MIT and Me!
By Ryan McCrary

KALAMA, Wash. – Got great news yesterday: I successfully passed my leadership coursework at MIT and matriculated with the grade of “complete plus”. No, I have no idea what that means either. While riding high on the afterglow, I did get some bad news: I did not win the Fields Medal. 

Finishing the course reminded me of one of the smartest, most inquisitive people I’ve ever known: my Grandpa Dyer. A first generation Sicilian immigrant, he grew up poor in Astoria, Oregon. A hardscrabble childhood got rougher when his dad walked out and he had to quit school after the fifth grade to take jobs to support his mother.

Eventually he became a sheetmetal worker – one of the most challenging and mechanically driven trades. After serving in the SeaBees throughout the South Pacific in World War II (enlisting at the age of 30!), he worked for the Bonneville Power Administration for nearly 40 years.

His lack of formal education was something that weighed on him throughout his life. He was a voracious reader on multiple topics and I can’t count the number of times I visited the library with him.

I remember at the age of five or six, after he introduced me to the joy of my first cup of coffee, sitting at his workbench where he showed me the jars where he had started college funds for my sister and I. Much later, he shared with me that the day my mom became the first person on either side of the family to graduate from college was one of the proudest of his life.

Although he passed before my sister and I graduated college, I can imagine the pride he would have felt knowing the legacy of his college funds paid off for his grandkids.

QUOTABLE:  “Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.” – Mark Twain