Thomas Heeg stories

My grandfather, Thomas Heeg grew up on a dairy farm in Elmhurst, Queens, NY.  I don't know how big it was, but from old maps of the area, probably not much more than an acre if that, but sufficient for them to provide a milk delivery service.  My grandfather would drive the horse drawn milk wagon to his rounds every morning to deliver the fresh milk.  The horse being shod with metal shoes of course, made a pretty good conductor to the ground.  One day a storm came up and a bolt of lightning struck and killed the horse and threw my grandfather off the wagon.  Another time, lightning struck the barn and set it afire.

He and my grandmother owned a small grocery store in the old style where the worker would fill the order for the customer and pull the product off the shelf.  A friend of his asked him to go into business with him on the model where the customer would get the goods themselves and bring them to the cashier.  My grandfather thought that was a bad idea and his friend went on to open King Kullen supermarkets and made a fortune.

In his later years, he became a supervisor in a plating company and spent his vacations working on a friend's farm.  When he came back he would razz my grandmother by raving about the fresh home-cooked food on the farm.  Until two weeks before he died, he got up every morning at 5 am and took two busses and a train to work every day.  He smoked Kools and big cigars pretty regularly, had a beer with dinner and went to bed every night a 9pm, no matter who was there.  His hands were as big as catcher's mitts and his fingers were easily an inch in diameter.

Even when he was about 81 when all the brothers got together to help Uncle Ed build his dock in Massapequa, Poppy was there pushing wheelbarrows of dirt with everyone else.