AMERICAN MEN

The Best Man I Ever Knew

Growing Up As A Girl Child In America: Part 13

Author photos — l (Bampy & Sam) center — Bampy in his beloved orange grove, r (Sam, Bampy, my dad, my mother at Joshua Tree 1960)

My brother Sam said that our grandfather only raised his voice to him once. In all my growing up years, he never raised his voice to me.

Everything I have in my life today, I owe to the lessons taught by my grandfather, E. Norton “Nort” Sturtevant. My brother and I and our cousins called him Bampy.

I’ve known many good men. I’ve known geniuses. I’ve known great bosses. I’ve loved men from fine families and men of honor.

But none of them were my Bampy.

He was a 4-letter athlete in high school and a 6-year star football player at the University of Redlands. He worked at a men’s clothing store for years before becoming foreman of the Sunkist Packing House and eventually buying his own 10-acre orange grove, the place where I spent my first five years.

He was married to the “most beautiful woman in Redlands” — years later, this is how my mother’s school friends described my grandmother, Nana, Lyda Doak Sturtevant, to me.

He was the most respected and loved man in our hometown of Redlands, California, for all the years I knew him and for many years before that.