Part 2 of the William Gentleman Story
By Dr. JanMa — Janet Gentleman-Ingersoll, PhD
Last week I told you about the fire.
About my father tying a rope around his waist and crawling through a burning house three times to find his three youngest children hiding under a bed.
If you missed it, go back and read it. It will change how you think about courage.
But today I want to tell you the rest of his story.
Because William Reed Gentleman was so much more than the man who crawled through fire.
William Reed Gentleman came from a long line of extraordinary people. In 1863, his grandparents William Wright Gentleman and Elizabeth McGregor Gentleman immigrated from near Falkirk, Scotland to Chicago, Illinois and founded Wm. Gentleman and Sons, a cattle buying business in the Chicago Stockyards that would span three generations. His father William McGregor Gentleman built a dairy farm in Crown Point, Indiana and started a trucking company. My father continued both and added his own dream, a feedlot south of Fair Oaks, Indiana that he built with his partners, his brother Jim and their dear friend Frank Gentleman, an Irishman with no blood relation but a lifetime of belonging to our family.
My father never finished high school. He assumed full responsibility for his family at fourteen when his own father died. He drove semis to New York as a teenager. He was a prankster of the highest order. He loved a good time and he loved watching the people he cared about laughing and thriving right alongside him.
He had a beautiful, complicated, extraordinary heart. When one of his truck drivers, a man named Tuffy Bridges, with a wife, six kids, and a drinking problem, landed in jail after a binge, my father went and got him. I woke up one morning to find Tuffy asleep on our couch. Dad never mentioned it as a big deal. It simply was not a question for him.
He invented a feed and water system for cattle being transported by rail and worked with Texas A&M to get it implemented. He was always thinking, always innovating, always reaching for the next idea.
He was flawed, as all great humans are. But he was mine.
Years later, a series of heart attacks sent my father to bed for nearly a year. But something unexpected happened in that bedroom.
My father discovered the World Book Encyclopedia.
He read it. All of it. A to Z.
Not just once, but twice.
Not because he had to. Not for a degree or a grade or anyone’s approval. Simply because he was curious. Simply because learning, real learning, joyful learning, was available to him. And he was hungry. Hungry to know more. Hungry to do more. Hungry to be more.
I did not fully appreciate that image until decades later, when I found myself going back to school at sixty. Sitting in my first college classroom, terrified and exhilarated, I thought of my father in that bed with his encyclopedias.
If he could do that, I can do this.
He died in October 1982. He never saw me earn my PhD. But he is in every classroom I walk into, every workshop I lead, every conversation I have with an older adult who thinks their best and bravest days are behind them.
They are not.
My father proved that a person’s courage has nothing to do with their age, their education, or their credentials. It has everything to do with what they are willing to go back into, one more time, for the people they love.
What are you willing to go back into?
What rope are you willing to tie around your waist?
Your best and bravest chapter may still be ahead of you.
Don’t just get older. Get BOLDER.
