Whenever business takes me through Henryetta, Oklahoma, I make time to stop by Grandpa Eli Maghe’s grave. It isn’t a long visit. I don’t make a speech. I just stand there a minute in that quiet Oklahoma dirt and remember the man who was my mother’s father—and one of the biggest influences of my life.
Grandpa Maghe was born March 25, 1900, and he left us August 27, 1987, when I was twenty-seven years old. He lived in Henryetta and later in Okmulgee, worked the furnaces at the lead-and-zinc works in the Henryetta country for years, and somehow still found energy for everything else a stubborn eastern Oklahoma man could pack into one lifetime. He started and ran a dry cleaners over in Beggs. After he retired from the smelter, he hauled mail on a contract postal route between post offices across eastern Oklahoma. And through all of it he stayed the same skinny, pipe-smoking, twinkle-eyed old coot I knew as a boy—funniest, crankiest, and most stubborn man you’d ever meet, and I mean that as a compliment.
As kids, my sisters and I spent summers with Grandpa and Grandma Mary Maghe in Okmulgee. Those were the kind of summers you can still smell if you close your eyes hard enough—chlorine and hot concrete at the local pool, dust and pecan shade, the big picture windows of his dry cleaners in Beggs where we’d play like we owned the place. Grandpa loved to fish, and he loved to hunt squirrels. More than once he took me out into the towering pecan trees of the Deep Fork River valley, a pre-teen tagging along behind a man who knew every bend and bottomland like it was his own backyard. He taught me that being outdoors wasn’t a hobby. It was how you stayed yourself.
Before all that—before the smelter and the mail route and the dry cleaners and the summers with us kids—Grandpa Maghe was a soldier. The records say he entered the United States Army on November 20, 1917, still seventeen years old, and he wasn’t released until August 9, 1919. He told me he served as a private in the artillery, the old horse-drawn kind, over in France in the First World War.
He also told me a story he never forgot, and neither did I.
He and his artillery crew were resting along the side of a ditch in France when a shell hit nearby. The blast killed the buddies on both sides of him and left him standing. Spared. Alive. Marked for life by the simple, unfair fact that he walked away and they did not. Grandpa Maghe carried that day with him the rest of his years. He didn’t dress it up. He didn’t turn it into a movie. He just remembered them—and remembered that somehow, for reasons he never claimed to understand, he was still here.
I think about that every time I stand at his grave in Henryetta. A boy from 1900 who went to war before he was old enough to vote in most places, who came home and worked hard, raised a family with Grandma Mary, and still had enough mischief left to dive after a bass in his underwear or drag a grandson into the pecan bottoms looking for squirrels. Surviving that ditch didn’t make him soft. It made him present. It made him grab hold of fishing trips and family and ordinary Oklahoma days like they mattered—because he knew they did.
Even late in his life, when some folks figured he ought to stay home in a chair, I was still taking him hunting and fishing. He dearly loved it. One time, when Grandpa was in his mid-eighties, I took him canoe fishing down the Illinois River. A few people said he was too old. Grandpa Maghe could always swim like a fish, and he was perfectly fine going canoe fishing at that advanced age. More than fine—he loved every minute of it. Stubborn as ever. Happy as ever. Proof that “too old” is just something other people say when they haven’t met Eli Maghe.
He passed when I was twenty-seven, which feels both long ago and like yesterday. I still enjoy stopping by his grave whenever I’m in Henryetta. It isn’t sadness that pulls me there so much as gratitude. Grandpa Maghe left a mark on me—how to work, how to laugh, how to stay stubborn about the good things, and how to remember the people who didn’t make it home from France while still living fully in the years you were given.
So if you’re ever rolling through Henryetta and you’ve got a minute, you know where I’ll be thinking of him. Not as a name on a stone. As the man who survived a ditch in France, ran a dry cleaners with those big windows, hauled the mail, worked the furnaces, taught a kid to fish and hunt, and at eighty-something still climbed into a canoe on the Illinois like the river had been waiting on him.
He didn’t just live a long life. He used it.
And that, as far as I’m concerned, is the best catch of all.
