A little bit about “Ol Grimey”…
Frank Grimes was a hard worker with perpetual bad luck. He was abandoned by his family at the tender age of four, and never got to go to school. He spent his childhood days working as a delivery boy, presenting gifts to children from wealthy and loving families.
On his eighteenth birthday, Grimes was severely injured in a silo explosion. It is never revealed what he was doing in the silo, or how it exploded. His recovery was long and painful.
Frank Grimes worked long and hard consistently, and what few spare moments he had, he used to study science by mail. At age 35, Grimes received a degree in nuclear physics from a distant college. A bird attempted to steal it from him when it arrived.
His long years of toil and suffering left him bitter, resentful and arrogant among his peers. Frank Grimes had to struggle for everything all his life, was working a second job at a foundry, and yet all he had to show for it was his briefcase, his haircut and a one-room apartment wedged between two bowling alleys (the latter of which impressed Homer).
Grimes took an intensely growing dislike to Homer Simpson, finding him obnoxious, idiotic, and dangerous. Initially, Grimes minded his own business, but after Homer intruded upon Grimes’ personal space with actions such as unintentionally stealing his lunch (Grimes was on a special diet) and Grimes’ personalized stationery, this caused Grimes to increasingly dislike Homer. In direct contrast, Homer started to admire him, even giving him the nickname “Grimey” (which he thought Grimes liked, when in fact Grimes despised the moniker). When Grimes ended up accidentally destroying a wall after smacking a beaker full of sulfuric acid out of Homer’s hands right before he drank it, without explaining how the man saved his life, or that it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t recklessly reached for the oddly placed beaker full of highly corrosive liquid, he only pointing at Grimes and saying “He did” when Burns asked who destroyed the wall. As a result, Grimes was given a stern warning and a severe pay cut by Mr. Burns, and he told Homer that they would be mortal enemies from that point on.
In an effort to prove that Homer was a truly undeserving buffoon, Grimes tricked him into entering a nuclear power plant model-building contest intended for kids. When Homer won the contest with his own entry (a copy of the current power plant, with added fins to lower wind resistance and a racing stripe) to thunderous applause from the audience, Grimes finally snapped, declaring everyone in the plant to be insane. Clearly having lost his mind, Grimes ran through the plant, psychotically impersonating Homer in a mocking fashion, and ultimately spotted some high-voltage power cables, saying, “What’s this? ‘Extremely high voltage.’ Well, I don’t need safety gloves, 'cause I’m Homer Simp–” He touched the cables before he could finish his sentence and was fatally electrocuted.
Grimes was buried in Springfield Cemetery. Homer unintentionally managed to make a mockery of the funeral ceremony by falling asleep and, half waking up, telling Marge to change the channel in a drowsy voice, causing the entire funeral congregation to erupt in laughter as the coffin was lowered into the Earth.
