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Description
A lot of you may know, I'm an amateur genealogist. Family history is extremely important to me. Sure, there's the part of me that is just a history nerd and gets a kick out of seeing people who look like me in important time periods, but I also believe that this hobby grants a certain perspective in both directions. On the one hand, it provides a microcosm through which to analyze larger historical events, to trace one tiny dot which eventually balloons out into the chain of events which led to the world as we know it today. On the other hand, it's extremely informative to see how my family has ridden the tide of history, to look back on big events and understand how they have personally impacted my very existence and brought me to where I am now. I also just enjoy digging up these individual human stories, the lives of real people otherwise forgotten by the history books who nonetheless serve as the foundation to everything I know. After drawing my dad and grandfather, I decided it'd be fun to take y'all on a short journey up the family tree, to show off the Spainhowers that came before me. The obvious next step in that line is my great grandfather. I never got to meet the man personally, so this time I'll be relying on the picture my dad’s stories and recorded documentation has painted.

James Junior “Jim” Spainhower was born into a really shitty household in Petersburg, Indiana on March 10, 1926. He was the second son of James Alfred Spainhower, an abusive fuckhead who'd come home from the coal mines everyday to beat the poor kid black and blue. His mother, Aileen Cox, died when he was just four years old, so any semblance of protection she may have afforded was lost, replaced instead by his father's next swing, Lucy, in 1935. In short, there was nothing for him there, but there wasn't anything to run to either. That was, at least, until 1941, when the staticky voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke the news to the American public that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was now officially entering World War II. Jim saw this as the perfect opportunity to escape, because apparently getting shot at and kamikazed was a brighter prospective than continuing to endure the shit he went through at home. On April 22, 1942, Jim signed up for the US Marine Corp, lying about his age on the paperwork as he was only 16 years old at the time.

Jim was assigned to the 1st battalion of the 22nd Marine Regiment, and was accordingly shipped off to the Pacific for training. His first taste of real combat wouldn't come until February 1944, however. As part of the invasion of the Marshall Islands, Jim's regiment landed on the island of Engebi on the 18th to take the enemy airfield from the Japanese. The airfield was secured by that afternoon, though the Battle of Eniwetok would continue for the next four days as the Marines cleared the remainder of the atoll’s islands of enemy resistance hiding in spider holes. Combat concluded on the 22nd once Parry Island was secured, but this last stretch of the battle put Jim out of commission. He took two imperial bullets in the shoulder, which earned him a Purple Heart. He'd actually still have those hunks of lead embedded in his collar bone for the rest of his life, as since they weren't interfering with anything vital, the doctors figured it'd do more harm to try to get them out than to just leave them in.

Speaking of doctors, this is roundabout where the first special woman in Jim's life came in. I can't prove this exactly, but the timeline lines up pretty well, so this is my headcanon. I like to think the nurse who tended to his wounds was one Betty Fogarty, a freshly recruited member of the WAVES. The storyteller in me likes to think this is how they met, though for my own sanity I prefer to believe they didn't bud a relationship for at least another month, cause otherwise she was 26 and he was 17 which… ew, come on Nana. Either way, both were at least of legal age when they got married in the Seattle Court House on June 23, 1944. Betty was honorably discharged on July 7, while Jim remained in the service of the USMC until he was discharged as a corporal on April 21, 1946. The end of the war gave the couple the opportunity to settle down in Betty's hometown of Troy, New York, and start a family. By 1947, their household had expanded to include a daughter and two twin boys. I wish I could say the generational abuse stopped with Jim Jr, but all accounts I've heard from family members concur that he was one hell of a disagreeable asshole. My favorite old photograph of him is this one where he's got his daughter in his lap, and she's all smiling and holding one of her baby brothers, but meanwhile he's just slouched in such a disinterested pose and grumpily staring somewhere off camera like “just take the picture already, Betty”. Like it's sad he clearly wanted nothing to do with his own children but the photo is just hilarious. He's almost never smiling in the photographs, and when he does it looks really forced. I imagine that's why he and Betty eventually divorced at some point. She was always smiling.

The family ditched Upstate New York in 1948 and settled down in Mishawaka, Indiana. What exactly called Jim back to this giant cornfield of a state, I honestly have no clue. Based on everything I've heard about the man, it sure as hell sounded like he would've wanted to stay as far away from his parents as possible. No one alive today seems to have any recollection of the reason, though, and apparently Jim was pretty adverse to talking about his past to begin with. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd assume it may have been work related. He'd gotten into appliance repair and engineering, owning his own little shop by 1956, and you'd be hard pressed to find a greater exporter of mass-produced mechanical goods in America than South Bend (the larger city hub directly to the west of Mishawaka). The old Dodge Manufacturing Company was one of the beating hearts of the city's industrial boom, and Jim had managed to score a gig as one of their factory foremen in 1967, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1987. He'd continue to run his personal shop until 1996… when his black lungs caught up with him.

A habitual smoker for the better part of 50 years, Jim developed lung cancer that year. It was clear he wasn't going to make it long, and from what I'm told, the approaching end finally mellowed him out a little bit. His grandson (my dad) never liked him. He was a cantankerous old bastard and my dad had enough of that with his own father. Still, Jim was his grandfather, he was family, and they'd found enough common ground in the hospital room to chat and make some semblance of amends for their strife. My dad visited Jim in his last months towards the tail end of 1998, and showed off the ultrasound of his developing firstborn. Whatever pain Jim and remorse had been festering all his life, he at least got to leave this Earth knowing it wasn't for nothing. He had a great granddaughter. His lineage would continue. There would be another Spainhower. I hope that brought his troubled soul the peace it sought. He died on December 15, 1998, just four months before I was born. Rest well, Great Pa Paw. I never knew you, and maybe I wouldn't have liked you if I did, but I wish I'd gotten the chance at least. Whatever your faults, you brought me here, I carry your name, and I think we’d both agree that means something. Perhaps we'll find each other one day, and I'll buy you an ale in exchange for an old story.

Design notes, ah my old nemesis: color trim on a black background. We meet again you ornery bastard. My goal was to emulate the colors of formal US Marine uniforms, because I think they're actually quite stylish. Unfortunately, my scanner absolutely fucking hates that extremely dark blue, and for some reason it gives it trouble even making out the outlines underneath. Like there's been worse offenders, and you can definitely make out the details with minimal squinting here, but it still bugs the shit out of me. Everything else is really just a composition of bits and bobs I found in old family photographs which I thought worked well together. If I'm being honest, his face was the biggest challenge. Sorry, Great Pa Paw, but you weren't exactly a looker. He kinda looks like a potato with a unibrow. I'm willing to chalk that up to him just kinda letting himself go over the years, though, because the earlier photos of him in uniform from the war years definitely do his face more favors. Like, there I can kinda see why Nana Betty might’ve wanted a piece of that, but Steve Rogers he was not.

Description
A lot of you may know, I'm an amateur genealogist. Family history is extremely important to me. Sure, there's the part of me that is just a history nerd and gets a kick out of seeing people who look like me in important time periods, but I also believe that this hobby grants a certain perspective in both directions. On the one hand, it provides a microcosm through which to analyze larger historical events, to trace one tiny dot which eventually balloons out into the chain of events which led to the world as we know it today. On the other hand, it's extremely informative to see how my family has ridden the tide of history, to look back on big events and understand how they have personally impacted my very existence and brought me to where I am now. I also just enjoy digging up these individual human stories, the lives of real people otherwise forgotten by the history books who nonetheless serve as the foundation to everything I know. After drawing my dad and grandfather, I decided it'd be fun to take y'all on a short journey up the family tree, to show off the Spainhowers that came before me. The obvious next step in that line is my great grandfather. I never got to meet the man personally, so this time I'll be relying on the picture my dad’s stories and recorded documentation has painted.

James Junior “Jim” Spainhower was born into a really shitty household in Petersburg, Indiana on March 10, 1926. He was the second son of James Alfred Spainhower, an abusive fuckhead who'd come home from the coal mines everyday to beat the poor kid black and blue. His mother, Aileen Cox, died when he was just four years old, so any semblance of protection she may have afforded was lost, replaced instead by his father's next swing, Lucy, in 1935. In short, there was nothing for him there, but there wasn't anything to run to either. That was, at least, until 1941, when the staticky voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke the news to the American public that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States was now officially entering World War II. Jim saw this as the perfect opportunity to escape, because apparently getting shot at and kamikazed was a brighter prospective than continuing to endure the shit he went through at home. On April 22, 1942, Jim signed up for the US Marine Corp, lying about his age on the paperwork as he was only 16 years old at the time.

Jim was assigned to the 1st battalion of the 22nd Marine Regiment, and was accordingly shipped off to the Pacific for training. His first taste of real combat wouldn't come until February 1944, however. As part of the invasion of the Marshall Islands, Jim's regiment landed on the island of Engebi on the 18th to take the enemy airfield from the Japanese. The airfield was secured by that afternoon, though the Battle of Eniwetok would continue for the next four days as the Marines cleared the remainder of the atoll’s islands of enemy resistance hiding in spider holes. Combat concluded on the 22nd once Parry Island was secured, but this last stretch of the battle put Jim out of commission. He took two imperial bullets in the shoulder, which earned him a Purple Heart. He'd actually still have those hunks of lead embedded in his collar bone for the rest of his life, as since they weren't interfering with anything vital, the doctors figured it'd do more harm to try to get them out than to just leave them in.

Speaking of doctors, this is roundabout where the first special woman in Jim's life came in. I can't prove this exactly, but the timeline lines up pretty well, so this is my headcanon. I like to think the nurse who tended to his wounds was one Betty Fogarty, a freshly recruited member of the WAVES. The storyteller in me likes to think this is how they met, though for my own sanity I prefer to believe they didn't bud a relationship for at least another month, cause otherwise she was 26 and he was 17 which… ew, come on Nana. Either way, both were at least of legal age when they got married in the Seattle Court House on June 23, 1944. Betty was honorably discharged on July 7, while Jim remained in the service of the USMC until he was discharged as a corporal on April 21, 1946. The end of the war gave the couple the opportunity to settle down in Betty's hometown of Troy, New York, and start a family. By 1947, their household had expanded to include a daughter and two twin boys. I wish I could say the generational abuse stopped with Jim Jr, but all accounts I've heard from family members concur that he was one hell of a disagreeable asshole. My favorite old photograph of him is this one where he's got his daughter in his lap, and she's all smiling and holding one of her baby brothers, but meanwhile he's just slouched in such a disinterested pose and grumpily staring somewhere off camera like “just take the picture already, Betty”. Like it's sad he clearly wanted nothing to do with his own children but the photo is just hilarious. He's almost never smiling in the photographs, and when he does it looks really forced. I imagine that's why he and Betty eventually divorced at some point. She was always smiling.

The family ditched Upstate New York in 1948 and settled down in Mishawaka, Indiana. What exactly called Jim back to this giant cornfield of a state, I honestly have no clue. Based on everything I've heard about the man, it sure as hell sounded like he would've wanted to stay as far away from his parents as possible. No one alive today seems to have any recollection of the reason, though, and apparently Jim was pretty adverse to talking about his past to begin with. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd assume it may have been work related. He'd gotten into appliance repair and engineering, owning his own little shop by 1956, and you'd be hard pressed to find a greater exporter of mass-produced mechanical goods in America than South Bend (the larger city hub directly to the west of Mishawaka). The old Dodge Manufacturing Company was one of the beating hearts of the city's industrial boom, and Jim had managed to score a gig as one of their factory foremen in 1967, a position he would hold until his retirement in 1987. He'd continue to run his personal shop until 1996… when his black lungs caught up with him.

A habitual smoker for the better part of 50 years, Jim developed lung cancer that year. It was clear he wasn't going to make it long, and from what I'm told, the approaching end finally mellowed him out a little bit. His grandson (my dad) never liked him. He was a cantankerous old bastard and my dad had enough of that with his own father. Still, Jim was his grandfather, he was family, and they'd found enough common ground in the hospital room to chat and make some semblance of amends for their strife. My dad visited Jim in his last months towards the tail end of 1998, and showed off the ultrasound of his developing firstborn. Whatever pain Jim and remorse had been festering all his life, he at least got to leave this Earth knowing it wasn't for nothing. He had a great granddaughter. His lineage would continue. There would be another Spainhower. I hope that brought his troubled soul the peace it sought. He died on December 15, 1998, just four months before I was born. Rest well, Great Pa Paw. I never knew you, and maybe I wouldn't have liked you if I did, but I wish I'd gotten the chance at least. Whatever your faults, you brought me here, I carry your name, and I think we’d both agree that means something. Perhaps we'll find each other one day, and I'll buy you an ale in exchange for an old story.

Design notes, ah my old nemesis: color trim on a black background. We meet again you ornery bastard. My goal was to emulate the colors of formal US Marine uniforms, because I think they're actually quite stylish. Unfortunately, my scanner absolutely fucking hates that extremely dark blue, and for some reason it gives it trouble even making out the outlines underneath. Like there's been worse offenders, and you can definitely make out the details with minimal squinting here, but it still bugs the shit out of me. Everything else is really just a composition of bits and bobs I found in old family photographs which I thought worked well together. If I'm being honest, his face was the biggest challenge. Sorry, Great Pa Paw, but you weren't exactly a looker. He kinda looks like a potato with a unibrow. I'm willing to chalk that up to him just kinda letting himself go over the years, though, because the earlier photos of him in uniform from the war years definitely do his face more favors. Like, there I can kinda see why Nana Betty might’ve wanted a piece of that, but Steve Rogers he was not.