He lived in the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee as a child, and he had a horrible family. They were abusive toward him, they were abusive toward each other, and they were abusive toward other people. As result he started going off alone in the woods at a very young age.
By the age of 12 he was pretty much living in the woods. He would wake up in the morning and run outside, coming back only to get some food (usually just one meal per day). Some nights he would even sleep in the woods; his parents didn't care.
Over time he was fed less and less as his family started to care even less about him. He was visibly malnourished, and tried to combat it by eating berries and learning about edible mushrooms in the woods. That still wasn't enough to keep him from looking like a concentration camp victim though.
One day he was picking berries in the woods when he came across an older man fishing at a large creek. The man immediately recognized that my grandpa was near-starving and offered him food. He went to the man's house, and there the man's wife made him his first real meal in several years. From that day on, my grandpa went to their house to get food every single day, and occasionally slept in their guest room too.
My grandpa and the man got to know each other. They exchanged stories; the man talked about his experience in the army during World War I, and my grandpa talked about what was happening at his home, which he was visiting increasingly rarely. The man taught my grandpa how to hunt, and lent him his first gun.
Eventually the man convinced my grandpa to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. My grandpa did, and was promptly stationed in Hawaii. While he was there he figured out that he could impersonate a soldier and get free access to food, booze, and cigarettes. He made friends with several soldiers that were stationed there, and they became the first real friends he ever had.
Eventually he had to go home, so he went to board his plane. A police officer (possibly military guard or security guard) pushed past him and stole his seat, so he had to stay at his base for a while until the next flight. That plane took off, and was never seen again.
The flight he was finally able to board was on December 5, 1941. He flew to LA and transferred to a flight to Nashville, where the man I mentioned earlier picked him up and took him to his place. My grandpa spent the night there and the next morning, he heard the news that Pearl Harbor, where he had been based, had been attacked. He frantically looked all over the place trying to figure out if his friends were okay. He never heard anything so he assumed they had been killed.
He went through a period of really bad depression, since he had lost the first and only friends he ever had. He got a small house in Nashville and tried to make friends but couldn't even bring himself to have a normal conversation. He went to a bar one night and just broke down crying in the corner. Meanwhile, a girl was there with her friends. All her friends had picked out guys and were flirting with them, but no one showed any interest in her. She saw my grandpa crying in the corner and decided to go talk to him. They got to know each other, became close, and now she's my grandma.
Fast forward to 2003-ish. My grandpa's health was failing so he was stuck at home reading a lot of books. He read a book about World War II that referenced an interview with one of the guys he thought were killed at Pearl Harbor. It was dated after Pearl Harbor. He found out the guy was involved with a historical group in Atlanta, so he sent a letter. It turned out, my grandpa's friends thought he was on the flight that had disappeared. So they thought each other were dead.
His group ended up being all alive, so they got together and had some good times before my grandpa and one other guy in the group were hospitalized for unrelated reasons at around the same time. Four of the five guys ended up passing away (including my grandpa) but the fifth one is still around somewhere.
