Happy Birthday, Dad!

Today would have been my Dad’s 76th birthday.

On Father’s day I tried to write something that adequately portrayed Dad, and didn’t feel I did him justice, so I’m going to try again.

The trouble is; I don’t know where to start.

Some topics are easy. They have a logical beginning and end, but people like my Dad are a little more complex.

He and I probably spent more hours together dirty than we did clean when we were both younger. We fixed cars, dug foundations by hand, remodeled the kitchen and added a wing onto the house. He was great believer in the phrase “the only way to get it done right is to do it yourself”; a credo I believe in as well. You may not get it done faster or cheaper, but it will be done your way, and that’s what makes it right.

I have a picture of me at about 12 with my shovel in the ground and me hanging on with a grin. We were starting on building our garage. We don’t have pictures of 12 year old, 5 foot tall, me at the bottom of a 24 inch wide, 4 foot deep trench as we finished the digging. He and my uncle and a couple of cousins laid all the block in the building, and I mixed all the mortar. Dad even built the windows; no sense buying what you can make.

He and I then spent many hours out there working on just about everything. Cars, lawnmowers and the old Gravely. We rebuilt motors, replaced transmissions and did everything we needed to do to keep things running. From him I got a great basic education in how things work. Not from a book or a TV show, but hands in the dirt. Find it broke, take it apart, understand what makes it tick, find out why it won’t, and replace the bad part.

He once bought an old double barrel shot gun, cheap, because only one barrel would fire. He found out the firing pin the broken barrel was worn out. So he took the pin that worked out of the gun and made a second one to match. That gun still hangs over the fireplace.

He would work on anything. After the TV repairman charged him $60 to fix the TV, he took a correspondence course in Color TV repair, and started fixing his own TVs. This was about a year before everything became solid state, and TV Repairmen basically disappeared.

He was good with his hands, and followed his mind where ever it took him. The urge would strike and he would drag out his guitar and play for hours, a skill he taught himself while riding an LST from San Diego to Japan and back. The cruise took 9 months, and stopped at Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong. I still have the silk ‘dress whites’ he had custom tailored in Hong Kong.

Or he would drag out the crayons or colored pencils and draw something, just because the urge had struck. Or carve wooden animals out of small blocks of scrap wood. I have on my desk a lamp Dad made for me; a windmill drives a cam that causes the little man at the other end to chop wood. I don’t know where he found plans, or if he just dreamt the works up himself. My guess is this was his own design. I also have a chess set he carved and painted for me, complete with a folding board to store and carry the set. All carved with a pocket knife.

He also worked his mind, with crossword puzzles. He was ecstatic when the local paper started publishing the Sunday New York Times puzzle. He would always finish it, sometimes taking ‘hints’ from the answer key the following week, or by asking those around him questions, especially on modern pop culture issues.

I guess in some respects he wasn’t too different from a lot of men in his generation, a lot of our fathers. A life long drinker of Weidemann beer, and Southern Comfort (for medicinal purposes, and to mix with a holiday egg nog). He even had a restaurant that kept a 6 pack of Weidemann on hand, just for him. I think I saw him cry once, at his mother’s funeral. There were things he did well and things he did… not so well. But that didn’t stop him from doing them, or at least trying. We shared a lot, argued some and, once I grew up, became friends.

Hey Dad! I’d hoist a Weidemann for you, if I could find one; I guess a Sam Adams will have to do. Thanks for all you did for me, all you taught me, and all you sacrificed for me. Happy Birthday!