I’ve come to the conclusion that the father I refer to occasionally is a myth. As in most myths, there is some truth to the depiction, but the overall picture has been shaped to fit into a frame I created from distortions. When my father died a number of years ago (at the age of 82) I began to whittle away at that myth and began to discover that he was not half bad at what he did. You’d never know that from the stories I seemed to enjoy telling about him.
My father was a hard-working, middle-class man. He was a product of the Great Depression, so his values were shaped by circumstances I have never experienced. His father was a tough, ornery man who probably abused his wife and children out of anger at his own situation. A skilled craftsman, my grandfather broke his back as a relatively young man and was never able to function as a carpenter/mason for most of his adult life. I never knew him but I suspect from the stories I’ve heard that he wasn’t a great guy to be around. I suspect my father and his brothers and sister learned how to avoid him.
I was the third of four children…a typical middle child. But my father paid more attention to me than I was trying to remember. He had a nickname for me, “Butch,” which only lasted a few years. It never took. My brother was “Bud” but that didn’t take either. I think my father was trying to fashion an “Ozzie and Harriet” kind of relationship, but we weren’t the Nelsons. He was a Boy Scout executive and nurtured me through Cub Scouts and into the Boy Scouts until (at Second Class) I chose to go in another direction. I wasn’t the outdoor type and it was becoming less appealing to me to sleep on the ground and cook over an open fire.
My father was head-over-heels involved in the Masonic fraternity. He helped nurture a chapter of DeMolay, a Masonic organization for boys, and drove us to a nearby city regularly for our meetings and events. Our 1953 Kaiser became well-known as a transportation “taxi” for my friends and me to get there and to other places.
Dad loved to fish. I think he probably fished in one way or another at least once a week until his age and infirmity limited him. When he had a heart attack as a middle-aged man, he had to have a companion when he went, so I was his fishing partner. At first it was an honor and was exciting. As I became a teenager, however, it got old, and I found myself bored to tears sitting in a row boat on a lake with a limp line in the water. I’ve never fished again once I went off to college. But it is only in these later years that I have calculated the hours I spent alone with him. He loved to introduce me to his fishing buddies and his friends wherever we went. My father was a networker and knew people all over the place. That gene has been passed down to me and to my children.
When my father went to Detroit in 1950 to pick up our brand-new 1951 Kaiser Manhattan he took my brother and me with him. On the train ride out there I sat with a “displaced person” from Easter Europe. It was my first experience with a conversation with someone from the War (WW II.) I have never forgotten the experience; I think it helped me yearn for a world view beyond my limited geography.
Among my memories of my father is the day he went to work promising to bring home a can of air. I didn’t believe there was such a thing. But sure enough, when he arrived home that evening, there was a can of air with a hose connected to it, meant to pump up a flat tire. I was awed.
Another time he and my mother decided I was bright enough to be a scientist. (They didn’t quite pick up that my abilities in math and science were grossly limited.) As a Christmas gift they gave me a crystal radio kit, and then my father helped me construct the set from the kit. A later stocking gift was an insulator…one of those ceramic pieces you put on an electric wire to absorb a power surge, as when lightening struck. I never could figure out what I was supposed to do with it, but I treasured it as a valuable possession.
Another Christmas when funds were low he reconditioned my brother’s old bicycle. He did a great job on it. I rode that bike for two or three years after that. For years I spoke negatively about the bike, that it was a hand-me-down. It is in recent years that I can recall the feel of the handlebars, the sound of the wheels (with a playing card placed in them to sound like an engine) and the envy some of my friends had for it. It was a great bike.
Every summer my father rented a summer camp on a little lake near our home and we moved there for a month or so. We went for Sunday drives to interesting places in Vermont and the mountains of Upstate New York. I remember my father killing a rattlesnake on the highway and cutting off its rattles to collect the bounty on it. Once he brought home a Jeepster convertible from the car dealership so we could ride through Vermont roads experiencing the exhilaration of the wind blowing through our crewcuts.
My point is that I think my father worked hard to try to be the best father he could to me. Things didn’t work out well in our family, and he and my mother were divorced in later years. I think that’s when I began to forget the good times I had with him and the care and guidance he gave me. It took his death to call it back to memory. The “bad guy” I had created was a myth … at least as far as the early years when he was trying to be Ozzie and I was Butch. I’m glad we reconciled the memories and the relationship in his later years and that my children had a chance to know him as my friend…and my Dad.
Photo Credit: Reader’s Digest
