The Grandchildren’s Memory
The human texture of Bessie Blount’s life is most accessible through the recollections of her grandchildren, particularly her grandsons Aaron and Nicholas Griffin, who have been quoted in multiple profiles.
Their grandmother, they recall, was “steely” and “diminutive” — physically small but entirely self-possessed. She lived in a modest one-bedroom trailer, “stacked with her papers and instruments.” She did not have a grand lifestyle or significant material comfort. She had never made much money from her inventions or her consulting work.
But she talked. She told stories about her accomplishments with evident pride, and her grandchildren absorbed those stories with a mixture of admiration and the particular attention that children pay to grandparents they believe are telling them something important.
Aaron Griffin remembered that when his grandmother encountered the failures and rejections of her career — the VA’s refusal, the lack of financial reward, the limited recognition — her response was characteristically defiant: “OK, I’ll show you.”
She showed them. Repeatedly.
She also, according to Aaron’s account, diagnosed his brother Nicholas with weak vision in one eye when Nicholas was twelve, by analyzing his handwriting. Blount had developed the conviction that handwriting analysis could reveal aspects of a person’s physical health — and she apparently applied this belief even in family contexts, to considerable accuracy.
Her mind did not stop working in retirement. She kept inventing small things, kept analyzing problems, kept producing solutions. The automatic eye dropper built from plastic, paper clips, and rubber bands is an image of someone who could not encounter a practical problem without reflexively designing a response to it.
This orientation — the inventive reflex — is perhaps the defining characteristic of her life. Not any specific invention, but the disposition that produced inventions whenever she encountered a problem that a solution would help.