My late grandfather was a man of many hobbies. He knew how to do many activities that the ordinary person in this day and age would not know how to do. He had several hobbies that changed over the years of his life, but they were always impressive and well-executed. From a group of hobbies that he could do, one of them was French knots.
The first hobby my grandfather ever took up was embroidery; it was something his mother had taught him early in life. He would embroider various life forms in nature, like birds and flowers, and sometimes even vehicles. He was really good at it and liked doing it, but he got bored and moved on to a new hobby.
Once he reached adulthood, Gerald Dressler was drafted for the Vietnam War, but he was not deployed immediately to Vietnam. My grandfather was actually stationed in Germany, and he was one of the people who spoke Cherokee. This was one of the most important codes that soldiers used in Vietnam so that the enemy wouldn't be able to understand intercepted transmissions.
Once he returned home, he married my grandmother, and they started their family. This is where the next hobby my grandfather acquired came from. My grandmother taught him how to knit, and he made an Afghan, which is a type of blanket that originates from Afghanistan. He liked to knit, and he was good at making many items with his hands.
Once he was bored with knitting with my grandmother, he moved on to his next hobby, which was quilting. This was not your typical making of quilts with a sewing machine; he did these by hand. My grandmother still has some of these quilts, and they are of fine quality. My grandpa always made his products to a higher standard than most.
While my grandparents were living on their own without their children in their house, my grandfather started to sell black walnuts from the tree in their yard in the late 1980s. This was when the highway still went through Dickeyville and right past my grandparents' house. We still process them to this day. He added yet another hobby when he started rock polishing. This was something that he was doing later on in his life, but he didn't do it as long as the other hobbies, because he was admitted to the hospital after he fell.
My grandfather knew a lot of people and knew how to make a lot of items he loved, and he was a well-respected person in the community. He grew up in Potosi and made a positive impact on our community as a whole through his hobbies and connections with the people he had known ever since he was a kid. He worked the majority of his life in a paper factory, but his hobbies really defined him more than anything else.