Dana White, King of MMA

Dana spent many years with both his grandmothers when he was growing up.
Madelyn lived with us after I had packed up Dana and his sister and moved to Las
Vegas, Nevada from Massachusetts. I had divorced Dana’s father, I needed to get
away and wanted a fresh start.
Dana’s paternal grandparents were from Maine. Dana’s father, the youngest of
five children, was born in Bangor, Maine. His grandmother, Ilene, was a stay at home
mother who never worked a day in her life. She went from living with her parents to
living with her husband. She also never got a drivers license and was very dependent
on others. She worried about everything to the point of obsession; I do not believe she
ever enjoyed a day in her life. She would eventually develop dementia and be placed
in a home where she passed away a number of years ago.
Dana’s grandfather, David, worked in a factory as a machinist when they lived in
Connecticut. After his retirement, they moved back to Maine, to a trailer in the
woods in the middle of nowhere.
When Dana was born, David’s granddaughter Joanie had been his favorite
grandchild for the past five years. Now that she was going to school and not living
close enough for frequent visits, David was hoping that Dana would be a girl and take
her place. David and Ilene came to the hospital when Dana was born, and the only
thing David said was, “You had a boy. You can keep him. We don’t want him.”
I was stunned. They did not even go to the nursery to see Dana. However, after
making such a statement, it was strange how things would turn out between Dana and
his grandfather. It took no time at all before Dana and David had quite an amazing
relationship.
David was quite a character, both in physical appearance and personality. He was
a small man, probably five feet, five inches tall, and he had very thin gray hair that
was never combed. He usually walked around with three days worth of growth on his
face. David had a very craggy, deeply wrinkled face as if he had worked out in the sun
and weather all his life, and he was missing many of his teeth, which did not stop him
from giving a full-on smile that revealed all those gaps between his few remaining
teeth. He walked with a limp, the remnant of a stroke for which he never went to a
hospital. Dana’s grandmother found David on the floor one day and he could not talk