Father's Day?

I just ordered a golf shirt for Dave and will order 2 more for Dan our son and Japhet our son-in-law.
What are you up to?

My dad died in 1982. I will spend a bit of time talking to him on Sunday. Sometimes, when I do, I can sense him "talking" back. Other times, I sense the smile in his eyes.



His eyes had a way of developing a crinkly twinkle when he was about to come out with something delightful, always suited to his intelligent, dry wit. A quality, incidentally, that I gave to Daniel Redstone. That same twinkle is one of the main reasons I admire this bloke:



They look a lot alike, I think.

Ann
Delightful. You took after your dad.
Thanks for your pictures.

Ann, I think you will like the book I'm currently writing. I'll let you know when it's finished and if/when it gets published. The working title: "Eternal Life"

I want it also, Abe.

I changed my mind for Dan and ordered a picture of Kenzie instead. He can hang it in his office.

My dad died when I was 35. He was 59. He was a great honky tonk piano player, trained as a classical musician. He was kind. He was not a businessman. He lacked joy in his life after my mom divorced him even though he remarried. He loved my son. He loved me. He wrote music and poetry and children's stories but none were published. In his illness, he could not play professionally but went to old age homes and veterans placed where they didn't mind if he missed a note. He did exude joy when he was playing the piano. I published instead.of my dad. Alas, I never showed the talent for the piano though I keep trying. I don't think he's watching. I think the spirit of those we loved and lost lives on through us, in us and around us with our memories and the feelings we have about them. If they are our biological parents, they live on in our genes and those of our children.

Charming memories, DK.

My dad passed when I was 37 and he was 82. That's right he was 45 when I came along.
I have very happy memories of him. We were best buddies. He would buy me ice-cream when we went to town to pick up our mail. We would play school and I would be the teacher and boss him around.
I know there is a lot of him in me as he loved to shop and buy coats. I love to shop also
He looked like Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, He didn't talk like him though. Had a very clean mouth.
He is missed and very fondly remembered.

I bought my David tractor coffee mugs. He loves old tractors. We have nine. His pride and joy is an old Farmall. He has gradually gotten all the equipment for it from the Cole planter with it's many seed wheels... He has the grove tractor his grandfather used to maintain his orange grove. I think it is 1930, but I am not sure. He makes sure they all run and do the job they were designed to do. The mugs depict a vintage John Deere and the very Farmall that he has. He will smile.

Love,

Betty

Betty,

GOOD!

Good memories, all.

Abe,

What are yours?
I notice no men are answering.

Father's Day has already come and gone in Germany. Seems that it is not such a big deal. Mother's Day is always special.

Memories of my Dad are becoming more vivid as the years pass. He was a avid big game hunter and it was something special we did together. In his later years he took up golf for the exercise and was on the golf course every week. I began to like the game especially the comraderie it afforded. I haven't played golf since nor have I hunted. The memories remain.

I especially remember him making breakfast. And in later years when I visited, he made breakfast for me. He enjoyed his eggs and bacon, and when there was a pig slaughter, he had his scrapple (panhaas) for breakfast. I was not that fond of the panhaas, but since he liked it, I acquired a taste for it.

Don Stephens posted a story about his father some time ago. I would like to read it again.

Abe,
Good memories, Thanks.

Abe,

You've got mail

Thanks Don. I love the story. It is a great tribute to your father. I can understand more about you having read the story again.

Don,
Would you post it here again?
I like it too.

Just for you Alice:

My Hero, My Dad
by D. J. STEPHENS
My dad, by most people’s standards, was a plain and simple man. He was a quiet person that always gave the appearance of strength without having to say a word, the strong silent type.
He was born and raised on a family farm in the tiny town of Brock, Nebraska. His father, my Granddad, was the son of Irish immigrants and Grandma was a Native American, Ogallala Sioux.
I never knew my grandparents; my Grandmother left Grandpa while Dad was still in grade school. The story was, she wanted to return to her people and the reservation.
My Grandfather passed away shortly after Dad and Mom were married.

All through school Dad carried the nickname “Half-breed”. He told me that although he knew it was meant to be derogatory, he always wore it with a sense of pride.
The schools in Brock and the surrounding counties were so small, the high schools could only play eight man football and even at that the players had to play both offense and defense, plus freshman played on the Varsity teams. Dad played both football and basketball while he was in high school. As a kid I used to love to sit and listen as he recalled what he considered his glory days.
One story that always stuck out was the one he told about a particular basketball game. It seems that Dad was going for a rebound at the same time as another player. The other player’s finger entered Dad’s eye socket right under the eyeball and popped it out of the socket. He said it literally came right out to lie on his cheekbone. One of the teachers watching the game was standing right there under the basket and saw what happened. Immediately she ran onto the court grabbed Dad’s wrists and held his arms to his side and shouted for help, then she calmly told Dad to lie down and to try not to touch his face. Someone came running up and put a belt around him pinning his arms against his body, he found out later it was his coach. In the ambulance they kept dripping what he thought was water on the eyeball to keep it wet. At the hospital the doctors told him he was very lucky, nothing was broken or torn. They replaced the eye in the socket and other than having to wear an eye patch for several weeks and a little blurred vision in that eye for a couple of months, he never had any other after effects from the incident.

When he turned sixteen, midway through his sophomore year, Dad dropped out of high
school to work on the farm with Grandpa.
He never really talked much about those next five years. What little he did say, gave me the impression they were some very hard times. I also got the feeling that Grandpa was very tough on him and somehow blamed him and his older sister (my aunt) for Grandma having left him.

I don’t recall if I ever really heard how Mom and Dad met, but I do know that shortly after he turned
twenty-one they were married and continued to live and work on Grandpa’s farm.
Though Dad never talked about it, Mom told me that he also rode bucking broncos in rodeos at the different county fairs around Nebraska and Iowa during the summers for extra money. She said he must have been pretty good since he almost always came home with prize money.
There were several times over the years, I would find Dad sitting completely enthralled in front of the TV watching a rodeo, especially the bucking horses and he would get this far away look, then he would critique and score the riders as if he were one of the judges. I never knew the significance until after Mom told me about him riding saddle broncs.

Dad told me that Granddad passed away from a massive heart attack about two years after he and Mom were married. Mom always swore it was from a broken heart. Grandpa’s Will left the farm to Dad as my aunt had married the man who owned the farm next to Grandpa’s the year before Dad was married.

During the first four years they were married, Mom suffered four miscarriages. Dad later told me they had just about given up hope of having children when Mom became pregnant with me. They ended up having two more boys and a girl after that.

I was born at the hospital in Lincoln and when the doctor came out to tell Dad that he had a son, he also had to tell him his son had been born with severe club feet. My feet were so twisted that the soles of my feet were against the outside of my legs.
When I was older Mom told me Dad had sat and cried the entire night.

The day before Mom and I were to go home from the hospital, one of the other doctors at the hospital met with my folks and told them he knew of a doctor at Shriners Crippled Children’s Hospital near Chicago that had been experimenting with a new surgery to correct club feet. He told them he had talked to the surgeon and was told that if they could get me to Chicago he would do the surgery at no cost to my folks. Mom said they were both elated. Then the doctor went on to say that unfortunately the surgeries would require me to be in the hospital for at least nine months a year for up to five years in order to complete the procedures. Mom told me that when the doctor finished telling them about what to expect, Dad leaned over the bed and gave her a big hug and kiss and said, “I’ll be back in the morning to get you and Donnie.” Then he shook the doctor’s hand and left.
At the time Mom said she didn’t understand what he was doing. She found out the next day that Dad had driven straight to his sister’s and after telling her the news, offered to sell his farm to her husband, my Uncle Buck. Dad pointed out to them that since the farms were adjoining it would more than double the size of their farm. He also told them they could pay for it over time from the farm’s profits. Then he left them, went home and called Mom’s brother, my uncle Don (who I’m named after) in Chicago. Uncle Don had a painting business and contracted out to spray paint barns all over Illinois and Iowa. Dad had called him to ask him for a job.
The next morning when Dad came to the hospital to pickup Mom and I, he told her he had sold the farm, he was going to work for Uncle Don and we were moving to Chicago.
For the next six weeks the folks packed their belongings and prepared for the move. They
only took what would fit on the trailer Dad was taking from the farm. Obviously, I don’t
remember any of this or the trip to Chicago; I can only relate what the folks told me as I grew up.
Uncle Don had found them an apartment in a northern suburb of Chicago. We lived there
until I was nearly out of grammar school.

For the next five years, I spent nine months out of the year at Shriner’s. My only memories of the hospital were from my last year there. I distinctly remember one day standing in my bed which was like a large crib, looking through the glass partition that separated the ward from the hall. I was crying as Mom and Dad were walking down the hall, apparently leaving. When Dad turned to wave goodbye I could see he was crying too.

Dad worked for Uncle Don for two years after we moved from Nebraska. Unfortunately the job kept him on the road a great deal of the time so Dad quit and took a job in a factory.
While working third shift in the factory that first year, Dad attended trade school during the day
to learn welding. When he finished his training he took a job at a plant in Libertyville, Illinois that built earth moving equipment, where he worked for the next twenty some years until he retired.

Sometime during 1944, I was about six years old and had been out of the hospital nearly a year, I remember we were coming home from a Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan movie. Mom was carrying my younger brother who was about six-months old and Dad was carrying me. The stairway to our second floor apartment went up the outside of the house. When we reached the landing halfway up the stairway, Dad set me down and retrieved the mail out of the mailbox. He was thumbing through the envelopes using the porch light on the landing to see, when Mom let out a gasp and slumped down to set on the steps. When I asked what was wrong, she was sobbing and said, “Your Father has to go to war.” Dad helped Mom to her feet and told her, “I
won’t have to go, the plant has been making big guns for the Army for the last year and a half. I
just need to go to personnel and get a form to take with me when I report.”
Now obviously I don’t recall exactly what was said and have to go by what Dad told me in later years when I asked about the war. I do remember Mom sobbing and screaming about Dad having to go off to war.

Two things my Dad loved to do as far back as I can remember were fish and hunt pheasants. From the time I was eight years old, he always asked me if I wanted to go with him when he did either one. He bought me a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun for my eighth birthday, which I carried when he took me pheasant hunting.
Our apartment was on the second of an old farm house on the edge of town. Right across the street from the house were the train tracks for the old North Shore railroad that ran from Milwaukee to Chicago. On the other side of the tracks were corn fields that backed right up to the tracks. Dad had gotten permission from the farmers to hunt their fields, so all we had to do to go hunting was walk across the street and over the embankment for the tracks.
Dad’s pheasant hunting made the front page of the sports section of the local paper that first year I went with him. Dad, Butch (our Springer Spaniel) and I had been working the field across from the tracks and were walking back toward the tracks when Butch jumped a big rooster pheasant. Dad threw his shotgun to his shoulder and I anxiously waited for the boom that I knew was coming. As the bird rose higher into the sky and grew ever further away from us, Dad lowered his gun.
“What’s wrong Dad, why didn’t you shoot?” I asked.
“Too close to the road.” He said, then whistled Butch to come to him. “Let’s go get breakfast,” he said as he took the shells from his gun, dropped them in his pocket and snapped the leash on Butch.
We continued on through the corn field and climbed up the embankment onto the tracks.
As we topped the rise we could see a police car with the gumball light flashing, sitting in front of the house. Dad shouted, “Wait at the bottom of the hill, don’t cross the street,” and took off running toward the house. I could see him take the stairs two at a time. I walked down the embankment to the edge of the street and sat down on the ground and waited as I had been instructed to do.
What seemed like an eternity later (probably fifteen minutes), Dad came back down the stairs grinning from ear to ear. It seems the big pheasant he had let go, had flow across the street and right through our second story picture window. Mom had called the police. The headline read, “Husband misses shot at pheasant, Wife captures bird in Living Room.”
Dad never made me go hunting or fishing with him, but he never failed to ask me if I wanted to go every time he went. He would also spend hours with me and the BB gun teaching me how to shoot, constantly emphasizing safety as if the BB gun was a deadly weapon. All of that practice paid off when I was in the service as I competed with an Army Division Rifle Team.

For my twelfth birthday he bought me a 20 gauge double barreled shotgun. That year I was able to truly hunt with him and not just tag along. When I got my first pheasant he unashamedly hugged me and told me how proud he was. Butch retrieved the bird and dropped it at my feet instead of Dad’s.
Dad convinced me that even Butch was proud of me.
I believe it was the next year that the folks bought their own home. It was in a small town in the far northeast corner of Illinois, right on the Wisconsin border.
Shortly after we moved there, one of Dad’s friends, the Village Marshal, asked him to help police the village. So Dad joined what amounted to a two man police force.
He worked at the factory all day, the police patrol for about six hours each night, plus being on call for the police when ever he was home.
He also joined the volunteer fire department and since we only lived two blocks from the fire station, he was always the first one there when the alarm went off, so they made him the engineer which meant he drove the truck.

I used to love to listen to him tell about the strange things that happened while he was on duty on the police force. Like the night he assisted the Wisconsin State Police in capturing a bank robber.
Dad had heard the radio calls from the State Police that they were in pursuit of a bank robber and he was heading for the Illinois state line. Well at that time the road the robber was on was the main road coming out of Wisconsin and it ran through the middle of our town. Dad said he radioed back to the State Police that he would have a road block setup just across the Stateline so they should not break off pursuit at the border.
He raced his squad car to the fire house and got the fire engine and headed for the Stateline. About a mile inside the Illinois side of the line there was bridge for a creek that ran under the highway, with woods lining both sides of the road. When Dad got to the bridge he turned the fire truck crossways on the bridge so it was blocking the road. He had no more than got it parked when he heard the sirens and saw the string of red lights coming down the highway. He waited until they were within a quarter of a mile of the bridge and there was no place for the robber to turn off, then he turned on the flashing lights of the truck, grabbed his shotgun off the seat and bailed out, putting the truck between him and the oncoming convoy.
Well when the robber saw the flashing lights of the truck he slammed on his brakes and as between eight and ten State Trooper cars began spreading out behind him, he jumped out of the car with his hands in the air. Dad made the arrest since they were on the Illinois side of the border. The Wisconsin State Police gave Dad a plaque and an award certificate that I still have.

The first new car Dad ever owned was a 1951 Studebaker, before that about all he could
afford were pretty much beaters.
Man how he loved that Studebaker. He had the portable lights for both the police and fire
departments setup in the car and always talked about how it was so much faster it was than the
squad car the village furnished.

One day Mom and I were coming home from somewhere, I don’t remember where, but we had stopped at the store which was a block from our house. When we came out of the store, I asked Mom to let me drive home. Now I’m thirteen, just finishing grammar school, I’d never driven in my life. Without hesitating Mom says, okay and throws me the keys. She talked me through starting the car, using the clutch and shifting gears. Unfortunately she couldn’t talk me through using the brakes and I ran over a stop sign which resulted in a huge gash in the hood of Dad’s dream car. I was terrified…I didn’t know where he would hide the body, but I was certain that Dad was going to kill me. I know Mom was scared, mumbling things like, “What on earth am I going to tell your Father? He is going to be furious.”
Well I was going to be a man, if I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be whining. When we got home Dad was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper. I sat down across from him and said, “Dad I’m awfully sorry, but I put a dent in the hood of your new car.” Then I held my breath.
“How did you manage that?” He said, surprisingly calm.
“I ran over a stop sign.”
“You were driving?”
“I was trying.”
He slowly got up and walked out to the garage with me right behind him. When he reached the car, he slowly ran his hand over the crease in the hood. Then he slid his arm around my shoulder and I knew this was when I was going to die.
“I think you need a few more lessons and a lot more practice.” Then he gently tightened his arm in a slight hug. That was all that was ever said about me denting his dream car. He got it fixed and started spending Saturday mornings teaching me to drive.

I would interject here that as far as I know, my Dad never lied to me. If he told me, “If you ever do that again I’ll take the belt to you.” All of the excuses in the world would not keep me from getting the spanking (not a beating, a spanking) if I chose to defy him.
Anytime he had to discipline me, he always let me know it was the act that had disappointed him, but it did not change his love for me. If I got a spanking for something, first it had to be for something serious and second it had to be for something I had been told not to do.
Within an hour or so after he punished me for anything he would come to me and say,
“I’m going to the store, want to come?” or “I’m going fishing in the morning, want to go?” It was his way of letting me know he wasn’t mad at me.

We lived just a few miles from Lake Michigan and between our house and the lake front there was a huge wetland area, a couple of miles wide and several miles long.
One day just before I finished grade school, Dad said that he had heard there were a lot of muskrat and mink in the marshland and wondered if I would like to run a trap line with him over the winter. He said we could alternate days walking the trap line and that anything I got in the traps on my day of working, would be mine. So for a couple of weeks before the trapping season opened he took me out and showed me how to look for sign as well as how to set and bait the traps.
Through that whole winter, every other morning I would get up around four in the morning and walk the trap line before going to school. We trapped several mink over the season and had at least a couple muskrat in the traps everyday. Dad taught me how to properly skin, stretch and dry the hides. We sold the furs to Sears and Roebuck; they had a special department that bought furs. We would package them up and send them off and a week or so later we would get a check with an itemized list of what we had sent and how much each pelt had been worth. I don’t remember exactly how much I made that winter, but I believe it was a couple of hundred dollars, but mostly I truly treasured the experience. It was like going back in time two hundred years. I enjoyed it so much that there were many mornings I would get up and go with Dad when it was his turn to walk the line just to share the adventure.

My freshman and half of my sophomore year in high school, I spent at the Seminary in Scranton, Pennsylvania. When I came home for Christmas vacation during my second year, I told my folks that I wasn’t going to be a priest. Mom sat and cried, guess she thought I was going straight to hell. Dad just grinned and said, “Get your gun, let’s go hunting.”

After graduation I joined the Army and spent nearly ten years in the service. During that time Dad made the drive from Illinois to Fort Benning, Georgia on two different occasions. One when I graduated from Jump School and again when I graduated from Ranger School. After the graduation ceremony at Ranger School, Dad gave me a mock salute then presented me with a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. To a soldier this was a real treasure.

During the ten years I was in the service, Dad retired from the factory in Illinois. Then he took Mom, my two brothers and sister and moved to Florida. After a year or so Dad got bored with not working and took a job as a welder for a bridge construction company. Within a year the company made him the superintendent of his own crew. He actively worked that construction job until he was seventy-three years old.

While on leave once, I went down to Florida to visit the folks. I didn’t tell them I was coming as I wanted to surprise them. After saying my hellos at the house, Mom told me where Dad’s job site was and I went to see him. I parked a couple hundred yards from the job site and walked toward the bridge. Dad was talking with a group of men at the base of the bridge; he must have seen me about the same time I saw him because he threw his hardhat to the side and began trotting to meet me. As soon as we came within reach, he threw his arms around me and lifted me off the ground in a bear hug. Then he planted a big kiss on my cheek. What a sight that must have been, this rough-tough construction worker and a bad-ass Ranger in his Class A
uniform standing in the middle of the road hugging the hell out of each other. It was one more thing Dad passed on to me, to never be ashamed to show affection to the ones you love.

When I got out of the service, I went back to Illinois and took a job as a computer programmer for a bank group, that’s where I met my wife.
After our wedding we went down to Florida so my bride could meet my parents. While we were there I ended up getting an offer to manage a banking group computer service bureau in the area. So we stayed…for nine years.
We bought a home on an eight acre lake about five minutes from the Inter-coastal waterway, ten minutes from the ocean and an hour from Lake Okeechobee. Over the next nine years Dad and I did a lot of fishing…about three hundred days a year.
It was not unusual for us to get up a 3:30 in the morning and drive to the pier on the ocean and fish until 7:00am, race home to shower, change and go to work. When the Snook were in season, Dad and I would meet up after work on a Friday night and fish our way up and down the Inter-coastal between Lantana to Fort Pierce, arriving back home on Sunday night.
When my wife and I moved back to Illinois for a business opportunity, the fishing and the time with Dad were the only things I missed about Florida.

Every couple of years my wife and I would take our vacation in Florida. Dad and I would squeeze in some fishing and sit up nearly all night just talking and catching up.
When we arrived on one of our trips, Dad answered the door with his hand in a cast. When I asked what happened, he got a sparkle in his eye and told me how he got the broken hand. It seems he got in a squabble with one of the new men on his crew. I forget what the argument was about, but suffice to say the young man was barely twenty-one and Dad was seventy. The words, “What are you going to do about it, Old Man,” were used. Then the youngster made the mistake of taking a swing at Dad. That’s when Dad broke his hand and the young man’s jaw. When I asked if he had fired the lad, Dad said, Hell no, he’s too good a worker and beside now that he knows who’s boss we get along just fine.” At seventy years old Dad was as fit and hard as he had been at twenty-one working the farm.

Whenever I got a chance to go hunting, I would call Dad as soon as I returned home to let him know how I did. He would want to know every detail. Dad didn’t get to hunt in Florida, but a couple of times we were able to meet at my youngest brother’s place in Ohio to hunt turkey and partridge. Again we sat up most of the night just talking.

When my sister called that particular October to tell me that Dad had been diagnosed with lung cancer, I was devastated.
He had gone for his annual physical and they had discovered a spot on his lungs that wasn’t there the year before. The biopsy had shown it to be malignant. Seems all those years of hanging over a welding torch and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day had caught up with him. I grabbed the next plane to West Palm Beach. I spent the next few days there with him and have never felt so helpless in my life. I went with him to his doctors the day before I had to leave to return home. The doctor had been his physician for nearly thirty years, they had become very close friends. I remember the doctor weeping while telling us that the cancer was inoperable and that Dad probably had from three to
six months left. Dad put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder and said, “Larry, don’t feel bad for me, I’m seventy-eight not twenty-eight and I’ve got no regrets.”
When we got back to the house, I gave Dad a big hug and told him how proud I was that he was my Father and how much I loved him. The next morning I had to fly back to Chicago for my job.

We talked by phone a couple times a week over the next month, but never talked about his cancer. The calls kept getting shorter as he continued to grow weaker.

My wife and I went down for Thanksgiving; Dad was putting on a brave front, even though it was obvious he was very weak.
In January, Sis called again to tell me Dad was in the hospice and they didn’t expect him to make it another forty-eight hours.
I was on a plane again, bound for West Palm Beach. As I deplaned in West Palm, I heard someone call my name. It was my brother, the next younger, he is five and a half years younger than me. We had been on the same plane and didn’t know it. Dad passed away within a couple of hours of our arriving at the hospice.

Over the fifty-four years I was fortunate enough to share this earth with my Father; he never once brought up the sacrifices he had made so that I could walk. He gave up his farm, his way of life, a life he loved, to work in a factory so that I could go to Shriner’s.
Incidentally, he didn’t get paid for the farm and because Uncle Buck was married to his sister, Dad never pushed it.

Even though he was considered strict, I always thought Dad was fair with us kids. As I said earlier if we got a spanking, we had it coming; we had done something seriously wrong that we had been forewarned not to do.

Though he’s been gone nearly twenty-one years, I still miss him everyday.

Thank you so very much, Don:D

Thank you.

I liked the pheasant part - made me laugh!