He blushed as he told me the story. We were sitting at the diningroom table. He was a proud man, a quiet man and I was a young graduate student who was trying to learn as much as I could about this man that I had idealized for as long as I could remember. My grandmother sat next to him, coaxing him to tell me the story, filling in the blanks with her remembrances. It was the first time I had heard this amazing story and I soaked it up like a sponge.