When my grandfather moved in with us the doctor suggested we give him a beer a day for his health.  So we bought him a small fridge and left the beer in it.  Well his reasoning with beer apparently was that of, if the doctor says one a day is good for me, then six would be even better.  When it became quickly apparent to my parents that grandpa had a buzz going all the time, they removed the beer from his fridge.  Undeterred my grandfather then turned to bribing the neighbors to go buy him more beer.  Once he received it, he would then hide it in the small wooded area behind our house.  He soon discovered that me and my siblings would then go retrieve it and sometimes give it to my parents.  Happy he was not, plus he lost access to money in which to pay the neighbors.

He also smoked cigars and pipes, cigars being his favorite, but not my mothers.  She allowed pipe smoking in the house, but he had to go outside to smoke his cigars.  In an attempt to get around this embargo, he crushed up some of his cigars and put them in his pipe to smoke, thinking my mother wouldn’t notice.  That lasted about 2 seconds before my mother was yelling at him that she could easily tell the difference.

He also quickly learned that now living with a family of 12, that if he didn’t get his portion of the food when it passed him by, there would be no opportunity for it later.  Left overs didn’t occur at my childhood home.  So he took to hiding food in his room and then forgetting about it.  Every once and a while my mother had to clean it out.  So if he ever offered us something to eat from his room, we were immediately suspect of it for god knows how old it might be.

He also had a hard time to adjusting to living under someone else’s roof.  For he was used to being in charge.  He would try to give us orders with little success.  On occasion he would raise his cane to try to enforce his orders and we would just grab it and there was little he could do.  Also my father wasn’t to incline to allow him any authority anyhow now that was living under his roof.