My great-uncle Arthur

My great-uncle Arthur worked many years in a factory. They produced umbrellas; just a single type of umbrella, the classic long one. Although you might think his life was really boring, it was not at all.

He was born in Munroe Falls —a little village in the North of Ohio— in 1919. He dropped out of school at an early age in order to work in their family business. But soon he realized that he was too lively to stay in the same place and left to Chicago. There he worked as a paper boy delivering the Tribune.

One day, in December 1941, he read in one of his newspapers a huge headline with only three letters: «War!». He threw the papers down and went to a recruitment point to enlist in the Marine Corps. His regiment was sent to the Pacific and during several months fought in the tiny islands of the Coral Sea. Southeastern Asia is a very rainy region, and rain was a reality he had to learn to live with.

After the war he created a little workshop introducing all the materials he had learnt in the Army to make the most resistant and innovative umbrellas and other rain clothes. A little time later, an important corporation bought his patents.

With the money he had earned, he travelled through Europe and South America learning about many countries and cultures. When he was 31, he fell in love with a Parisian painter in Montmartre. They got married and left to San Francisco (California) where my great-uncle started working in the umbrella factory as a production manager. He retired when I was born and started writing children's stories telling all his personal experience around the world.

My great-uncle passed away when I was 10 years old. Everybody in our family was sad, but still today we remember him and we are happy about the full life he had.



[Composition #1, 4th Level]