The year 2012 will be filled with many historic anniversaries, as most every year is. We have already written about the fiftieth anniversary of the John Glenn flight aboard Friendship Seven, And, we will, God willing, in April, write about the foundering of the Titanic on its one hundredth commemoration. But, some events are far more personal than others, and, this day, February twenty eighth is, for this writer, a very personal commemoration indeed!

My father was born on this date one hundred years ago!

My dad is not one hundred years old as he died in 1999, but, as this date has approached, many wonderful, humorous and interesting memories of the man seem to have surfaced in my mind. It is as if my father wants this date to be remembered, if only by just a few. To say that my father was an interesting person in his own right would be an understatement. And, it was always interesting to me that he predated the Titanic disaster by a month and a half. There were parts of my life that I sometimes felt closer to Titanic than I did to my father.

My older brother was born twelve years earlier than I and he totally consumed both of my parents time with his several close brushes with pre adolescent death until he was around ten years old in 1947. My parents came from families that might be considered overachievers for their times and their places of origin in the rural part of Illinois that they both grew up in and the agrarian backgrounds that had spawned both of them.

Neither of my parents were ever much interested in farming and, after their marriage in December of 1935, it did not take them all that long to migrate to the thriving metropolis of Vienna, Illinois, the county seat of Johnson county where they were both born. My father was a natural mechanic and heavy equipment operator and he and my mother, a beautician by training, began to establish themselves in Vienna and the surrounding areas by their willingness to work long hours, always for at least decent wages for the time. This was the period just before the outbreak of world war two and my father was a large crane operator on a war manufacturing plant that was being constructed in anticipation of the United States entering the war then currently raging in Europe. It was on a foggy night just before Pearl Harbor that his whole life was changed when he was almost killed in an automobile accident on a state highway where twelve other souls did lose their lives in similar occurrences over a fifty mile stretch of road that cut through the heart of southern Illinois. My father lost one of his eyes and had a piece of steel that came within fractions of an inch of piercing his brain where it would have killed him instantly. The doctors in the primitive hospitals of that time told my mother that my father would not likely survive. Although he had been in an apparent coma, he roused himself and told them that he would live, and he did, after twenty seven days in and out of consciousness.

After the accident, my father’s world was forever changed. He could no longer operate heavy equipment so he took advantage of the fact that his disability had also kept him out of war to become an able bodied businessman in a community where most of the rest of the able bodied had gone off to war. To the day that he died, my father could not remember Pearl Harbor.

It would be nice to say that my father was successful in business and retired a wealthy and content man, but, that would simply be a lie. After my father came out of his coma my mother soon opened her own beauty shop and it was her earnings that held our family economically together for the next forty years. My father had a weakness for going into business with other people and they either took advantage of him or were so incompetent themselves that, if he broke even, he had had a good year. Still yet, the village of Vienna always tried to support him as was the case in so many tight knit communities across the heartland of this nation during that period of time.

By the time that I came along in 1949 my father had established a very tight bond with his older son and I became close to my mother. It remained that way almost to the end of his time on this earth. I went into business myself and my dad and I did have a relationship as he would always inquire of me in his quiet way how business was going for me. But, generally, he left my raising to my mother, his long suffering wife. Both of my parents had deeply established roots in the Baptist church and they made sure that I was in church weekly, something that, as I grew older, I came to rebel against more and more as time passed by. I was to be almost in my fifties before I came back home to the church again and it has been an increasingly more important part of my life ever since that time. Something that my father did in the early fifties has played an important part of that process throughout my adult life. My father also had a weakness, or a strength, for anyone who was considered an underdog in life. In the business that he was running at this time in the mid fifties, he employed, from time to time, convicts that were paroled from the state penitentiary system. It did not matter if they were black or white, they found a place to begin a new life in my fathers trusting and benevolent care. In 1954, two of them betrayed his trust and ended up killing an older white lady and raping her granddaughter. In the aftermath of that event, vengeful members of the world war two generation ended up burning down the small and humble black community on the south edge of Vienna, turning the city and the county into a segregated and closed community for the rest of my fathers life. As the manhunt for the killers went on, I have now come to realize that my mother was afraid that those who burned out the black members of our community might have been thinking for coming to burn us out as well.. Although that never happened, our family suffered with the hatred of certain members of the community for the rest of my fathers eighty plus year life. My father went quietly on with his life and I know that he often prayed silently for those who hated him and for those who ended up in prison for the deeds that they had done on that hot, liquor filled, summer night when our world changed once again.

My mother died in 1998 after sixty two years with the man that she had loved through thick and thin, good times and bad. In the less than a year that remained to my father and I, we finally established the bond that had so long eluded us. I came to further realize in my conversations with my dad during this period of time, how much he had loved my mother and what a very fine and decent man that he really was and had always been. My dad and I became very close during the eight months or so before he died and his last conversation with me was filled with concern for my well being and for my future. He, after all, cared so very, very much, really, for all mankind.

IOVHO,

Regards,

Joe