I want to tell you a story about my father. And then I’m going to ask you to do something. It’ll probably not be easy. You probably won’t even like me asking you to do it. It could be one of the best things you can ever do.
This is my dad at 52. My mom says I look like him except I never had my nose kicked off by a horse and sewn back on like he did.
My father was born during the Depression in a poor town, Circleville, Ohio. He talked very little of his childhood. Most of what I know of it is from his oldest brother, who is still living, and from my mother.
My dad was a good man, who overcame a level of poverty we could never comprehend. He talked very little of his childhood. We spent hours working together in the fields or perched next to one another on the tractor. But I knew almost nothing of his childhood until his funeral.
His mother had died when he was a child and when his father remarried a year later, the children from the first marriage were put out on the street. His oldest brother and his wife took some of them in. An elderly black man who lived down the street took in my father and a few other children, who also were homeless.
They worked picking crops for different farmers and stole coal from slow moving trains to fuel the stove. He dropped out of school to work and when he was 10 he met my mother visiting a cousin’s farm. He told my mother he’d marry her one day.
At 17 he joined the Navy during the Korean War. At 19 he called home from his base in Norfolk. He’d written a letter to my mother’s best friend and sent the ring to her to take to my mother, then a bank teller, to give to her when he proposed over the phone.
Keep my mother’s best friend in mind. She’ll come back later in this story.
He was fortunate. He spent the Korean War cruising the Mediterrean and the Caribbean in a destroyer escort. He told me once of rough seas from a hurricane and a large brawl with French commandos at a bar where a handful of them took on half the ships crew and the French won.
He came home, got a job at the papermill in Chillicothe, built his first house himself, married and began raising a family.
A couple of years later he had saved enough to fulfill his dream of owning his own farm. He worked the papermill 8 hours and then would work the farm often until beyond sundown.
I spent hours working along side of him. Banding the bull calves, mending fence, plowing, bushhogging, baling hay and hoeing long rows of corn.
It didn’t seem like it at the time, but looking back it was an idyllic existence he gave us.
He never wanted us to work when we were in school (other than the farm). He wanted us to play sports and be in school activities, the things he had missed out on.
He took us on long vacations to places he wanted to see when he was young.
He always had confidence in us even when it wasn’t well placed. When I was 5 or 6 – depending on which family member tells the story – our old one-row corn picker that was antiquated even in 1969 when we were using it, broke down and he wanted to get the crop in that night. My older brother and sister and he would alongside the wagon picking the field corn and throwing it in by hand for the last 10 acres or so left. Someone had to drive the tractor though, so he stuck me in the seat, put it in gear, told me how to accelerate with the gas on the side and how to stop and steer. I’d ridden on his knee on the tractor and he’d let me steer often so he figured I’d do alright. Except he put it in third gear instead of first like he intended and instead of moving at a crawl, I took off at a fast running speed. He yelled for me to stop it, but at 5 (or 6) I didn’t weigh enough to push the clutch all the way down. I forget how we got it stopped, but we all survived and I drove with it in first gear the rest of the night.
Sorry for the digression.
He was a strong man. He worked all day at the paper mill and then worked on our small farm when he got home. He was never sick until one January in 1984 when he started having trouble breathing.
We were digging a trench to run an underground electrical cable to the new barn.
“Boy, I just can’t catch my breath,” he said.
He went to the doctor. The doctor ordered a biopsy. The biopsy showed inoperable cancer. Less than seven months later he was dead after months of painful radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
My mother’s friend visited us on the night when we received the biopsy results. She was a registered nurse. She and my mom cried for a long time. I walked her out to her car and after trying to keep it together, I cried on her shoulder for a long time too.
As kids, my sisters and I had often encouraged my father to quit smoking. He tried. He tried several times. But he couldn’t stop. The cigarette in the morning was as natural to him as his coffee.
I had just turned 20 when he died. I was working that summer at the paper mill when the foreman came up to me and told me the call had come. I raced out the gates and to my truck and threw in my hard hat on the seat next to me and slammed the truck into gear and drove with a desperate and terrible fear that I would get to the hospital too late.
Dad had wanted to die at home, but it wasn’t to be. He was not conscious when I arrived. The rest of the family was already there by his chair. The cancer had made it uncomfortable for him to lay down so he had slept for months in his chair from home.
He passed away soon after I arrived.
I’ve often thought that if a tobacco company executive ever crossed my path, it would be his last step.
Nearly 24 years after my father’s death, I still miss him terribly. He never got to hold my children. I can remember him with his first two grandchildren, both girls. They followed him on the farm like two rambunctious puppies and he’d set them beside him on the tractor. I miss that he’s not here to do that with my daughters.
I often say I’d do anything for my kids. And sometimes I mean it.
I’ve said it before, with each birth of my daughters I thought my heart would swell and explode through my chest because I was so filled with so much love and happiness by their arrival. I love my life, but if I ever had to trade it to keep one of them safe from harm, I would make that bargain with a glad heart for I love them so.
As fathers we need to do the things that are hard to do as well as the things that we’d gladly do.
If you smoke, stop smoking. If you drink too much or do too many drugs or do anything that can be detrimental for your health, then look at your children. If you’d gladly give up your life for them, aren’t they worth giving up cigarettes or 30 pounds of excess weight for them as well?
I was doing well with running to get back into shape until a minivan bounced off me in December. Here is my Father’s Day promise to them, to do all I can to be there for them. No life is guaranteed, but what I can control, I intend to do my best to live as long as I can for them.
