My grandfather, Charles Bailey, turned 90 today. Ninety!

On the inspiration from a friend, I pondered how a man of 90 years sees the world. So after cake and ice cream tonight, I asked him.

“The world’s going to hell in a hurry,” he told me, having used the word “hell” at least seven times. “Our morals are going to pot.”

He said greed is consuming us — politicians, corporations, and individuals. Abuse of capitalism is rampant, and a combined decline in education and work ethic will ultimately end Western dominance in favor of China and India.
“Back in the old days, people worked for the good of the country — for the good of humanity. I worked like hell in the laboratory getting nothing. Five bucks a week, for crying out loud!”

A noted cardiologist, research scientist, and World War II Navy medic, my grandfather once led a team that cured typhoid fever and typhus. He developed blood groupings for the American and British armed forces. And his understanding of the human eye inspired his brother, William, to invent the color television tube for RCA.

After his work with blood groupings, which became standard on military dog tags, he got a big raise — to $22 per week — “which was a tremendous amount of money in those days,” he said. When he worked with monkeys in Malaysia to cure diseases, he and other researchers made tremendous vaccination breakthroughs.

“All I got for that was $5,000 a year and I didn’t ask for any more,” he said. “If you did it today you’d get $20 million and be made vice president of a corporation. That’s the difference. We had a different outlook on life. We weren’t so greedy.”

Telling a story at the dinner table

My grandfather doled out the criticsm for young people today, who seem to care more about their “ePods” than schooling. He refined his frustration by directing blame to parents, who don’t instill adequate values of learning and labor and discipline anymore. I pressed him to tell me whether he ever got punished for disobedience, and he joked that his teachers scolded him for being so wordy in essays.

I did get him to admit that his mother caught him smoking a cigar at age 10. (“I got a good whacking on the behind for that. Up to bed without supper.”) And I found out that his mother used to strap him to bed at night because of a nasty sleepwalking problem. One night, after having sat in Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, he had a dream that he was jumping out of a plane. “But I forgot to use the parachute,” he said. He jumped out of the window, from the second story, and onto the concrete below. “I landed and fractured me skull.”

He did offer one positive contribution: The growth of the Internet — “the vast amount of knowledge that’s hidden behind the keys of your keyboard” — is one of the most important things to hit humanity. “It disseminates knowledge, and that’s something we have to do,” he said. Indeed, his hunger for technology, probably because of his life in science, is never satisfied; many 90-year-olds are shunning computers.

Some of his viewpoints are frustrating and not entirely logical, and for such a vibrant and loquacious man, there are not always boundaries between internal and external monologue. But his mind spins at such a rate, and in such a way, that is rare of people at any age.

Here’s to 90 more years, Grampy. I love you.