Dads

[Rusty Edge]

No, I'm not a father. This is a place to talk about them. To remember them, honor them, [complaint or disagreeable woman] about them as you feel inclined at the time.

I'll start-

[Rusty Edge]

My Dad...well, maybe I'll start his story with his Dad. [this is not strictly chronological ]

My Father's Father was a coal miner as a teenager. A hard worker. He played hard, too.
That involved unintentionally starting a family while he was still a teenager, drinking and gambling.
He never hit my grandmother, but he beat the kids so hard she feared he would kill them. She never left him, mainly because she couldn't drive. Well, the family forced him to work harder, becoming a foreman, and probably drink more, until he found Jesus and went to Methodist seminary. There were other jobs in there- as a standby boy in a glass factory. Kids passed out working in the heat, so they had some waiting on a bench to drag them away and take their place.
Spraying roaches at night in a bakery. Painting and papering houses. A fireman on a couple of railroads.

My Dad was the 5th of 10 kids. He was born during the Great Depression. Based upon where they lived at the time, it was while my grandfather was in seminary. Needless to say, they were poor.

Later they moved to a village of about 150 people  with a clay mine, brickyard, soft coal crusher, and two rail lines, a church, an elementary school and a post office. Filthy place, covered in dust, with sewage overflows in the ditches and an acid stream through the middle of it.

My parents met in 8th grade and were a couple ever after. He was shaving every day by then. He was an outgoing guy and a prankster in high school. He belonged to the projection club ( they delivered and set up movie projectors in the classrooms ). He worked in the general store which my mother's family owned at one time.

After graduation he joined the Navy. He wanted to see the world, but mostly he was a paymaster in Virginia. He was a stocky 5'7" with short dark curly hair and blue eyes.  After discharge my parents were married in my grandfather's church, and they moved into half of my Mom's widowed grandmother's house. He got a job as a teller at a bank and bought a new VW Beetle. I was first born, then my brother 13 months later, then when my sister was born 2 years after him, we moved to a house across the street from the church. My grandparents had moved out of that parsonage to another church by then.

The "new" house was a fixer upper. My Dad was constantly working on it. The well needed a new cover. He built a coal bin in the basement. He paneled the dining room and put 1'X2' waferboard  "tiles" on the floor, but they aligned them diagonally with the room, just to make it a pain in the butt to measure and cut the pieces around the walls. The house always smelled like sawdust.

Meanwhile, my Dad was the church custodian and fire stoker. There were two buildings to maintain. He made extra money for that. Somehow he got stuck with Sunday School Superintendent.

Beyond that, as he got promotions in the bank, he was going in after hours to work. It seemed that most of the time I saw my Dad he was working. He usually had us along to clean the church ( maybe that's when my Mom took the car and got her hair done ) or sometimes when he was doing deskwork in the bank. Also when he was working in the garden, or he had us playing outside while doing yardwork.

Sometimes he took us along when he went to collect delinquent payments, or do repossessions for the bank. I later learned that was so that the women didn't try to bribe him with their feminine wiles.

I think you're starting to get the picture. About the only time I saw my Dad is when he was working.
He was always saying stuff like "If at first you don't succeed, try, try, again." "Any job worth doing is worth doing well." "Early to bed and early to rise..." Not that he was making us work, but if we wanted to help, he found something for us to do. When he talked to us, it was about work. There are more bits, but that's the idea.

Well, he did have a sweet tooth, so he took us for ice cream cones or floats frequently. He also liked auto racing, so we went to the local dirt track on Saturday nights. He also took me and my brother , usually alternately, hunting and shooting. He was a good teacher on that subject, but most of the time it was about being silent and perfectly still, or hiking long distances in rough terrain.

As if he wasn't busy enough, he started going to night school at Rutgers, which wasn't even in the same state. He started smoking a pipe to stay awake. I have no idea when the man slept.

He did spank me with a belt. Not unusal behavior in that time and place. The way that usually worked, I had incentive to be good, so he rarely needed to do it. I will say that the worst one was really undeserved because he had unrealistic expectations. My parents were mad at all of us kids that day. I got over it.  There were hugs, too.

Family vacations were usually towing a camping trailer. We loved it. He also took us along on business trips. I went to Jacksonville, New Orleans, New York, and few times to Philadelphia. Flew on jets, even.

Between 2nd and third grade my dad got a job running a bank on the far side of the county. I think it was him and 5 people to begin with.  He started giving away electric blankets and skillets and piggy banks and things with deposits. He became the youngest bank president in the history of the county, and the bank with the highest deposits per capita in the state.  So he was great at his job.

The new town was clean and safe, it even had a movie theater and later a pool. The house was much bigger. We had 2 or 3 cars, then bought a camper of our own. We joined a club with a campground, and started regarding the lot and fixing that up. When that was finished, we bought abandoned  farm and moved out of town. Dad wanted us to have mini-bikes, because the farm roads were too rough for bicycle travel. By then I was 10 and able to be useful with the work.

When I was 11 he went into the hospital on Columbus day. I'm not sure why, but I think that's when they discovered cancer. He got appendicitis on New Year's Eve. By then he was stage 4. He wasn't expected to survive March. Many prayer meetings, radiation treatments, surgeries, and chemo treatments followed.  My aunts came to watch us while my parents relocated to the cancer clinic.

By late August, the week I turned 12, he was dead. He was 33.

I'm sure we'd have butted heads had he lived through my teenage years.

Most of my life my self identity was tied up with my work. I love to travel. I've seen a lot more of the country and the world than my Dad ever got to.

[Buster's Uncle]

Did Jesus improve your grandfather? How much?

-I rather regret that I have to note for many people's benefit that getting Jesus does improve a lot of people - and equally regret that I don't have to inform ANYone that getting Jesus often does not, or not enough.

[Rusty Edge]

Well, Jesus happened before I was born, and possibly before my Dad was.   Apparently.

Another thing my grandfather  did was before was raise and fight chickens. He'd been invited to the nationals in Tampa that year, so he must have been pretty good. My grandmother took him to a revival meeting, he changed his life and never went to Tampa.

As far as I know, he never drank or gambled afterwards. I never heard him curse. My great grandfather was an alcoholic, but not him. I think he would have mentioned it in one of his sermons if he were. So he went to seminary, became a pastor. After retirement he still worked as a substitute  and temporary pastor.

I've mentioned before that he was a great story teller. The colorful past added to that. Also, he didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story. It made him an entertaining and popular preacher.

The only vice he had as long as I knew him was that he was a horse collector. Tennessee Walkers, mostly. He very rarely rode them. Mostly he was busy feeding, breeding, cleaning, training and trading. Sometimes he took some to show. The whole clan got drug into making hay and building fences. Whenever he would agree to get rid of some, he had a way of coming home with more, or a newer trailer and more saddles or something. A buggy. A sleigh. A pony.

Maybe he told himself it was a business. The kids kind of resented the fact that all of his money went to the horses, while my grandmother got her eyeglasses from the 5&10 cent store instead of an optometrist.

[Buster's Uncle]

...If he couldn't get the horse hobby to at least HELP pay for itself, he was doing it wrong...

Haven't I talked before in the last three or four years about the preacher and politician professions tending to draw a certain type?  Tall charismatic hellrakes end up as one or the other a lot to great success - and frequent failure to keep their pants on and the subsequent scandals.  Neither can afford to drink or gamble or fist-fight worth mentioning, but the best part of womanly affection had always been for in-private all along...

---

I should probably quote some stuff in here.  Last night, I was waiting for you to go first...

You sound like your dad was absent working instead of impossible to live with, but here we sit, both sons of buzzsaws, and surely deeply informed in our personal styles largely in reaction to them...

[Rusty Edge]

My Dad was a good guy. He tried. Maybe we should have found more time to play together doing stuff besides Monopoly, or talking about work and things that sounded like Poor Richard's Almanac.
Actually, he was pretty good about teaching me to ride a bike and that mean pony. But neither of those experiences were fun. Bike riding was a lot of scrapes and bruises on account of a klutz factor. The pony was my grandfather's idea. He wanted all of the grandkids to get interested in his animals. All I really learned was how to mount, because it would throw me as fast and as often as I could get on and get it started moving.

I take that back. Those pony lessons were the best training for playing football I ever had.

When I say we would have butted heads, it was because he was strict. I doubt if he'd have given us the freedom to make our own mistakes.

But maybe those books about the kid who salvaged a bulldozer, or the one who patched together a model T and started a trucking business make more sense to you being his favorites.

Or strangely, meaning something to me because most of the heroes in those stories don't have Dads anymore.

[Buster's Uncle]

I was months shy of 40 when Daddy's work finally ended, and I was jealous of my Mom having a dad into her 60s.  No boy should lose his daddy at any age.

In my eulogy for Daddy, I talked about work as the central theme -though he was the smartest person in that room except for maybe me (and I'm sure his brothers and sisters agreed - they were more bothered by all the jokes; Momma's family and some of his coworkers tittered and so did the choir director, but me crying a little during sorta threw off the delivery and Daddy's family were not a good audience for comedy at The Prince's funeral) it was his crazed work ethic that really got him ahead.

He was The Prince, by the way - evil cross-eyed John Boy is a thing you need to know to ever have any hope of understanding him, which I fancy I did as much as a boy is likely to understand his pop.  He was the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son - and in fact, as the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son of the Eldest Son, I'm technically the head of an extended family of over a hundred people, and if I'd ever made something of myself that looks good on paper by mainstream standards -money- I could tell aunts in their 80 what to do and be obeyed sometimes.  Those rednecks actually kinda, sorta believe in that excrement just a little.  Seriously, my opinions would be listened to gravely and taken seriously even when I obviously didn't know what I was talking about.

And BELIEVE me, you could have it all, my empire of dirt - I wish anyone in the universe but me had been The [family name].  ZOMG, nobody will ever obey, but I still got the expectations from the World's Smartest and Hardest-Working Caveman and the beatings for being Bobby Hill to his rage-Hank.  (We LOVE that show, Hank having so much Daddy in him but being a kind man.  There.  I said it.  I love Hank Hill, a declaration that would make him flee the "dirty internet" in terror... )

Father was an uncomplex man -not simple- in a complex world.  That's a fact, and I said so in the eulogy.

The son of Aunt Lucille -I think that makes him first cousin once removed, and I didn't really know him at all- came to me afterwards and said my speech could have been about her -although I really doubt she served in Korea- which --- didn't know her all that well, either, but if she was hard to live with or particularly smart for the (incredibly smart on average, if ignorant and uncouth) family, it would come as a surprise - but he definitely did intend the part about being a workaholic and a miser and a worrier.