Grandpa, the Entomologist

9/28/26

Grandpa, the Entomologist

A while ago, I wrote about about my grandfather, Ed Hohmann (1890-1977), in his capacity as a musician, but he can also be described as an Appalachian engineer and inventor. That is to say, he could design useful gadgets, toys for us kids, and rudimentary furniture, building them with what he had on hand. He could repair about anything that was broken, using his tools and his large collection of junk in the garage. You’ve probably heard of folks who save small leftover pieces of string, adding them to an ever-expanding ball. Grandpa had that, a similar ball of aluminum foil, small ends of cut two-by-fours, coffee cans full of nails, screws, and other hardware, and literally a ton of stuff he had accumulated over forty years of living in the same house. I spied a steel bar in the garage that he said was the parking brake lever from his long-gone Model-T Ford, and that he might need the steel to repair something someday. I saved it as a memento after he passed.

His ingenuity and resourcefulness stemmed from his upbringing on a farm in West Virginia in the days before automobiles and electricity. Trekking to nearest city, New Martinsville, meant leaving at dawn and getting home at dusk. There were stores in Littleton and Cameron for staples, but even going to one of those towns was quite a trip. So, the family needed to be self-sufficient, living on what they raised and using what they had on hand. Add to that, his living through the Great Depression, and you can visualize a man who didn’t find it necessary to buy much of anything other than groceries and a few items for the medicine cabinet.

Grandpa and his brothers all took regular jobs when they became adults, leaving their younger brothers and the offspring of their older brothers to help Great Grandpa Joseph manage the farm work. Grandpa went to work for the gas company in 1910, eventually working his way up to the position of the foreman who supervised the construction of the gas main into Washington, DC. That’s how I came to be here, alive, not too far from the Nation’s Capital, writing this drivel. When Grandpa turned sixty-five, he was forced to retire. He and his employees missed the camaraderie they had shared at the office, so once or twice a week he stopped by at lunchtime. When I became old enough, he occasionally took me along on those visits. The gas company employees built a swing set for me using gas pipe for the frame. That swing is still intact as of this writing, sixty-five years after its construction.

I’m building up to the story about the bugs, but first, I want to build Grandpa up a little, lest you think him a foolish man when you see the conclusion.

- Grandpa hand-dug the family’s well using only a shovel, pick, and a hand auger, while his father hauled the excavated dirt and rock to the surface with a rope and bucket.

- When I was studying calculus, Grandpa was able to solve some of the word problems in the textbook without knowing any calculus. He figured out an instantaneous velocity using a graphical method. His answer was within one percent of that obtained using differential calculus.

- Having worked for the gas company, he knew how to calculate cube roots with pencil and paper, as gas quantity is measured in cubic feet.

- He repaired a dragging muffler on my car, literally using baling wire, which held up until I sold the car several years after his passing. Even when he was in his eighties, he insisted on changing my car’s engine oil for me, as he was certain I would ‘mess it up.’

- He made stools, tables, and cabinets, all with scrap materials. Their left porch railing was a four-by-four, while the right one was the original two-by-four. Grandma teased him about that frequently, but it served the purpose. He made toy cars that really rolled, which I accepted politely, idiotically consigning them to the closet because I had Hot Wheels cars to play with. His hand-carved weathervanes with propellers that spun in the wind graced the roofs of my parents, aunts, and uncles.

There was evidence of his handiwork throughout his home and those of his kin. His ingenious “jury rigs,” as Grandma called them, were signs of his creativity, many still serving their purposes.

Okay, now for the bugs.

One day when I was about twelve years old, Grandpa was in the backyard with a magnifying glass, carefully inspecting a flower as I arrived on my bicycle. As an insect flew away, he said, “I’m huntin’ me a new bug.” As usual, he was deliberately vague, at first, to draw me into a dialog. When I asked about the ‘new bug,’ he said a fellow in South America had just been awarded ten thousand dollars for discovering a previously unknown species. Grandpa went from flower to plant, looking at every insect in the garden, saying, “Nope, ladybug.” And a few minutes later, “Nuh-uh, beetle.” He went on like that until I lost interest and went in the house, where Grandma fixed me up with a Peppermint Patty and a glass of milk. When Grandpa came in, twenty minutes or so later, I asked how he had learned of the South American award. He said he’d read about it in the newspaper.

I’m pretty sure he never found the golden bug. I recently searched the internet for evidence of any cash award given for discovering a new species of insect in the 1960s, finding nothing. I don’t know what the old fellow saw in the paper, but his delving into entomology and describing it as “huntin’ a new bug,” and those memories resurfacing into my consciousness sixty years later, gave me a good chuckle and the impetus to tell you about it.

Tom Mindte
September 2026

Grandpa in 1913

Grandpa and me, 1972

The swing built for me by the gas company employees

The Model-T brake lever

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