A Tribute to Arnolds Grinvalds

Arnolds Grinvalds

25 October 1956–10 November 1990

Arnolds was the second child of Liesma and Vitauts Grinvalds. He was named after his uncle Arnolds Grinbergs, his mother’s brother, who had been a soldier, stranded behind in Latvia after World War II. Uncle Arnolds’ wife Alma fled the country with their children in October of 1944, and no one was sure of Arnolds’ fate as the Soviet army swept across Latvia killing any enemy soldiers they found.

My brother Arnolds (who went by Arnold) Grinvalds was born in the mid 1950s, after the tumult of the war had passed, and life was relatively peaceful. He was also born at the right time—too young to be sent to the pointless war in Vietnam, but old enough to live through the 60s and enjoy the abrupt evolution of society and rock and roll.

We had seven siblings in our family, and he was the eldest son. As his youngest sibling, I had the least contact with him when we were growing up because of our 15-year age difference, but I remember him fondly.

He died of AIDS in 1990 after a long battle that left my mother withered, and shook our family to the core. I didn’t even know he was gay until he got sick, and I still don’t really understand what it all meant even all these years later. 

We grew up in a conservative small town in Nebraska with an immigrant pastor for a father. I still remember how kids in my high school class would openly talk about killing gay people and doing all sorts of other horrible things. “Gay” and “faggot” were common slurs on the playground and in the hallways of the school. I never bought into the whole hate thing, but I felt it from others.

The funny thing, if things can be funny in these situations, is that Arnold always came to family events with his friend Martin. I mean, it couldn’t have been more obvious. They lived together. Three of my older siblings lived with Arnold and Martin or in one of their rentals while they lived in Lincoln. They all had to have known. Martin died several years before Arnold. 

Arnold was incredibly smart but anxious. He always seemed to have a plan for doing something big. In the 80s, he won a Mr. Nebraska contest and ran for mayor of Lincoln. He didn’t get very many votes, but it seemed like such a big deal at the time. I remember how important it felt to have a brother who was on the ballot to be mayor of the second largest city in Nebraska. Lincoln was well-known as having a large population of gays at the time, and I am sure this was part of his political agenda.  

For years, he self-published a newsletter that went out to dozens of people. It was a mix of news and humor that people enjoyed and even cherished. I followed in his footsteps, publishing my own newsletter for years as I moved from place to place. 

Another one of his talents was making up games. One summer, he spent a long time cutting out little cardboard pieces and color coding them to make a prototype of a board game. I don’t remember how the game worked, but it had domino-type playing pieces with swaths of color like orange, red, and yellow. He sent it to Parker Brothers or some other game company, but he was rejected.

He and my other brother Norm would also modify the rules of games. Arnold liked chess and Scrabble because they required skill, and he detested games of chance except for this one he made up. The game was super simple and we called it “Dice Bombing”. You played with 3 dice, 2 that were normal and one that had mathematical symbols on it: +, -, X, and ➗. Then you threw the dice in any order, and you could use the other dice to try to “bomb” the ones you had already rolled to make them change. The best roll was 6×6, and the worst was 1-6 (-5). And we would yell as people threw the dice calling for “mina (minus) 1”! 

Comedy tapes were another fun little project that he would embark on. My brothers Norm and Al made a series of comedies as well, but Arnold’s skits were legendary. He and Al did a parody of a Michelob Light commercial that is forever embedded in my memory. Al said, “You could’ve beat Bobby Fisher the way you played today!” and Arnold replied “I never played for a Michelob Light before!” in this hilarious high-pitched voice. You had to hear it to get it. 

When he got a video camera, we used it to film some funny clips like a parody of my parents playing Solo which feels more tragic now than funny as Arnold played our father yelling at our mother for playing the wrong cards. But he nailed the impression with one liners like, “Go back to Lincoln,” in a perfect Latvian accent. 

But the thing about Arnold I remember the most was his kindness and generosity. He never had a completely stable career, but if he ever came into money, he shared it. I recall when I was 12 or 13 years old, he bought me a Texas Instruments pocket computer. It was a working computer that was just a bit larger than a calculator with a little screen. I think he wanted me to learn now to program, but I never did. 

Another time, I had this pet project of fixing up this old mini-bike that I had bought at a flea market for 50 cents. I had taken it all apart and fixed it up so the engine would almost run, but I couldn’t quite get it going. So I took it to old Elmer down the street who made a living by fixing old lawnmowers for people in town. He took a look at it and told me it would cost $20 to fix, which was a lot of money for me and my family at the time. I asked my dad for the money, and he just yelled at me causing this big drama in the kitchen. Arnold just pulled out his wallet and gave me the $20 like it was nothing. I went to pick up the bike, and I actually got it running for a few rides. It wasn’t much, but it was also everything.

Now that I think about it, none of the gifts really worked out as expected. He gave someone a helicopter with a working gas engine that never started. I tried everything to get it going, and it sputtered a few times, but nothing seemed to work. Maybe it is better that it never flew because it was just a big propeller with an engine and no means of control, so I am guessing it would have hurt or killed somebody after it finally took off.

When he went to college, Arnold ran away to California to study at UCLA. I always thought it was so cool to have a brother living in California. I didn’t know it was U-C-L-A, and I pronounced it “Ucla”—UCKLUH. “The Ucla Bruins!” When he came home for a visit, we made a big “Welcome Home” sign, and it was thrilling for me, but I bet it was a big disappointment for him. He didn’t finish college, and here he was, back in Nebraska. 

I think he always wanted to be a writer. He loved to write, and after he died, he left behind many drafts of finished and unfinished stories from his creative writing classes at UNL. In the end, he did complete his English degree, but he never had time to develop or create anything major. Time was his enemy. He died when he was only 33 years old, which seemed old to me then, but now seems impossibly young. 

One story that he had many drafts of was called the “Ace of SPAIDS” about a young man dying of AIDS and playing cards in the hospital. I remember looking through his drafts after he died and thinking about all the work he put into his story, meticulously choosing words and phrases. I thought that I would work to get his stories published, to create some lasting legacy of his words and work—but it never happened. 

Now that he has been dead for as long as he was alive, what legacy does someone who died so young leave behind? 34 years later, is there anyone out there who remembers him? I sometimes think of all the people he met and knew during the heydays of his Lincoln party life, most of them would be old men now, if they survived the plague; what has happened to all of them?

Epilogue

Uncle Arnolds did survive the war. He made it through by hiding in a barn on a farm. The family took him in and hid him from the Russians, and he married their daughter who had lost her husband in the war. He now had two families—one in the United States that he had no contact with, and an adopted son in Latvia named Bruno Grasmanis, whom he raised as his own.

In an interesting coincidence, Arnolds Grinbergs died on 14 November 1990 at the age of 81, and his nephew, Arnolds Grinvalds died four days before on 10 November 1990 at the age of 34. 

Uncle Arnolds’ legacy lives on through generations of offspring. His great-granddaughters are thriving in Latvia through the Grasmanis line, and his great-grandchildren in the states have also made incredible lives of their own. I know that my brother Arnold does not have such a legacy to his name, but perhaps in some small way he can be remembered for the kind, brilliant, generous, and beautiful soul that he was. 

Side note: I wrote this as a labour of love and a self-reflection piece. Please feel free to leave a comment about Arnold if you remember him, and share this with anyone who might have known him.