My Dad, Bill LeGrand

My dad was born in Houston, Texas on May 5, 1916. His mother was Sarah Effie Meads and his father was Henry Fain LeGrand. He spent his childhood in Houston and Bryan and after graduating from high school enrolled at Texas A & M where he received a B.S. in Petroleum Engineering. In 1940 he started working for Gulf Oil and he continued to work for them until he retired in 1978.
I didn't have a really close relationship with him as a child but we became closer after my mother died, and had a really good relationship when I became an adult, especially after my daughter Tamara was born. He really adored her and they spent a lot of time together when she had breaks from school. Today she works in the same industry he worked in and I think that would have made him very happy. He would have been really happy if any of his grandchildren had gone to A & M
but none of them did. He absolutely loved A & M and attended all of their football games with his friends Joe and Jesse.
After my mom died he had to start cooking for us and became a wonderful cook. Everybody in my family remembers how wonderful some of his meals were especially his spaghetti and meatballs.
He loved water and fishing and after he retired built a house on Lake Livingston. He also built a lot of the furniture that was in the house. He could build just about anything . He enjoyed taking his boat out on the water at sunset or sitting on his deck sipping his scotch and soda.
He also loved cats and always had at least one. When I was in high school we adopted a gray kitten named Smokey from the SPCA and he kept her for many years and even had an oil painting done of her which I still have. He also had several strays who adopted him over the years including a black cat he named Shadow, because she followed him everywhere, and a gray Tom who called my dad meow (that was his joke).
He died on June 6, 1998 from complications from a stroke he had had over a year earlier. The stroke left him partially paralyzed and he was very unhappy, so his death was a relief, but I still miss him, especially on Father Day.