Uncle Fred, like Aunt Pisces, was not actually a blood relation of my own. He was the husband, and later the widower of my grandfather’s half-sister, Mabel. Ergo; he was for some decades, Grandma’s brother-in-law.

From everything I've ever heard, both Grandpa and Mabel were somewhat difficult people, and I gather that there was a good deal of fellow-feeling between the two who had chosen to live with them. In any event Grandma and Uncle Fred were great friends, and continued as such until Uncle Fred’s death sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

Grandma was widowed by the time she was 60, and Aunt Mabel had the grave misfortune to develop some form of senile dementia, possibly, but not necessarily Alzheimers, which eventually required institutionalization. By the time I was old enough to sit up and take notice, Uncle Fred was living alone in a small apartment in Alhambra, and suplementing his pension by piano tuning. I have no idea what he had done for a living when he was still working.