Well, we won't talk about my black-sheep uncle ;-) ... but you're right about the rest of it and they did all that. They were all masculine -- not the phony macho put-on, but just normal men -- or what we would have considered "normal" for the time, traits that are being bred out of the kids today.
I guess that’s what our parents and grandparents meant when they used to say of someone who was ‘’normal’’,as ‘’he’s a good egg’’.