My Grandfather’S Wisdom

By George F. Knight

For a man with a sixth-grade education, George Ernest Knight was remarkably erudite and was blessed with a keen insight into human nature. His twenty years of observations on character, work, daily living, and faith provide valuable guidelines for making our way through lifes challenges and for dealing with the foibles of relatives, friends, and even total strangers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514474556

George F. Knight

George F. Knight was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, just over thirty miles from his grandfather’s home in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of St. Anselm College and the Catholic University School of Law. In 1994, he retired after twenty-five years as a legal editor and marketing executive at the Bureau of National Affairs Inc., a Washington, DC, legal information company. He recently retired after fifteen years of teaching high school social studies in Fairfax and Hanover Counties, Virginia. He lives in Providence Forge, Virginia, with Patty, his wife of forty-three years, and serves as a volunteer tutor at Literacy for Life, an adult literacy program at William & Mary University in Williamsburg. He was a contributing editor on two criminal justice books, The Criminal Law Revolution and Its Aftermath: 1960–1974 and The Law Officer’s Pocket Manual, both published by the Bureau of National Affairs.

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Copyright © 2016 by George F. Knight.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2016904086

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5144-7457-0

                Softcover        978-1-5144-7456-3

                eBook              978-1-5144-7455-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 03/21/2016

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Chapter I Knowledge And Wisdom

Chapter II Getting Along With Others

Chapter III Friendship

Chapter IV Work And Labor

Chapter V Living Day To Day

Chapter VI Religion/Spirituality

Chapter VII Politics/Government

Chapter VIII Miscellaneous Thoughts

Chapter IX His Favorite Readings

Chapter X A Brief Biography

Dedication

To Grandfather, who left us a priceless legacy, and to Dad, who led his own quite remarkable life, raised a good family, and taught me by example the meaning of kindness and integrity.

Introduction

I never met my paternal grandfather. He died of a heart attack in 1928, eight years before my father, George Elgin Knight, married my mother, and 15 years before I was born.

George Ernest Knight came from a line of hardy Scottish immigrants. He was born in 1879 under the shadow of the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where he would work nearly all of his abbreviated life.

Until the last years of my dad’s life, I knew very little about his father. In fact, none of my three siblings knew much about him. This cloak of mystery hid no dark family secrets. It was simply my father’s general reticence and, more likely, the fact that he knew his own father for only 22 years, that kept him, and us, from getting to know the man.

It was not until my own father passed away in 1993 that I discovered what a remarkable man George Ernest Knight was and what a legacy he left us in the tattered scarlet journal I found among my father’s simple possessions. On the faded and fragile pages of that relic from 100 years ago, I found meticulous handwritten notes that convey a wisdom far beyond what one might expect of a man who, like many of his contemporaries, had to drop out of grade school to help support his family. Over the course of 20 years, between 1908 and his sudden death at 48, he carefully recorded his thoughts, impressions and observations about the people he encountered, his interactions with them and his ruminations on life, religion, work, and human nature.

While his observations may not offer startling conclusions about the world in which he lived and the people he met, many are deeply profound, offer interesting insights and demonstrate a remarkable understanding of human nature. What captured me most was his ability to see the heart of any situation and the unique way he expressed himself, with remarkable clarity and, often, a dollop of gentle humor. It is also very apparent from his writings that Grandfather firmly believed we have a large measure of control over the way our lives go and that, to a large extent, we make our own world.

Not long before his own death, my father sat at his kitchen table for hours and composed a primitive but remarkably detailed history of the Knight family going back