“OK, we need to get over to take care of all that, but I need a lift. It's hard to drive when you are three feet nine.”
Edwin Ludlow III did not know whether to laugh or cry, confronted with his little cousin, six-year-old Grayson Ludlow, responding just as his great-grandfather, Edwin Ludlow Sr., would to hearing about a building issue.
Edwin III remembered his grandfather, to the end of his life, would be picking up a tool box to get over somewhere if he thought it would help … the great architect, at the end of his life, was a humble man, and that was who his grandchildren remembered.
But …
“Eddie, we need to get over there and take care of all that, but I need a lift, because I can't sketch and drive at the same time.”
There was structural trouble at the new gym for the high school kids. Eddie Ludlow's grandfather heard about it, and fixed it all up for no charge because “I want for y'all what I need for my grandchildren.”
So then there was Edwin Ludlow's great-grandson, hearing about a problem in Lofton County, VA that his great-grandfather modernized, and what had just come out of his mouth?
“Yes, nephew, Grayson is so much like your grandfather it is scary sometimes,” Capt. R.E. Ludlow, Grayson's grandfather and Edwin III's uncle, said. “Like my father, Grayson can sit there and draw and build and draw and build and forget to eat or drink and then fall out if we let him. But also, he is my grandson … so I can get him up and get him outside to be a little boy and do all the things.”
“Yes, he needs to get all of that,” Edwin III said. “The way this county is, there will be enough for him to do later on.”
