Jim Vance

Jim Vance, called Papaw by his family, was J.D. Vance’s maternal grandfather and a formative father figure in J.D.’s life. He could be abrasive, intimidating, and uncompromising, yet his practical care and affection gave his grandson lessons that endured long after Papaw’s death. At the funeral, J.D. described the central truth of their bond: “I never had a dad,” he said, “But Papaw was always there for me, and he taught me the things that men needed to know.” He concluded, “He was the best dad that anyone could ever ask for.”

Character and Family

Papaw’s manner was famously blunt. To suggestions or behavior he disliked, he had a habitual one-word response: “Bullshit.” His gruffness could make him seem like a figure from another era, and his protectiveness could become frightening. During a cross-country drive with Aunt Wee, he kicked open the ladies’ room door at a highway rest stop with a loaded revolver because he feared she was being assaulted. Years later, he warned Aunt Wee’s husband, Dan, that he would kill their dog if it threatened their infant daughter. The threat was not merely theatrical: decades earlier, after a dog nearly bit Mom, Papaw had made a similar promise to a neighbor, and the dog was dead a week later.

His intimidating streak coexisted with deep tenderness toward children and family. He would get down on the floor and play with J.D. and Aunt Wee’s young daughters, and he welcomed hugs and kisses despite his customary grousing. He also showed care through practical help rather than verbal apology. He never apologized in words, but his actions could express what he could not say aloud. When Aunt Wee reproached him during their long drive for his earlier alcoholism and for the distance between them, he answered that they had the whole day together to talk. The response was brusque, but it made room for the conversation she wanted.

Papaw’s relationship with the women in his family was especially important to the way he judged men. He objected when J.D. lost his temper with Mom, Lindsay Leigh Lewis, or Mamaw, and taught him that “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family.” The lesson came, J.D. recognized, from Papaw’s own past failures in treating the women close to him well. His authority on the subject therefore carried the weight of experience rather than the simplicity of an abstract rule.

Work, Teaching, and Everyday Care

Cars were Papaw’s chief hobby: he liked buying, trading, and repairing them. Not long after he stopped drinking, Uncle Jimmy found him cursing over an old car on the street. When Uncle Jimmy offered to pay a shop to fix it, Papaw was genuinely surprised; he enjoyed doing the work himself. The episode captures a characteristic distinction in his life: what looked to others like hardship or frustration could be, for him, a valued task.

He also gave J.D. instruction through patience and repetition. Papaw bought him a BB gun with a mounted scope, secured it on a workbench with a vise, and fired at a target while they adjusted the scope to match each impact. Then he taught J.D. how to shoot: focus on the sights rather than the target, exhale before pulling the trigger. Years later, instructors at United States Marine Corps boot camp said recruits who had already learned to shoot often performed poorly because they had acquired bad fundamentals. J.D. was the exception. Papaw’s careful instruction helped him qualify with an M16 rifle as an expert, the highest category, with one of the platoon’s highest scores.

Papaw taught academic persistence as well. He and J.D. worked through increasingly complex math problems, and Papaw distinguished not knowing something from lacking intelligence: ignorance could be remedied with patience and hard work. His darkly comic coda was that the genuinely unintelligent were “up shit creek without a paddle.” Beneath the joke was a durable lesson for a child whose life often lacked steadiness: difficulty did not prove incapacity, and learning could proceed one problem at a time.

His practical care extended to Lindsay Leigh Lewis. When she wrecked a car he had bought and repaired for her, he bought and fixed up another so she would not feel that she came from nothing. The gesture joined material help to emotional understanding: he knew that a dependable car could also stand for belonging and dignity.

Death and Its Immediate Aftermath

When Papaw failed to appear for a series of expected events, his absence signaled that something was seriously wrong. Mom arrived shortly after Mamaw called, and J.D., already sobbing, feared Papaw was dead. The family hurried to his nearby house. J.D. pounded on the front door; Mom ran to the back, saw her father hunched over in his chair, and broke a window to get inside and reach him. Papaw had been dead for nearly a day. Mom and Mamaw wept as they waited for an ambulance. At Mamaw’s request, J.D. tried to say goodbye before the body was taken away, though he did not explain to the medical technician why he needed to see Papaw.

At the funeral, J.D. recalled not only Papaw’s harshness but the hours of instruction, his welcome for a child’s affection, and his generosity toward the family. He stood and told those assembled how important Papaw had been to him. Afterward, people praised J.D.’s courage, but Mom did not; she seemed withdrawn, moving slowly and speaking little. The grief surrounding Papaw’s death was not shared in the same way by everyone, and the family’s apparent mourning concealed a more serious crisis.

In the days that followed, Mom insisted that Papaw had been the only person who understood her and treated other mourners as though their grief were illegitimate. Mamaw kept J.D. close, ostensibly because she needed him while grieving. Lindsay Leigh Lewis, who had slept in J.D.’s room, hugged him and promised that they would get through what was coming. Soon afterward, Mom erupted in the front yard, shouting at family and a friend; a police officer restrained her as she struggled, and there was blood on the porch. J.D. remembered wishing Papaw were there to know what to do. His death was therefore not only a personal loss but the disappearance of a trusted adult at the moment the household’s instability was intensifying.

Legacy in J.D.’s Life

Papaw’s importance becomes especially clear against the repeated changes in J.D.’s childhood. Before he moved permanently in with Mamaw, J.D. changed homes and household arrangements as his mother’s relationships shifted: from Middletown to Preble County, back to different addresses in Middletown, and later to other homes, including one with Ken, a stranger to him. Those moves were accompanied by drugs, domestic conflict, and children’s services becoming involved. Papaw’s death came amid this unsettled period, taking away one of the people J.D. most trusted.

After J.D. moved in with Mamaw permanently, the contrast was stark: through tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades, he lived in the same house with the same person. J.D. credited the peace there with giving him room to do homework, concentrate on school and work, build lasting friendships, and clarify what he wanted from life. He remembered not only those practical benefits but the relief of knowing where he would live the following month. Papaw had not been alive to provide that stability, but the family bond and lessons he helped establish remained part of its foundation.

Papaw’s influence also followed J.D. into adulthood through specific skills and principles rather than a single idealized memory: expert marksmanship grounded in sound fundamentals, confidence that knowledge could be acquired through effort, affection expressed by showing up and helping, and a standard of conduct toward women rooted in hard-earned regret. In the memoir, his bluntness and tenderness remain inseparable. He could frighten the people he loved, yet he could also repair a car so a granddaughter would feel she came from something, or teach a boy patiently until he knew how to do a difficult thing well. His death ended that presence; the work and care he had put into his family continued to shape J.D.’s understanding of what a father could be.