For all his devotion to higher education, the road my grandfather took to the bachelor’s degree was long and winding. As I wrote in Part One of this post, he had only a ninth grade education when, in 1917, at the age of 20, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War I and spent […]

When my grandfather, Russell W. Wallis, died in Richmond, Virginia, on March 27, 1985, at the age of 88, I was 23 years old and living in Washington, DC, just two hours away. It was the closest I ever lived to him. I moved to DC in January of that year and struggled at first to find work. […]