Still truckin', despite the potholes

There’s something about Harold Granger that just never stops. When there’s an obstacle in his way, he either moves around it or fights his way through it. The Rivière-qui-Barre man has within him a kind of indefatigable engine constantly driving him forward.

Granger just turned 80 and author Elaine Cust has put his life story down into a book to tell us all of how this one man is like a reflection of us all, how our basic struggle for survival is what binds us and that when life hands you lemons — even big ones like a bout with polio — sometimes all it takes is steadfast determination.

Granger was just a teenager back in the late 1940s when the mysterious disease of the central nervous system took away his ability to walk. It also robbed him of normal breathing. He became a prisoner in his own body and then in a hospital where he had to endure agonizing treatments like the dreaded iron lung. He also had to learn what most of us accomplish as babies turning into toddlers — standing on two feet. There is no way that most people could read this amazing story without being somewhat thankful that it wasn’t them.

After getting back to these basics, he never stopped figuring things out for himself. He became a self-taught mechanic, inventor, innovator, businessman and devoted himself to his favourite pastime — fixing up old cars, specifically the oft-maligned Ford Edsel. His love of cars and engines also carried him to build his own successful bus line, Harold’s Bus Lines, providing daily transportation for thousands of schoolchildren who attended Camilla School.

As the tagline on the book states, he is ‘an ordinary man who has lived an extraordinary life just by living every day.’

Cust was lucky enough to grow up just down the road from Granger and his family. She was their daily babysitter and got to know him pretty well. To this day she still can’t quite fathom how amazing and humble he is. His story, as she calls it, is “Too incredible to be fiction. You couldn’t make up all that stuff.”

The point that she wanted to make with this biography is really about the triumph of the human spirit. Granger never asked her to write this story and he never sought accolades. He only wanted to walk, make a living and raise his family. Pretty simple stuff, except that he had more hoops to jump through than most to achieve those objectives. Maybe that made it easier for him to jump higher.

Cust wondered if perhaps he was destined for this kind of greatness. Right at the beginning of the book, she wrote an imagined scenario at the time of his birth — a midwife foretold Granger’s mother about what his future would hold.

“She had this sense that his life was going to be a tough one but she told his mom that he would be strong of spirit. The strength of his spirit is what really I find compelling.”