Let Me Tell Y’all A Story is a weekly column that’s not focused on sports. It’s brought to you by our partners at Chuck Owens, Alfa Insurance.

Tuesday, September 29 marked 106 years since the birth of one of my all-time heroes.

His name was Ernest Claude Garvin, but all my life, I called him Poppy.

The father of my mama, he was one of two awesome grandfathers I was blessed with. My Papaw, Fred Furr, lived just a mile up the road.

Poppy lived on Claiborne Road, outside of Sandersville in Jones County. That meant I didn’t see him as much as Papaw, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a huge influence on myself and my siblings.

My cousins in Jones County called him EC and my grandmother, Edna, often just called him Babe.

He was born on September 29, 1919, in Newton County to Maudie Mae and Ellison Garvin.

The second son of a Garvin brood that would eventually include three boys and a girl, his mama was 18 years old when he was born.

Their life was one of sharecroppers that moved between family homes in Newton and Jones Counties.

In December of 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, drawing America into World War II.

A month later, Poppy was in training with the United State Army.

If I could go back and relive parts of my younger life, I would go buy a video camera, set it up on a tripod in front of my grandfather, and get him to describe his life in excruciating detail.

I didn’t do that, but I do have every memory of what he told me about being a 22-year old training for war

He once took my cousin, my uncle and myself on a train trip to Washington, D.C. While walking around the National Museum of American History, we passed through an exhibit on World War II.

There was a picture there of draft card numbers being pulled out of a giant glass bowl.

He explained to me how the system was created to process the millions of men who’d signed up to serve.

“We all wanted to go,” were his exact words.

Tom Brokaw sold a lot of books writing about “The Greatest Generation.”

I didn’t need to hear that phrase to realize that my grandfather was a cut above.

He spent three years overseas, first going to the theater of war in North Africa and then later moving to the occupation of Italy.

Never prideful, never boastful, I’d have to draw stories out of him.

He told me once about crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a transport ship that used a zigzag pattern to avoid German U-boats. Another time he described how large the Nazi soldiers were when he first got overseas and how by the end, the soldiers from Germany that surrendered were old men and boys.

He was on the ground crew of a bomber in the United States Army Air Force.

He once told about the worst day he experienced, one where plane after plane didn’t make it back.

I realized later, as I got older and dug deeper into the history of WWII and his stories, he was talking about Operation Tidal Wave, a significant day in the war when the fuel facilities used by Germany and its allies were taken out.

There were 177 B-24 Liberators that took off that day from Libya, near Benghazi. Only 88 made it safely back at the end of the operation.

When I was growing up, there was a plastic tote in a cabinet at my grandparents’ home in Jones County.

It was filled with pictures from their life. Photos of my mom and her siblings when they were young. There were pictures of Poppy playing golf and polaroid snaps of truck tailgates packed with fish that had caught along years ago.

The ones I always sought out were the small, black and white pictures. The ones that had a much younger version of my Poppy in his three years overseas. A favorite was him and a couple buddies posed outside The Coliseum in Rome.

Before he left to serve, he met a girl that lived in Fort Myers, Florida while training there.

They wrote letters back and forth and when he got back to the states, they got married.

Poppy lived to be 88 years old, passing away on October 28, 2007.

He’d worked many years at Masonite Corporation after going back to school to get a business degree from the University of Southern Mississippi on the G.I. Bill.

I always knew he was proud of me for being a Golden Eagle myself.

For over 50 years, he was a Sunday School teacher, deacon, and leader in his church.

His retirement from work was spent doing good for others, as he and my grandmother were recognized for their work with The Red Cross and he was also elected as a state representative during the mid1980s.

When my mama passed away unexpectedly while I was in college, my grandparents would come over from Laurel to check on me from time to time.

I can think back to this one lunch we had at Copeland’s in Hattiesburg and how my grandfather, who was I think 86 at the time, absolutely destroyed a fried onion as an appetizer before tucking in for his entrée.

He was always himself, until the very end, which I now realize was a huge blessing.

When he was close to death just a few years later, I was sitting in his hospital room when a nurse looked at his chart and saw his name.

The man spoke to both my grandparents and let them know that he’d received a nursing scholarship while attending Jones College. One they created in my grandmother’s honor and bore her name.

“Did it help you, honey,” my grandmother asked. Yes, he replied, absolutely.

“Good,” she said, “that’s why we did it.”

A couple days later, with nearly my entire family gathered in that same room, she leaned down into my Poppy’s ear and said, “you can go, Babe.”

And he did.

Before he left, he lived a life filled with family, dignity, faith, travel, patience, servanthood, happiness, war and most importantly, peace.

If I make it to my birthday on November 16, I’ll have lived exactly half as long as he did.

Will I make it to 88?

I’m not going to bet on it, but however long I do have left, I daily strive to follow the example laid out for me by my Poppy, Ernest Claude Garvin, on what a life well lived should look like.