Some thoughts on my father on Memorial Day...
My father died on Memorial Day, May 27, 1992 and was buried on the
observed Memorial Day, the following Monday.
We weren't particularly close throughout the years we lived under the same roof on Utah Street in Toledo. My three brothers and I lived pretty much in fear for many of those years, actually. That's not to say that
my fear was constant, of course, but it always seemed to be just below the surface for me. Once, however, he took a belt to my mother for reasons I have never understood — an incident that two of my brothers (who also witnessed it) don't recall. He came flailing at me one high school night when I arrived home after 11:30pm.
Fear.
Mind you, it wasn't twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year. We were not abused children. And while "getting the paddle" (a cribbage board, actually) was often threatened, his anger rarely took him beyond the point of yelling at us, but knowing what he was capable of was enough for me to know not to cross him.
We grew up in a household in which we were regularly chided with "Is that what you learned in church today?" by a man who didn't go to church. Ironically, at about the time I stopped going to church, he had become a fervent church goer, and was eventually baptized Catholic.
That I am probably the most sensitive of my brothers was a natural and, I suppose, mutually repelling factor in our relationship — despite our shared fondness for baseball, golf, drawing and a penchant (I later realized) for whistling. I grew up watching my President (John F. Kennedy), his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, Jr. get murdered; I watched as mounting numbers of American soldiers and Vietnamese people (soldiers or not) were killed. I developed a deeper and deeper distaste for authority thanks to the Presidency of Richard Nixon. My father, naturally, was the authority in our home, so there seemed little to attract me to him; and more and more (as I began to believe that I could think for myself) for him to get angry with me. I let my hair grow longer than my brothers would dare, an increasingly difficult thing to do considering that my dad cut our hair all those many years.
The stupidest thing (amongst the many!) I did while in that household was to sneak out our back door in the middle of the night to take snapshots of a local late-night radio talk show host (whose show kept me awake too many nights) for my art project, an oil painting. To do so, I had to "steal" my dad's Ford Falcon and drive about five miles to the station (WOHO). I was sixteen at best and didn't have a drivers license. Upon my return at about five or six in the morning, snow had begun to fall as I pulled up to the curb. Tire tracks were evidence that the car had been moved overnight... that nobody took the car's original parking spot while I was gone was a miracle, but I fully expected the tire tracks to give my hijinx away.
When I tried to open the back door, it was locked... I had to use the front door. Upon entering, he was in the kitchen (between me and my room). I'd been busted. I lied, though, about how I'd gotten to the radio station. "I hitchhiked," I told him. He went back to bed without further incident and I begged for more snow to fall by morning. I was lucky. Six inches of snow fell covering the car's tire tracks. You cannot imagine my sigh of relief that morning.
My dad, my son Zach and TaffyOn this Memorial Day, I recall how my father never expressed his views on the Vietnam War, which was not only a polarizing issue in the United States at that time, but a very palpable fear for those of us coming of draft age. Nor did I ask for his opinions. I wonder now, though, what might have gone through his head since he'd served in the Navy during World War II (on a minesweeper). I wonder what he thought of the possibility of his sons serving in that disaster.
In my parents' wedding photo, he wears his Navy Blues. I recall, now, that his ribbons were kept in a desk drawer (not a particularly hallowed place, actually) in the house but I didn't know much about what they meant. We knew more about his baseball and softball exploits as a young man than we knew about his experiences in the Navy. [My favorite softball story is about a game in which he fell as he rounded third base just as his brother Rob (who had singled) stumbled rounding first base. "I was the better ballplayer," Rob would pronounce at the funeral home's mini-memorial the night before the funeral.] All that remains of his Navy days are fading black-and-white photographs.
I came to recognize as I stepped further into adulthood that there was much more to him than he often let on. He had always claimed to be a good artist while we were kids, occasionally scribbling or sketching out caricatures of my mother (or such), but it didn't otherwise take up much of his time. Thankfully, once he retired from Coca-Cola (he was a refrigeration mechanic) in the late 1980s, he spent a great deal of his waking hours painting landscapes. My then-wife (Penny, herself an amazing artist) encouraged him and freely gave him studio tips, suggestions and materials.
He loved nature; he loved to feed the birds in our backyard; he made birdfeeders and would etch "Crude Productions: Not Made in Korea" (I can still hear his snicker) on their backsides. He regularly went deerhunting in Canada with my uncle Dick (his sister Mary Belle's husband) but never came home with a killing of his own. My mother always posited that he couldn't bring himself to shoot something he thought so beautiful. Perhaps he was just a bad shot, but I prefer to believe my mother's explanation.
I spent the better part of a day with him a year or so before he died, driving along the Maumee River from Toledo to Grand Rapids, taking photographs. He with his 35mm Pentax K1000; I with a borrowed Fuji 6cm x 17cm panoramic camera. He would use his photographs for reference material for his paintings. It was one of the very few days that we'd spent that kind of time together. Ever.
I was working when I got the call that he'd been taken to the hospital. For the next several days, his condition went from good to bad to good and back. I slept most nights in the hospital waiting room, where I watched Johnny Carson step down from his Tonight Show set for the last time. My dad didn't particularly care for Johnny's "dirty jokes" and despised the cackling Ed McMahon, so my announcement about the event to my dad was probably one of the more enjoyable moments of his time spent at the hospital.
Because his condition continued to fluctuate, and because the doctors told us that he could stay like this indefinitely, my family and I returned home. We decided not to continue the vigil. Sometime mid-week he died and we returned to Ohio for the funeral. We were at the church's rectory talking to the priest when I learned from my mother that my father had received a medal for saving several lives, pulling men up from a burning oil fire after the explosion aboard the
USS YF-415.
For all the faults I was able to find with him while I was a kid, I came to appreciate him much more as we both grew older. I suppose that's typical. What I have come to appreciate most about him, though, was his charity towards others. He regularly shoveled snow for Mrs. Raitz, a very elderly woman across the street; he was always willing to help out friends with their cars or refrigeration (ice-makers, air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers) problems. He genuinely liked helping people, I think. He was a good friend to many. I don't know that I could pay him any higher compliment.
So, with all this going through my head this weekend, it was difficult watching the news Saturday night, listening to the veterans of World War II pining on behalf of their brethren who had survived the war but who had died too soon to see the new memorial in D.C. My dad belonged there, if only to share the pride for taking part in something that about which he never would have publicly boasted.
Edited and revised 30 May 2011
