My Grandfather, Ludwig

Ludwig Ferdinand Moeller (My House)

My hero is my grandfather, Ludwig. He is my grandfather on my dad’s side of the family. He is a certified public accountant and worked very hard to get to where he is right now in life.

There are many different jobs and interesting things he has done in life. I would like to state a few of them that are significant to me. For a good part of his professional career, he was the manager of the labor accounting department at General Dynamics. He got his first major accounting job in 1943 working for his professor’s firm (Bauman & Finney that was a big account firm at the time). He plays both the organ and piano (self-taught). He also contributed to the invention of the clicker, on the side of a mechanical pencil.

He had three brothers and three sisters. He was one of two children that have a high school diploma. He was also the only child in his family to graduate from college. He lived in Germany until 1925, when he immigrated to the US. (Oak Park, a suburb in Chicago.)

He was born in Elgersburg, Germany in 1919(Thuringia) (not far from where Martin Luther translated the Latin bible to German). In 1925, he immigrated to the US. In 1937, he graduated from HS and, in 1943, he graduated from Northwestern University. He also got his CPA Certificate in 1946. He was married on December 7 1946. On May 30 2002, he was widowed when my grandmother lost the fight against cancer. He was alive during the Depression in the US which taught him a valuable lesson; this event made him appreciate everything a lot more then the average person because he knew what it was like to be poor.

He is my hero because of all the things he has done in his life. The first thing that I am proud of is how he taught himself English at the age of eight from extensive reading, which in my mind is impressive. I also admire how he was the only person out of his whole family to graduate from college. In his daily life, he would help anyone that looked like they needed it. For example, he would pull drunks off the streets and put them on benches with money so they could ride the buses home. Another example was when he saved a man who was being crushed by his own car. During one of his jobs, he was told to lie about certain numbers. When he refused, he was demoted. He is a man of principle, which I admire.