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HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 06/18/2006 : 23:20:12
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It's still Father's Day as I pen this.
My dad was born in 1916, in Richland, Missouri, the second of two sons. His father, Lloyd, born in Kansas of a pioneer family, was a respected and modestly prosperous pill-roller, an apothecary, and operated a small drugstore. In 1918, the Spanish Flu swept through the United states, and my father's father died of it. My grandmother, Minnie, was soon penniless and dependent upon rather poor relatives in Oklahoma and Texas. But she was able to meet and marry a decent man who supported her and her boys.
That gentleman himself died just before the Great Depression, and again the little family migrated, this time to Arizona along with Minnie's father, Jesse, a tough old Confederate Civil War veteran, who was twice interned in what is now acknowledged as a Union death camp. As the Depression hit Arizona (and it hit there late, and lingered there longer), old Jessie also died.
My father remembers the humiliation of standing in line for government food handouts. He spent his teen-aged years in the rough copper mining town of Superior. He played high school football on a gravel field. He ran with a bunch of Anglo and Hispanic teen delinquents who took cars from a local dealership for nightly joyrides, bringing them back before sun-up. Until one night when, approaching the dealership, they saw the silhouette of an armed man on the roof of the building.
My dad also caught and rode for himself a horse he found running wild. (He later heard that it had run away from a local ranch, so he returned it.) He learned from Indians how to collect certain river-bed shrubs, and to use them to tan leather. To help his family survive, he quit high school, and took a job in the Magma Copper Company smelter. (My father's brother, Lloyd, worked his way through law school and became an attorney, later becoming the youngest State Senator in Arizona history.)
He learned to box, and eventually fought professionally for a short time. My father met and married my mother, who was a native Arizonan. My sister was born in 1940, myself in 1945, and my brother in 1950. My father took a job with the Arizona Highway Department, driving trucks, and filling potholes. My mother and infant sister followed from one work camp to another. At one time there were so many centipedes and scorpions in their cabin, they put the legs of my sister's cradle in coffee cans filled with kerosene, a questionable safety precaution.
When World War Two broke out, my dad took his family to San Diego and began working in shipyards, eventually becoming qualified as a journeyman carpenter. His brother quit the Arizona Senate for the duration, and went into the Navy as a Machinists Mate First Class in the Pacific Theater.
My father always thought that the reason he hadn't been drafted into the military was that he had a wife and daughter. When he finally found out that his brother had gotten the draft board to not induct him as an act of nepotism, he was heartbroken, and had a near breakdown.
My father was always a gentleman, and still is. He treated my mother as well as he was capable, and was never violent toward her. He is of America's "Best Generation," a tough guy with a heart of gold. He always wears Western clothing. At ninety, carpentry is still his passion, and he has recently completed two large decks and several outdoor stairways for the huge family ranch and residential compound my sister and brother-in-law are building in San Diego County.
I love my old man, and salute him. When I grow up, I hope to be at least half the man he is.
Happy Father's Day to all you Dads!
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“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
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