Reprise: My Dad

I posted this tribute one year ago today. I can't think of anything more to add so I'll reprise.

I love this photograph of my father because it doesn't resemble the man I knew in any way shape or form.

The man I knew smoked only an occasional cigar and drank an occasional sherry or glass of wine, barbecued weekends, loved Chinese food and take out, and dressed like Don Draper every work day of his life because he was an ad man.  

This photo was probably taken when he was in the USAF during WWII.  The hair cut, the shirt, the hard-ass look.  I thought this was Frankenstein the first time I found it in the drawer of his high boy dresser.  I was probably 7 or 8 and it scared me to death.  He had to reassure me it was just a photo taken when he was young and he was definitely not a monster!

Dad, circa mid-1940s





I remember my father is as a loving but stern, old-fashioned man with a very rigid set of principles.  He was born in 1910, another era light years from the Sixties when I was coming of age.  We did not see eye to eye.  Yet, he instilled his faith in God, his work ethics, his frugality and his loyalty in my brother and me.  We are the better for those things.


Me, Dad, Mother at Butchart Gardens British Columbia   Summer 1969  Mother & I wear nosegays of violets from Dad



Dad loved an occasional cigar, a pancake breakfast with bacon on the side, a good walk, his dog(s), nature, God and country. He was never so proud as when his two grandsons were born.  I think they were the light of his old age.
 

D

Dad & Grandsons 2005 (age 95)

He was nutrition and supplement minded before it was fashionable.  He read the Rodale books and followed a predominantly naturopathic road when I was young.  I remember him ingesting Tiger's Milk, fish oil, B supplements, high fibre food, whole grains, raw honey.  He walked that walk.  He lived into his late 90s and was still mobile.

Dad presenting retirement document to a retiring Colonel Vandenburg AFB, 2004

For those of you old enough to remember, "My Dad" sung by Paul Petersen on The Donna Reed Show 

 

I Remember Papa

I love this photograph of my father because it doesn't resemble the man I knew in any way shape or form.

The man I knew smoked only an occasional cigar and drank an occasional sherry or glass of wine, barbecued weekends, loved Chinese food and take out, and dressed like Don Draper every work day of his life because he was an ad man.  

This photo was probably taken when he was in the USAF during WWII.  The hair cut, the shirt, the hard-ass look.  I thought this was Frankenstein the first time I found it in the drawer of his high boy dresser.  I was probably 7 or 8 and it scared me to death.  He had to reassure me it was just a photo taken when he was young and he was definitely not a monster!

Dad, circa mid-1940s





I remember my father is as a loving but stern, old-fashioned man with a very rigid set of principles.  He was born in 1910, another era light years from the Sixties when I was coming of age.  We did not see eye to eye.  Yet, he instilled his faith in God, his work ethics, his frugality and his loyalty in my brother and me.  We are the better for those things.


Me, Dad, Mother at Butchart Gardens British Columbia   Summer 1969  Mother & I wear nosegays of violets from Dad



Dad loved an occasional cigar, a pancake breakfast with bacon on the side, a good walk, his dog(s), nature, God and country. He was never so proud as when his two grandsons were born.  I think they were the light of his old age.
 

D

Dad & Grandsons 2005 (age 95)

He was nutrition and supplement minded before it was fashionable.  He read the Rodale books and followed a predominantly naturopathic road when I was young.  I remember him ingesting Tiger's Milk, fish oil, B supplements, high fibre food, whole grains, raw honey.  He walked that walk.  He lived into his late 90s and was still mobile.

Dad presenting retirement document to a retiring Colonel Vandenburg AFB, 2004

For those of you old enough to remember, "My Dad" sung by Paul Petersen on The Donna Reed Show 

For those of you about to be new fathers...  

Things Can Always Go Wrong

On a recent Sunday night, I threw a small dinner party for my two oldest friends in N.H.  One of them was the first woman I met in my neighborhood who subsequently introduced me to practically everyone I needed or wanted to know.  She's plugged in to our tiny burgh.   She's the person I go to when I need to know who is doing what, owns what, selling what, whose kids are doing what.  I laughingly refer to her as "The Town Crier".

While the dinner turned out beautifully, it was a comedy of errors under construction.  The paper towels caught fire & could have burned down the house were it not for my soapstone counter & my eagle eyed friend who saw smoke trickling out of the screen door as we sat on the rear deck.  I thought it was the bbq!  We snuffed the fire before it had a chance to blacken my new white cabinets or worse yet, burn down the house.

Back in the sweltering kitchen, continuing the meal prep as the humidity played havoc with my hair, my sanity & my overactive hot flashes, I was sweating profusely as I worked at the kitchen sink gazing out the window as my dog, Dewey, began to shake his head dramatically from side to side.  He was shaking something in his mouth which, to my horror, turned out to be a very long snake.  My guests couldn't see him from the deck because a large Japonica bush blocked their view.  I began screaming.  By the time my husband reached the dog, he'd snapped the head off the snake and was dragging two feet of snake body about.  UGH.  Now, being a California Girl, I'm thinking it's poisonous, you know, rattlesnake, coral snake, something like that.  Apparently it was a very long harmless garter snake.  That didn't appease me much.

When our guests left that evening, they thanked us for "a great meal and great entertainment."  I somehow always make these New England ladies laugh.

               Our beloved Dewey, referred to as "Sideways Dog", in his youth



HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

Happy Father's Day

M

My father, mother and I in front of our home, Van Nuys, California 1952.

Background is the car they called "Snubnose".

My father died three years ago this summer.  He was  98 years old.  He wanted to live to be 100 and we all thought he would.  Perhaps that's why I was so surprised when he keeled over from a heart attack while eating his favorite food, Chinese. 

Dad's family is long-lived. His mother lived to be 100 years and 3 months.  His Aunt Dema, youngest of his mother's eight siblings, was still driving the coast of California into Oregon when she was in her early nineties.  Her husband, a younger man in his seventies, did not know her real age until she passed.    I hear he was quite surprised.

I remember sitting and talking to Dad when he was elderly, trying to glean information about his life.  He was born in 1910.  I'd heard much about his youth because he spoke of it often when we were growing up:  his days on the Ohio River, the old steamships and paddle wheels, the one room schoolhouse, life on the farm. But his single years, while learning the ad biz in Chicago before the war, were not well known to me.   There was so much more I wanted to know.  Did he have fun?  What were radio and ad agencies like back in the 30's?  What was baseball like?  What entertainments and entertainers did he see?

Dad originally worked as a copywriter and print ad designer for Florsheim Shoes.  They had a large building in downtown Chicago.  He worked in the basement probably starting around 1928 or '29.  I know he was there in '29 because he spoke of the Stock Market Crash, seeing a jumper's body on the sidewalk of his building outside his basement window.  He expected another major crash for the rest of his life.

My family circa 1957 in our second home,Woodland Hills, CA.

My little brother is on a hobby horse.

Dad participated in the beginnings of radio broadcasting. He pioneered in an exciting new business,  national radio representatives, representing  stations around the country to the big ad agencies like Leo Burnett and Foote, Cone & Belding.  Chicago was the center of advertising in those days thanks to pioneers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  Dad went to work for one of the early national radio representatives, Howard Wilson & Co.  They sold broadcast air time on radio stations around the country to Chicago ad agencies.  In those days, radio programs ran in fifteen minute segments, also known as quarter hours, and were sponsored by one major advertiser.  He said it was exciting times back then; the business was young, they were young, they lived in a great city, it was all new.

Dad had access to some pretty exciting sporting events too.  He was a lifelong fan of baseball going to both Comiskey Park to see the White Sox and Wrigley Field to see the Cubs.  When I was a kid, he occasionally took my brother and I to Chavez Ravine to see the Dodgers.  I think the Cubs were his favorite team, however. In those days, he said you could meet the players and he was lucky enough to shake hands with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the like.  He saw Red Grange play for the Chicago Bears.  He watched Seabiscuit and Man O' War race.  It wasn't the race.  It was after that.  But he said it was "memorable".

Around 1939, he moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep business.  He later gave it up to enlist with the  Army Air Corp at the beginning of WWII.  He worked in several areas including:  transportation manager for supply trains across the U.S., as an intelligence photographer in Europe.  He was a skinny guy, weighing in at 125lbs during the war, making it easy to hand him partway out of the plane to take photos while flying over Germany.

As kids, we would ask him, "Did you bomb anything?" 

"Oh sure," he'd say.  "But I don't know if we killed anyone."  I don't think that was something he ever wanted to dwell on.  Dad remained in the USAF Reserve after WWII, retiring as a Lt. Colonel.

After my mother died, in 1997, Dad told me he'd been married before, during WWII.  It was an absolute shock; not because he had but because he never told us.  He'd fallen in love with a young woman from New York.  I don't know how they met but they married just before he shipped out.  They wrote back and forth throughout the war.  I have her letters.  They are quite poignant.  Sometime, prior to his coming home, she had the marriage annulled.  She said her father was an alcoholic and she felt obligated to care for him and ddn't want my father to share the burden.  My father was crushed and he carried the pain of it with him all those years.  He erected a monument to her after he learned she, too, died of alcoholism-related illness.

Dad was 40 years old when he married my mother.  He said she never knew about his first wife.  I asked him why and he said he thought she'd be "jealous".  I don't think she'd have been jealous; Mother had two previous husbands.  But I'm sure she didn't know as we were close and shared a great deal.  My brother and I are their only children.

To say we do not know our parents is an understatement.  Their lives are a mystery, for the most part, just as ours may be a mystery to our children.  We may never really know our parents but we should try to learn as much as possible.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

D

Dad and his grandsons, 2005.  

He was very proud of them and thrilled they were boys!