FROM SHAKESPEARE TO GRANDPA PIGG My grandfather, George H. Pigg (1874-1960), was my educated grandfather. He may have finished the third grade. Much of his education had been handed down from one generation to another. His handwriting resembled that of his great grandfather, William Pigg, They wrote like the examples in your spelling book. One day Grandpa and I were surveying a tie-line between two boundaries of coal land. I operated the transit while he set the rod and made the field notes. We measured to a fence row alongside a country road. Grandpa sat on the bank of the road and wrote in his notes, "(such and such a course) (some number of feet) to a line of postes." As he wrote "postes" I started to say something about his quaint spelling. I stopped myself with the thought, "Jess, you don't have to impress your grandfather that you went to college by correcting his spelling." He had either heard me or caught a gesture. He pressed me as to what I had to say. I reluctantly said, "That is an archaic spelling of posts. We write p-o-s-t-s now, but leave it alone. It's good spelling. " "When did they change it?" he asked. "About a hundred and fifty years ago," He turned his pencil end for end and then said, "If they have changed it, we will change it." Disregarding my protests he erased a part of my heritage that had been handed down in the family from the days when Elizabeth ruled England and Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. When I was a child we often added the plural to words with es, It was a part of our culture that vanished with the coming of radio and television. By the way, I can remember the first radio I ever saw. Can you? The first auto I saw I chased up the hill.