Doyel: Gun-toting grammarian takes aim at columnist

GREENWOOD – The first time he emailed me, Indianapolis Star reader Kenneth DeVoe said my grammar was bad, my name was misspelled, and he had a “general loathing” for sports columnists.

When I showed up at his door, he was carrying a loaded .357 revolver.

This is not a story that started well.

This is a story that has not ended. But where it is now is good. He’s no longer Mr. DeVoe to me, or Kenneth. I call him Grumps. His wife? She’s Grandma. This story, about a story that has not ended, is my way of honoring a man whose favorite birthday is not his, not his wife’s, not any of his children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

Kenneth DeVoe loves the day our country was born, the Fourth of July. The year was 1776. Grumps wasn’t alive yet.

I don’t think.

***

Grumps has been writing his obituary.

He’s also writing Grandma’s obituary, news he shared this week with me and Grandma, who did what she does cuter than anyone I’ve ever seen. She rolled her eyes.

“You’re writing obituaries?” I asked Grumps. “Isn’t that weird?”

Grandma answered.

“It is weird,” she said. “He’s weird.”

He loves any excuse to write, and he loves the English language. That’s how this started, with that old grouch henpecking my grammar. Was he right? Of course he was, the brilliant jerk. But here was my terse response to his first email:

Rules are meant to be broken. I'm gonna use sentence fragments, too. Just because.

Grumps liked that. He wrote back, extending an olive branch — he hadn’t completely hated my column about Gene Keady’s hair. I accepted: I like you, Mr. DeVoe. You pain in the grammarian neck!

I asked him to breakfast, this stranger, this guy who writes letters to editors and writers to complain about whatever’s bothering him at the moment, but doing it with wit and charm: Iffen U care, he once wrote me, at about 1 p.m. (1300 hours) us’ns will wrap the trash in today’s Star.

So, breakfast at Four Seasons in Greenwood. I walk in and a woman of about 60 approaches and wants to know if I am, you know, me. Kathy DeVoe says, “You’re here to meet my father.”

“Your father?” I blurt. “How old is he?”

She points to a chair. He’s sitting, folded up on himself, this little bitty man in fine clothes. He doesn’t look a day under …

“I’m 90,” he says.

It was love at first sight. Until I saw the gun.

***

Here’s what you don’t want to do: Surprise Kenneth DeVoe at home, as I did shortly after that breakfast. I knock on his door and he approaches with his right arm at his side, hand behind his hip.

“Is that a …”

“You didn’t see anything,” he says, and heads for the back of the house where he and Grandma have lived for 15 years, reading the paper and sitting beneath two enormous flags. His chair is under Old Glory, eight feet tall if it’s an inch, a bright gold spear at the tip. Her chair is beneath the U.S. Air Force flag, blue and beautiful.

On his table is the .357. Or maybe it was his .38. Hell, I don’t remember anymore, but it wasn’t the shotgun or Uzi. The shotgun leans in a bedroom corner, under a hand-written sign: “This is loaded.” The Uzi, well, he has a permit but I couldn’t tell you where he keeps that thing. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s under his chair.

He owns pants with holsters built into the pocket, just right for his .380. This is a man who loves his guns, loves the Constitution and the Second Amendment that gives him the right to bear arms, and hated what he read several years ago about a home invasion in Connecticut that killed the mother and two daughters and badly injured the father.

“I’m a little old man,” Kenneth DeVoe tells me. “But I decided: That won’t happen to me.”

Or to his family members. He has bought 20 or more guns over the years, given them to his son and three daughters, to his grandchildren, his wife. I half-expect he’ll give one to me someday. I hope it’s a revolver, Grumps.

The man gives. One of my first visits, I was telling Grumps and Grandma that a small county newspaper was showing up at my place. Smart marketing, I said, giving new residents a free copy. Grandma rolled her eyes.

“Who do you think bought that for you?” she said.

I look at Grumps. Behind thick glasses, his eyes look as big as baseballs. He says nothing, but those baseballs are twinkling.

***

Kenneth DeVoe didn’t wait to be drafted. America needed doctors for the Korean conflict? Grumps, an anesthesiologist, joined the Air Force in 1952. He spent 14 months overseas, missing the birth of his son, Tom.

Back home, Betty DeVoe had been living in an attic in South Bend with no insulation. Dr. Kenneth DeVoe once earned $300 a month, spending $100 on rent. Turns out he had type O Rh-negative blood, making him a universal donor, his blood worth $25 per donation. He bought Christmas presents with that money.

“One year I had anemia and couldn’t donate,” he says.

“No Christmas that year,” Grandma says.

“And $25 would’ve covered the whole thing,” he tells me, then looks at Grandma. “But you wouldn’t have had anything.”

“That’s OK,” she says. “I had you.”

Well, they’re in love. They met at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, where Betty Deam was a nurse. Two weeks ago, they celebrated their 68th anniversary, and Grumps told Grandma, “In 68 years, I’ve never been angry with you.”

Along the way, Kenneth DeVoe served his country, worked 40 years at Memorial, retired to Greenwood, watched his grandchildren have children, wrote cranky emails to newspaper writers and anonymous checks to struggling strangers he read about in the same paper.

“I had the good fortune of being born in this country to Christian forebears,” he was saying a few days ago. “I couldn’t ask for any more.”

Grumps and Grandma have become dear friends. They know I’m emotional; they’ve seen me cry. I’d never seen Grumps cry.

“I was lucky enough to serve this country for two years,” he was saying, then sniffling.

Are you ...?

“No!” he shouted, this grouch who almost died five years ago.

He was at a friend’s funeral — too many of those — and the pastor had the church’s only microphone. A guest was giving a eulogy, straining to be heard, until Grumps rose from his seat, took the microphone from the pastor and gave it to the eulogist. Grumps sat down and said to himself, “I’m having a heart attack.”

Betty had to call 911. Grumps had driven himself home, told her what had happened and sat under that American flag. Doctors found his arteries were almost completely blocked, inserted four stents, and sent him home a few days later.

Grumps sat down under that flag again and grumbled to Betty.

“He wanted to go play bridge,” she says.

Grumps is terrible at bridge. Poker, too. He plays four days a week and loses every time.

“My friends need me,” he says. “I’m their secondary income.”

What does Grumps do for me? He makes me laugh with humor that is smart and silly, ironic and dry and absurd, like the time this retired anesthesiologist told me he’d saved countless lives in South Bend.

“By retiring,” he says.

Also, he makes me smile about an America made real by the stories of a man who grew up in the Depression and fought in a war and loves the country that asked him to do both.

***

Don’t read the non-ending to this story. Grumps won’t like it. Especially if it has a sentence fragment or some other assault on his grammatical senses.

But a few days ago, he was sniffling as he talked about serving in the Air Force, and lying about those sniffles, and then talking about the opportunity America gave him and Grandma, both growing up poor in rural Bluffton. Grandma was one of 10 kids on a farm with a hole in the ceiling; her dad put it there so heat from the kitchen stove could warm her room above.

Now Grumps is telling me about his childhood family physician, Dr. Zimmer. One night Grumps had the mumps, went to bed miserable and afraid, awoke to something cold on his chest. It was Dr. Zimmer’s stethoscope. Kenneth thought, “I’m going to be OK.”

A few years later his brother, Byron, had pneumonia. Dr. Zimmer arrived after dark.

“He sat with my brother all night. He saved Byron’s life,” Grumps was telling me. “I said, ‘I want to be like that.’ ”

Well, I think that’s what Grumps said. He was sniffling and crying, this gentle man who was made in America and will celebrate July 4 by reading about his hero, Lt. Col. James Doolittle, whose raid on Japan turned the tide of World War II.

But he doesn’t want to cry in front of me — I’m the emotional wreck, not him — and when he does, Grumps starts yelling.

“Look at me,” he shouted through his tears. “I’m worse than you!”

No, Grumps, you grouchy gun-toting grammarian. You’re so much better.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.