Path of a Bullet
My grandfather’s life was a mystery to me. But maybe he was closer to me than I knew.
By Elise Hansen
All I knew of my grandfather growing up was that he died in a hunting accident before I was born. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t know what he looked like — I’d never seen a picture of him. It wasn’t until last year, on a mountainside in Montana, that I learned that the one thing I did know about him might not be true. We were on a family vacation; I was hiking with my mom along a trail strewn with wildflowers and scratchy with evergreens. I asked her what my dad’s parents had been like. My grandfather’s death, she finally told me, may not have been an accident.
Her answer took me aback. But it would be over a year until I began asking more. Who was this man, my grandfather? Was this why my dad never talked about him? And what did his death have to do with a cold night four years ago as I stood barefoot on my neighbor’s porch?
My dad does not talk about his parents. So I first went to my mom. “Random question,” I texted her, “what’s dad’s dad’s name (my grandfather)?”
I expected to recognize his name. I expected to think, “of course! I knew that.” But when she replied, “William Jerit Hansen,” the chimes of remembrance didn’t so much as whisper. It was a starting point, though. You can learn a lot about a person with just their name, a vague notion of geography and a couple of estimated dates. I found some records and I started calling my dad’s family.
William “Bill” Hansen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1932. He grew up in Milwaukee, too, in one of the apartments in a six-story complex owned by his grandmother. He probably lived there his entire childhood, until he was 18 and left for college. As a senior in high school, he was on the football team, the swim team, the student paper, and was the basketball team manager. According to the caption in his high school yearbook, anyway. Someone put a digitized version of the 1949 Riverside High School yearbook online; finding it was like rooting through the dusty, cobwebbed corners of Google’s attic. They probably left it there for the same reasons they would keep the attic copy: it’s a signpost to another era, although no one will likely visit again.
In this case, though, it worked: it pointed me to the first picture I’d seen of my grandfather. The young man in the yellowed headshot was fairly handsome: tall, lantern-jawed and not terribly distinctive. He looks nothing like my father.
Shortly after he sat for this photo, Bill went to college at University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he joined ROTC and a fraternity, majored in engineering and met his future wife. Marian Jones was smart, social and funny. She was an English major, yet her speech was peppered with colloquialisms: “water off a duck’s back,” she’d say, or later, when my aunt was having a dramatic teenage moment, “you should be on a stage! and there’s one leaving in ten minutes.”
Bill and Marian graduated college in the same class, and not long after, an announcement appeared in Marian’s hometown paper, the Chicago Daily Tribune:
“Mr. and Mrs. Maldwyn L. Jones…announce the marriage June 27 of their daughter, Marian Ruth, to William Jerit Hansen…”
It was 1953, and the Korean War was drawing to a close. Bill joined the army and headed down to a military base in Augusta, Georgia, where he became a member of the military police. His main duties, my aunt told me, probably involved scooping up soldiers who got too drunk.
“He would have been pretty good at it, I think,” she said, perhaps with those drunken soldiers in mind. “He was always willing to overlook things.”
This quality would come in handy later, while she and my dad were growing up and learning what they could get away with. But it may also have led to his undoing.
A fad captured the nation in the 1960s and ’70s: the tennis boom. Pro tournaments were broadcast on some of the few publicly-available TV channels, piping tennis into homes across the nation, and pro players became nationally-known icons. Tennis belonged to the spry and the hobbling, to men and women, to athletes at home and athletes abroad. Across the country, tennis courts were sprouting up, nets unfurling, straight white lines delineating the play. Tennis courts overran not just the country clubs, but every neighborhood rec center too, and groups of eager players were swarming them.
Bill Hansen returned to Milwaukee after his military stint, a few years before the tennis craze ignited. He and Marian moved into a little house in the Whitefish Bay area, next to the local high school. Marian worked as an English teacher for a few years, and Bill joined forces with a charismatic friend from college. Harry Humphries was a tall, charming, bagpipe-playing Scotsman who was working in what could perhaps be described as the residential asphalt business, paving driveways around the county. Bill joined him, and together, the two became Humphries-Hansen Inc. When forehands and backhands started translating into dollars, they shifted into surfacing tennis courts and running tracks.
They struck the golden days of tennis court paving. Bill went to conferences in Mexico to meet with tennis court contractors; he saw tennis courts made of carpet and the tennis school run by legendary coach Nick Bollettieri. Humphries-Hansen did the tennis courts for Bollettieri’s summer camp in Wisconsin and the private tennis courts of Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr, a local deity. Bill designed a special warehouse to process the tennis court paint. It was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, but the labyrinth of pipes and barrels and mixers poured out court paint instead of molten chocolate.
My dad worked at Humphries-Hansen for a summer. He rolled barrels of tennis court paint around and squeegeed it across the courts.
“I probably inhaled enough carcinogens to last me the rest of my life,” he said. Product safety standards weren’t much of a thing at the time. Still, it explains his fastidious preference for well-maintained, well-made tennis courts. And growing up with a surface engineer for a father may also have inspired the pride he took in our immaculate Emerald Zoysia lawn. He loved it because it looked neat and orderly and very green.
Like my dad, Bill was a kindly, generous father, with rarely a harsh word for anyone. He and my dad went on fishing trips; they’d rent a little motor boat for a day and go out on Oconomowoc Lake and cast their lines. They fished for bass, crappies, muskies (“fierce tigers of the deep,” my dad calls them), walleye and northern pike. The family vacationed in Canada and Florida, and the family farm, owned with extended family, provided hours of entertainment. They drove tractors around and shot guns at things. Bill and Marian decided the property needed more woods, so they planted row upon row of saplings. Every time they went out to the farm, they’d be there, digging holes and nestling young trees into the ground. They planted the trees in rows, like a nursery, but no one ever moved them as they grew larger. To this day, there is a veritable forest of black walnut and oak trees on the property, all in unnaturally linear formation and too close together.
Those are the times my dad prefers to remember, and his memories are hued with deep fondness. But the tennis court gold rush didn’t last, and neither did Humphries-Hansen. Demand for new courts and new athletic tracks evaporated seemingly overnight, leaving the company overstretched and underprepared. Harry Humphries didn’t live to see its decline: he had long suffered from bouts of depression, and one afternoon in 1979, he took his shotgun and blew his brains out in the bathroom. The lasting impression that trickled down to my aunt and my dad was one of horror, as his family found the mess and coped with the grief.
Bill and Harry had perhaps been a bit casual about the bookkeeping, and over the next few years the money seemed to disappear (some in the family blame a dishonest accountant). One by one, the other employees of Humphries-Hansen started to leave, until only Bill was left. He started coming home from work earlier and his drinking became more evident. Bill and Marian had always been a social couple; they both drank regularly and smoked profusely. But Bill’s alcohol use slipped toward abuse. He started to forget things. My dad was in law school by this time, and during one break he came home and they made plans to go out to breakfast. It was a familiar place, one that Bill drove by almost every day, but when they got there, my dad realized it had been boarded up and closed for weeks. Bill either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t remembered.
It’s funny, the things we choose to remember, and the different values we assign to death. We put so much weight on how people die: we think all their strength and struggles bind together in a moment of illumination, and all their most enduring traits come to the fore.
Or we choose not to measure a life by death. At funerals or in those conversations where we’re grasping for assurance or trying to steady our feet on the memory of happier times, we say to each other, “Let’s not remember her in those final weeks. Let’s remember what she was like before…” We choose what we want to remember.
But how do you reconcile a life that ends in uncertainty? How do you decide what to believe about that life, and death?
On June 8, 1984, Bill Hansen returned home from a hunting trip. No one else was home. Marian and Cathy Anne were out of town; my dad was studying for the bar exam in Virginia; their cousin Nancy, who was staying the night, was out to dinner. Bill got out of his truck and walked around back to collect his gun from the trunk. There was a gunshot. An ambulance arrived shortly. He died soon after.
That is the bare set of facts everyone can agree on. But there are different interpretations of the details. Some in the family believed he had committed suicide. After all, his business was ruined, he was depressed and drinking too much, he died by his own gun in his own driveway. Besides, Bill was proficient with guns, and careful. He would never leave a shell in the chamber, never be caught with the safety off.
On the other hand, there was no note, the gun was still partly in its case, the bullet entered his torso. He may have been drinking, which would have made him more likely to be careless. But if this was his plan, it was an exceptionally mediocre one.
The questions that lingered in the wake of his death weren’t ones that go away easily.
What if I had been there? one relative asked. Would things have been different?
Wouldn’t he have thought about us before doing things this way? asked another.
What was going through his mind? asked still another.
If death can happen so suddenly, who might be the next person I know to vanish?
Concluding that Bill’s death was a suicide may fit the facts, but it doesn’t fit with how his children understood him. He was too gentle and considerate to choose such a violent and disturbing death. Ultimately, my father, my aunt and their cousin Nancy have chosen to believe it was an accident. There’s a reasonable range of facts to support their conclusions, but I think at the end the day we choose to believe what we can bear to know.
“The alternative would be too painful, I guess,” my dad said.
When I first learned on that day hiking with my mother that my grandfather may have committed suicide, a part of me froze. I knew there was some mental illness on my mom’s side, but I never knew that depression ran in my dad’s family, too. It’s different, learning that something that flooded you for so long flows from two tributary streams.
One chilly winter night when I was home on a break from college, I was sitting on my neighbor’s couch, pet-sitting. I don’t remember what set it off, exactly, but suddenly I was shaking all over. I ran outside and stood in our driveway, staring at my parents’ house in the dark. The only thing in my mind was an image of those old guns we kept in the basement. I wanted to shoot myself in the driveway with one of those guns — Bill’s gun, as it happens. I don’t know how long I stood there, barefoot and cold, staring into the dark at our house. Eventually I went back inside.
Probably just as well; in retrospect, that would have been both logistically tricky and pretty rough on my dad. But I didn’t know it would have been déjà vu, and that is what frightens me. What kind of ghosts slide through our thoughts that we are unaware of?
How is that possible that we can re-enact family history without even knowing it? It’s disconcerting, piecing together the shards of the past only to find a cracked image of yourself staring back.
Author’s Postscript: Fortunately, while the past may reflect us, it does not control us. Tracing the path back was unnerving, but on this side of history the ending was different. I’ve lived to treasure many sunrises since that night, and have felt new life spring up out of something that felt sparse and cold. Bill passed down his loving generosity as well as his griefs, and I choose to pursue the former. My dad has always embodied his father’s patience and good cheer, and if there is such a thing as friendly ghosts, I would like to let those slide through my thoughts in abundance.
To my dad: I know you will hate that I dwelt on the bad, but I think there were some things that needed to be reckoned with. It’s better to face the future with eyes open to the past, better to know what’s behind in order to know where to begin.
