Lucky Coincidence?
I like a place with some history to it, but when my husband-to-be and I picked the US Grant as the place to spend our wedding night in the spring of 1993, I had no idea I would be returning to somewhere my great-grandfather had been almost 50 years before.
Nobody really knows why he up and moved across the country from Youngstown, Ohio to San Diego in the middle of World War II. He had no family out West, and was already 75 years old, a grandfather and widower when he made the move. My Dad did some genealogy research on the family, and uncovered a letter my great-grandfather wrote addressed, “Dear Family” on US Grant Hotel stationery, dated Oct. 4-44, but it does little to shed light on the mystery. Mostly he talks about previous family history and what happened to different relatives. Dad is led to believe that he had some sort of job at the hotel — labor was scarce during the war years — and may have even lived there as well. But mostly he remains an enigma. He died only two years after arriving, leaving no indication of what prompted him to leave everything familiar for new ground at his age. But I didn’t know any of this 17 years ago when my husband and I were getting married. We only knew we wanted our stay to be somewhere romantic with a sense of history. What are the odds we would pick the one place with a connection to the only other relative of either of ours ever to live in San Diego? Seems it must have been fate, and maybe good luck, too, since we'll be celebrating Anniversary No. 18 this spring. Hmmm... maybe another visit to the Grant is in our future. -Louise Julig