Memories of my father!
We suppose that this post might have been done for father’s day a couple of weeks ago. However, that date simply touched off some thoughts inside of us that had lain dormant for a very long time.
My father came out of the prairies of southern Illinois in a rural setting at a time when much of the nation was still rural. It has been said that one of the reasons that this nation survived the Great Depression was the fact that seventy percent of all the population were either on a farm or very close to the land. My father was seventeen years old when the Great Depression began and he was a product of that event. Dad was a proficient mechanic and heavy equipment operator so he never really starved. He met my mom in 1935 and married her after a whirlwind romance in which observers of the scene said that he simply swept her off her feet. They were married on the longest night of the year and we suppose that they made good use of it. Mom had another serious suitor but Dad always said that he “beat his time.” They eloped to the bustling river town of Paducah, Kentucky where the vows were exchanged and sang “Red sails in the sunset” as they crossed the bridge back into Illinois to begin their life together.
Both of my parents came from a stock of people that had been long in America, even before it was the United States of America. But they were not people of any real monetary means. Mom came from straight off the farm stock and Dad came from those who ran small shops that serviced that farm economy. Their values ran deep and, if they had lived in the south before the Civil War, they might have had just as close ties to slaves as they did their white overseers. We have written often about my father’s role as a sort of civil rights pioneer when he took poor blacks from the state prison and gave them a second chance at life. We can remember my mother’s sincere invitation to one black gentleman in Dad’s employee who did some tasks around the outside of our home in Vienna, Illinois to please come take a meal with us and sit at our table. He knew his “place” in life and politely declined the invitation and ate out on the back steps by himself. This same man would later join with another black companion on a drunken spree one hot summer night and would kill one elderly woman while they raped her daughter. My father’s true character came out during the time after this event when he would see his fellow citizens go out to the black part of town and burn every black citizen off of their properties. Dad took no part in it and was roundly hated by some in Vienna for decades afterward for what he had made possible by his paroles. Dad bore it in silence and went about his business as if it had never occurred.
By the time of the racial incident during the mid fifties, Dad was already thirteen years past an automobile accident that had almost cost him his life and had kept him out of World War Two. I never knew my father with two eyes and have only seen him that way in a few rare photographs that preceded the event in his twenty ninth year. Dad always got a kick out of watching small children look at his absent eyepatchless missing eye and I never saw him appear to be bitter over what had happened to him.
My father rarely ever worked for anyone else and always ran his own independent businesses. It is a heritage that we picked up and perpetuated in the insurance industry where we were always our own boss on a daily basis. Both Mom and Dad instilled in me a spirit of independence and self motivation that has stayed with us to this very day.
My mother and my father managed to stay together for over sixty years through all of the ups and downs that any long marriage endures. Mom became more frail with each passing year as she aged and Parkinson’s Disease began to ravage her body in her later years. Dad tried his best to take care of her until they were finally forced into the nursing home together. Neither one of them would see a complete year there as Mom passed away about two months after their arrival there. After Mom’s passage, the will to live went out of my previously very strong father and he began to decline almost immediately after her death. But my father never lost interest in his youngest son and we became closer in the few months that we had together after Mom’s death than we had ever been before in our lives. I would pick him up out of the nursing home on weekends and take him on driving tours around southern Illinois until he became too unstable to any longer be able to do that.
It was a cold, snowy and icy January evening that I got the call that the end was near. I rushed to the hospital to be by his side but arrived there just a few minutes after his passage. He had gone home to be with Mom and there almost appeared to be a kind of relief on his face in death that his missions in life were finally at a close and that he finally had no further obstacles to surmount. My father was of the greatest generation but he never got the chance to go to a traditional war due to his injuries. But both he and my mother fought their entire lives for what they felt was right and taught their children the values that were inherently there from generations past. Dad was born a couple of months before the Titanic went down and lived to see craft take men to the moon and back again. He was of a time and age that we are not likely to ever see again.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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