In his own words, Jack Gianotti (Sr.) was an uncontrollable ruffian as a boy. Fortunately, he left us an essay about the summer that changed the course of his life, when he lived with a man named Jack Connor on an island in the BWCA. “Tamed” might be too strong a word for Jack, for he never lived a compliant life. He was a man’s man, in every sense you can think of. He loved the out-of-doors, fishing, hunting, canoeing, cutting firewood, and working hard at whatever he put his hand to.

If we take a quick peek toward the end of his life, after he had a heart attack sometime in his seventies or eighties, the doctor told him to slow down and start taking it easy. As Gramps related the story, he insisted, “I’m not going to sit in a rocking chair the rest of my life.” Within a few days (he says the day after discharge from the hospital), he was out jacking up one corner of the old farmhouse to shore up the foundation! For him, there was no exclamation mark; it was just who he was—and he lived to the age of ninety-seven! (Exclamation mark added.)

Speaking of the farmhouse, it was a classic, built as part of the original settlement in the late 1800s. It was so old that the rafters were made from four-inch-diameter tree trunks—which I remember seeing as a young boy, with the bark still on those makeshift trusses, holding up a tarred roof with multiple layers of shingles. One summer, as kids, we helped Grandpa make a cement sidewalk from the front door around to the left and back alongside the house leading up to the shed. On one side was housed a sauna (of Finnish and Norwegian fame) and the other the fascinating water well, where we helped retrieve the old H₂O by water bucket on the end of a rope. In our attempts to help, we were mainly like flies that constantly swirl about, getting in the way—but Gramps didn’t swat us away. He was a patient man.

I was around five years old or so, but I remember clearly every time he moved the old pickup truck a few feet closer to where he was working. He was smart—this meant minimizing the distance for carrying shovel-loads of sand and concrete mix. My job was to hop in the truck bed and hold down the sand while he moved the pickup five feet or so. Then came one of the most critical jobs for my brother Mike and me, and that was using our little shovels (Mike’s was bigger than mine; he was three years older) to move sand from up near the cab of the truck to the tailgate from which Gramps’ big shovel unloaded it. His was one of those big old coal shovels that could handle twenty of my little shovelfuls. Sixty-five years later, the memory hasn’t dimmed (of course, Grandma’s super-8 movie films have helped etch the event into my recollection, in living, er, black and white).

Behind the shed was the back quadrant of the front forty acres, where most days we could see deer enjoying the salt lick Grandpa left out every summer. In his older years, he saw the beauty of God’s nature differently than in his earlier hunting days.

Jack was born on October 13,1891, when his father was thirty-two and his mother twenty-seven. He was third in line, with two older sisters, Tracy and Charlotte, three younger brothers, Frank, Wilton, and Herb, and a little sister, Katharine. I find it hard to imagine this family of seven children since I’ve personally known most of them as old men and women!

Turmoil fell upon the family when an obscure illness sent the patriarch, Giovanni, to an untimely death. One can postulate the family stress and fears as the symptoms, which resembled alcoholism, wore the father’s body down. While death ended his physical struggles, it left the family without its primary breadwinner. It takes little stretch of imagination to think that whispered town gossip would have weighed the family down. It fell to Jack as the oldest son (in his early- to mid-twenties) to take on the role and responsibility of father figure, particularly for his younger siblings. He stopped whatever educational path he was on to support the family and even helped pay education costs for his younger brothers.

Jack’s burden of family responsibilities made only a small dent in his zest for life. He was a dashing young man, from what can be seen in early photos of him riding on top of a hay-filled wagon or his formal pose in World War I army dress uniform. He was a man’s man. Although he grew up in town, with three brothers and three sisters, the out-of-doors was his calling. And he never stopped enjoying God’s creation.

Life is not always easy; it is filled with hardships. Few people escape tragedy, illness, broken relationships, disappointments, reversals. The Bible teaches us that we live in a fallen world; it is far from perfect. In the words of a good friend of mine, we need to “buck up.” Jack Gianotti did that. What about you and me, as we face life’s hardships? To be sure, we can “buck up” to a degree, but some trials of life can overwhelm even the most bucking up.

God is the ultimate help for handling whatever life throws our way—and handling it well. The prophet Isaiah, who lived twenty-eight centuries ago, captured the age-old promise of God:

Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble badly, yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary. (Isaiah 40:30–31)

God is still available to help us today when we trust Him. He will enable us to buck up!