked before the war. And I looked nearby. He spent most of his life in South Boston. At seventeen, or eighteen, he probably wouldn’t have made it much farther than Quincy.

And I found it. Either the cover, or the rumor.

In my family, we’re better storytellers than we are historians.

1. Grandpa John was my paternal grandfather. In theory, one might assume we’d share a last name.

2. This is unlikely.

3. Perhaps they invested too heavily into monthly paranormal encyclopedias.

4. Hurt feelings aren’t constructive, so I moved on.