Grandpa called it a hoo-rah. So did Dad. He got it from Grandpa. I gathered that a hoorah was where you do something hard in hurry. At the last minute you finish up some big project, just under the wire, just before some deadline or other. I hated hoorahs, but Dad talked about them like they made whatever you were doing more important, like doing it under the gun made it a lot more valuable, somehow. It didn’t figure to me.

Everybody called Grandpa "R" because his name was Robert R. Britt, like me. Nobody ever called me "R" though. Anyway, he died before I was born, so I was named in honor. Here’s how the hoorah story goes:

Their job was simple enough. They had to get this big old steam shovel from the top of a steep hill down to the bottom of the steep hill. It was a steel gray Pennsylvania early morning in mid-October, and it was drizzling. Tree stumps poked up on the steep hills like goosebumps. R was leading a crew of men. That morning when the crew got to the site, they were bitching and moaning about working in that kind of weather. It was a bleak, colorless, cold, hard scene. But there you were, and it wouldn’t go away just by wishing it would, that was for sure. So R told the boys that if they could get that big old steam shovel down to the bottom of the hill, that would be a good day’s work.

"Hell, R we’ll be lucky to get that thing down there with this winch. In one piece anyway." said Dick Tincher, a tall skinny man with a wispy beard. He said it in a kind of slow carping wail, pointing to the rusty piece of steel equipment with the frayed cable coming out of it that was already hooked to the steam shovel poised at the top of the steep slope.

"Well one thing’s for sure," said R. "It’ll never get down there if we stand around here flapping our gums. Let’s start if we’re gonna start!"

There were three crew members besides R: Dick Tincher, a short fat bald man with a greasy gray beard that everybody called Skinny, and a kid no older than eighteen who wore thin coveralls and didn’t have a coat or a hat who never said a word. R had been calling him Rebel, for some reason. At R’s command, they took their positions. Rebel was to keep a watch and yell if anything went wrong, in addition to running for a tool if anybody needed one. Skinny was to ride in the cab of the steam shovel, and Dick Tincher was R’s second in command. He was posted at the winch controls. "Let her go," said R, and the Dick Tincher pulled the big steel lever that engaged the winch.. The cable started to pay out slowly, inch by inch, and the steam shovel that was attached to it began to creak and groan as its track started to turn and it started down the steep slope, with the fat man riding in the cab behind the glass, nervously handling the controls. The steam shovel had tracks instead of wheels, like an army tank. The crew watched as it inched down the muddy slope, the big treads moving around the wheels inside them and crunching brush and small trees as it went.

Suddenly the cable snapped; it broke cleanly in two, and a crack louder than a gunshot snapped off the nearby hills and echoed back. The big old lumbery steam shovel went careening down to the bottom of the hill, clattering on its steel tracks as it went, making a kind of grumbling roar as it slow motioned over stubs and brush in its way. Skinny could be seen franticly pulling levers inside the cab as it went down the hill in a kind of manic crawl.

It looked like it would upset for sure, but it didn’t, it just clattered all the way to the bottom of the hill. There it sat, still upright, suddenly motionless, a huge cloud of dust hanging over it and over the hill it had just descended, the racket still echoing in the hills and hollows, and the three men standing there on the ridge staring with their mouths hanging open, scratching themselves and then spitting streams of black tobacco juice. Then Skinny emerged slowly from the cab, stretching and shaking his head while standing on one of the big steel treads.

It took all of two minutes from top to bottom, and old R says with a shake of his head and boom in his voice it echoed off the hills too, "Good job boys! Let's go home!" That's the story. Old R says let’s go home, and then he grins and looks at all of them and says, "I told you we’d quit when we got her down there, didn’t I?"

"Good ol’ R," says the boys. "He’s quite a feller!"

Then there was the frog story. Old R was staying in a hotel up in Quebec, and he was trying to get some sleep, see? He was on the road all the time, you know, selling and servicing steam shovels. Well these French speaking Canadians were all partying in the lobby of the hotel. Old R’s room was three floors up, and the door to the room opened onto a hallway that opened on one side to this atrium overlooking the lobby. Old R was pretty annoyed at these noisy drunk French speakers, because, like I said, he was trying to get some sleep. You know how annoying it is to hear people jabbering in some foreign language, especially when you’re sleepy. Besides, R had to get up early for important business the next day. So he gets a balloon and he fills it with water, and he goes out to the railing overlooking the lobby, and he drops it right on some of them who were standing around drinking wine and jabbering away in French. And he says real loud, "Now maybe you Frogs will Shut Up," he says. And of course they did, and he went back to bed. That was the story. Good old R.

He had a heart attack only a year or two before he died, and they put him in the ambulance and he insisted that the run the siren. He wouldn’t have it any other way. Fire up that goddamn siren, says R. If I’m going, I’m going in style. Good ol' R, what a character.

We visited his grave in West Alec, PA, and I stared for a while at the mossy stone: Robert R. Britt. 18??-1952. The R stood for Ralston, his Mom’s maiden name. His Dad was a Presbyterian minister. The headstones poked up all around me and on down the hill like goosebumps. Good ol’ R. He was quite a feller.