Dwight Grandia Memorial for Indigenous Education
Dwight Grandia made his last charity donation in April 2021 to a new Q'eqchi' Maya high school in rural Guatemala that provides Indigenous youth with an accredited degree in agroecology. His gift allowed the school to repair its electrical and plumbing system.
Dwight's belief in this project grew from his own childhood. He himself attended a one-room schoolhouse like so many of these Maya children. As boys, he and his brothers slept on the ground at the family's farm for much of the year. Dwight didn't have indoor plumbing until he went to college.
To honor Dwight's memory, we hope to raise additional funds to build bunkbeds and create safer conditions for the 260 students enrolled at the school, who currently sleep on mats on the ground.
Thank you so much for your donation. Even small amounts -- every dollar -- will make a meaningful difference, a wonderful tribute to the generosity that Dwight showed to so many throughout his life from humble beginnings.
As Dwight wrote in memoirs to his granddaughter, "We rented a farm on shares and lived in a small house that was not in very good shape. Although I don’t remember it, my folks talked about how you could see through the floors to the ground below and so it got pretty cold in there in the winter...." Snow blew through the windows in the attic room he shared with his brothers. "We slept under a half dozen quilts in the winter time and we always slept right up next to each other to keep warm. After the family grew, all the rooms downstairs were bedrooms except the living room and the kitchen. As soon as it got warm enough, we took the quilts off the bed and put them on the front porch so we could sleep outside. Then when it got a bit warmer in the summer we would sleep on the front lawn all summer and stay out there until well after school started in the fall. After a couple weeks adjusting by sleeping on the front porch, we would go back upstairs."
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The Indigenous Institute for Integrated Rural Development or INDRI provides Q’eqchi’ Maya youth in northern Guatemala with an accredited high-school degree in agroecology. With their teachers and elders, they learn about organic agriculture, traditional health knowledge, and rural community betterment. All students make a commitment to return to their home villages to pursue sustainable farming.
While the Guatemalan government pays for teacher salaries, the grassroots Indigenous peasant movement ACDIP (www.acdip.org), which started the school in 2018, remains responsible for the upkeep of the facilities, health, and food for the students. In collaboration with Rotary International and other donors, they are working to build bungalow dorms and a proper kitchen. With the University of California-Davis, they will be soon opening a school library. The parent organization is a registered Guatemalan nonprofit which represents farmers from 162 villages across northern Guatemala, with whom Dwight's daughter Liza has collaborated since 2009.
Your memorial donation will help build bunk beds for these young people.
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Dwight E. Grandia
After a two-year struggle with gall bladder cancer, Dwight Grandia passed away peacefully at home in Gulf Shores, Alabama, on July 4, 2021. He was the firstborn to Dutch-American parents, Anna Marie Cornelissen Grandia and Virgil L. Grandia, on May 22, 1942 in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Raised on a farm southeast of town, he was the only child in his class taught with eight other grades in a one-room schoolhouse. He graduated from Oskaloosa High in 1960.
Attending Iowa State University with a scholarship from Air Force ROTC, he received his BS degree in Aerospace Engineering. He earned money in the summers fighting forest fires in the west. He worked briefly for Boeing’s missile and space division in Seattle.
He trained as an F-4 pilot in 1965 and joined a tactical fighter squadron on Bitburg Air Base in Germany in 1966. There he met his wife, Jacqueline S. Mixon, on a Christmas trip to Israel in 1967. They became engaged at “tulip time” in Amsterdam in April 1969 and were married in her home community of Crossville, Alabama, on July 21, 1969.
Three months later, he was sent to Vietnam by way of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines for jungle survival school. From Da Nang Air Base, he flew 150 combat missions. While in Vietnam, his son Timothy (Tim) Redden Grandia was born in spring 1970.
He was re-stationed to Hill Air Force Base in September 1970 as a test pilot on the F-4 and RF-4, with one dramatic emergency landing making the evening news. After he left the Air Force in January 1973, Delta Airlines hired him the next month and his daughter Elizabeth (Liza) Mara Grandia was born soon thereafter.
Over a 27-year career as Delta pilot, he flew the DC-8, B-727, 757, 767, and L-1011. Taking advantage of flight passes, the family shared many wonderful vacations. He and wife Jackie founded and led the Friends of the Library association in Stone Mountain, Georgia; served frequently as PTA officers; coordinated an election bond that built 17 new libraries in Dekalb County; and contributed to many other volunteer projects. He was deacon and elder for several Presbyterian Churches (Memorial Drive in Stone Mountain, Georgia; Decatur, GA; and Gulf Shores, AL), and attempted to found a new church affectionately known as the “Church of the Loons.”
After retirement in 2000, he preferred travel by land, touring all fifty states and Canadian provinces with his wife Jackie in their RV. For many years they tended a two-acre vegetable farm on Jackie’s homeplace in northwest Alabama. They moved to Gulf Shores, Alabama, in 2004, where they volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. Together, they generously supported Democratic candidates, construction of wells in rural Africa, World Vision, Habitat for Humanity, and ProPeten in Guatemala, among other charities.
An avid gardener, scuppernong wine vintner, house builder, and beekeeper for four decades, he gave away buckets of produce and (literally) a ton of honey to friends and family. A skilled carpenter and handyman, he paid many favors to his neighbors, who admired his sunny spirit. In later years, he socialized with the Ancient Aviators and put in countless hours on seven new Habitat houses and many more renovations in southern Alabama.
The birth of his only grandchild, Adelaide Rose, to his daughter Liza in 2010 gave him a new identity, “Papa D.” After his wife Jackie succumbed to cancer in 2013, he made many trips to see son Tim in Brooklyn, NY, and daughter Liza in Woodland, CA. He and granddaughter Adelaide became fast friends—biking, swimming, camping, reading, game playing, and even traveling to the Netherlands together in 2017. In later years and throughout the pandemic, Adelaide and her Papa D talked on the phone or FaceTime nearly every day.
Optimistic, generous, gregarious, patient, and always honest, Dwight could strike up a conversation with any stranger. From childhood farm antics, smoke jumping from helicopters into wildfires, winter survival training during a blizzard in Donner Pass, test pilot escapades, bee swarms, and worldwide travels, he had many adventures to tell.
He was preceded in death by his wife, Jacqueline Mixon Grandia on November 21, 2013. He is mourned by his son Tim Grandia [and husband Miguel Montelongo]; his beloved granddaughter Adelaide and daughter Liza Grandia; six younger brothers and sisters [listed with spouses]: Harold [and Eunice] Grandia, Marjorie [and Ron] VandeWall, Eileen [and Paul] O’Connor, Freda [and Tom] Perdue, Darlene Grandia, and Roger [and Jill] Grandia. With a photographic memory for dates, Dwight also kept up with the birthdays and life events of all his 14 nieces and nephews, as well their children, and onto great-great nieces and nephews.
A memorial service will be held at the First Presbyterian Church of Gulf Shores (309 East 21st Avenue, Gulf Shores, AL) on Saturday, July 24, 2021 at 2:00 pm. His ashes will lay next to his wife’s in the Freewill Baptist cemetery of Crossville, Alabama. Reflecting his green thumb, his chosen epitaph was “Nearer to God in a garden.”