Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Jimmy Grandy was a man who had faced significant challenges in his life, from a troubling childhood to his troubling Marine Corps service, from the bizarre days of teaching math in the South Bronx, where he earned the nickname Mad dog Grandy, to his bartending gigs for Freddy Lowry in the Kingsbridge /Riverdale area of the Bronx, where he met my sister, who would become his wife. He was a great story teller, who drew upon those experiences and was always engaging. The stories I share with him, involve his days as a produce distributor, when each morning we would drive to the Hunt’s Point wholesale produce market to load up an array of veggies to be delivered to Manhattan restaurants. His Hunt’s Point nickname then became Jimmy the Veg, his children, the little veggies. When I worked for him, we had to tough it out through some difficult times. I remember one day, a very cold day, an exceedingly cold day, it was negative 2 degrees F, at four in the morning at Hunt’s point. I was waiting by the truck for the food to be delivered so that I could load it. Me and another produce man working for another deliverer were breaking up pallets with our hands and feet to place in a barrel so as to light a fire to keep warm. Jimmy was walking the platform making purchases. We were hustling out broccoli that day. “Hustling” is a term that refers to a type of clearance sale when the produce houses are overstocked after a price change. We were to hit the streets and cold sell, to non repeating customers, the below market priced broccoli. Broccoli is packed in ice and when the truck door closed, the ice had melted a bit but when the door opened, what had melted immediately froze and we could not remove the last case of broccoli, which had already been sold. We began to laugh at the extremeness of this situation and the absurdity of the unmovable box. Jimmy went into the store owner and explained the predicament and returned to the truck with a hammer and crowbar to crack the ice and free the broccoli so that it could be placed in its’ rightful home. Jim had the strength to accept that daily grind as his life, where I could not continue doing that type of labor and in 3 years, I moved on. Despite the differences I would eventually have with him, I will always respect that dedication to responsibility and the strength to check his ego and to endure and overcome pain.
