Robert F. Slaman is a man who has inspired several generations. He is a man who served his country. He was the only one in his family to go to college. He is a man who built himself up from nothing. Robert F. Slaman is my greatest hero; and he just happens to be my grandfather. To my cousins and me, he is known affectionately as “Pops.” Growing up, I simply saw Pops as that fun-loving, trouble-making character who would always try to tickle me and steal bites of my dessert. To this day, at the age of 84, he is still just as playful and energetic. And even though he is in many ways childish at heart, and extremely quirky, I have nothing but the utmost respect for him. I have such fond memories of going to see him and my grandma as a child, even though they would always bicker like the typical old married couple. While my grandma was nurturing and protective, Pops encouraged my brother and I to be daring and adventurous, which oftentimes got us into trouble.

I always loved hearing the stories he told about his own childhood when he was quite the juvenile delinquent. He told us how one time, he and his friends snuck into the school pool at night to go swimming only to get chased around by a janitor and narrowly escape by crawling through the air ducts in the ceiling. Another classic story involved him leaping out of a first floor window in the middle of his Spanish class. He ran to the ice cream parlor and made it back to class without the teacher noticing a single thing.

Even today in his adulthood, he is still a very offbeat sort of fellow. A couple of years ago, he waged an increasingly violent war with the squirrels in his yard. He used to go out with a long stick and make a game of trying to knock them off the branches. When this failed to yield long-term results, he showed off his ingenuity by fashioning a more dangerous type of “squirrel stick.” He fastened a rusty nail to the end and wired it so that when plugged in, he could administer a stunning shock to his bushy-tailed victims. Since this new invention, the squirrel population in his yard has gone way down.

The only thing Pops hates more than squirrels is wasting money. This is a man famous for painting only the front of his house in order to avoid buying more than one can of paint. This past Christmas, my cousins gave him and my grandma a light-up Christmas wreath for the front of their house. He was so neurotic about wasting electricity, however that he sat for hours with the wreath plugged into an extension cord. When he saw a car pulling around the corner, he would plug the wreath in and then hurriedly unplug it as soon as the taillights faded into the distance.

I will not deny that my grandpa may be completely insane. So why is he my greatest inspiration? Born in 1930, as one of seven children, Pops grew up right in the thick of the Great Depression. With immigrant parents and six siblings, he had a childhood of scarcity. As he grew up, he had few options for a better life. Many of his siblings actually became alcoholics or drug addicts. But Pops was different. He enlisted in the Navy and was shipped off to Newfoundland. There, he worked as an electrician who helped build fighter planes to serve in the Korean War. He says one of his proudest moments was when the F6F Hellcat he had worked on successfully bombed a bridge in North Korea. Through these years he missed his family very much but in the end, this gave him his shot at a better life. He was the only one of his family to attend college after being given a full scholarship from the Navy to go to Farleigh Dickenson University where he earned a degree in Industrial Engineering.

Today, Pops lives with my grandma in the same house they bought 54 years ago as newlyweds. Due to his hard work and frugal ways, he lives a comfortable and healthy life. Even with 5 kids and 14 grandkids, he is always there when someone in the family is in need. He has done so much for me: starting out by pushing me to take risks and most recently, encouraging me to follow my dreams and come to Penn State. I cannot thank him enough. And because of him, I believe grandparents make the best role models.