Today was my dad’s birthday. It’s been a while since I was able to tell him happy birthday in person. He died of pancreatic cancer in 1986. That’s one of those cancer diagnosis you don’t want to hear. Dad didn’t do treatments. The doctors said it wouldn’t help and Dad did not like doctors or their needles. He stayed away from doctors most of his adult life. I can only remember him going to a doctor twice and one of those times was for this cancer diagnosis. He had made it through some scary health times when he was a boy. His mother made him wear some sort of asphidity bag with garlic or onion to ward off the flu during the terrible flu epidemic of 1918. Then when he was a teenager he went to Louisville on a train to have his tonsils out. By himself. Things were different back then. Maybe that was enough to make him determined to not get near doctors after that.
But he was a good guy with an adventurous spirit. When he was twenty-one he bought a motorcycle and went out west all the way to Oregon. That was in 1932. He loved that motorcycle and it sat in the garage for many years. But I never saw him ride it. I think by the time I came along it needed some kind of repairs. But he had such great memories of his trips on the motorcycle.
He met my mom on a double date when he was in his twenties and she was in her teens. They were each on the date with someone else, but my mother said she knew as soon as she saw him that he was the man she was going to marry. They went on some dates on that motorcycle. Mom had those cute culottes that she wore to ride with him. The day after she graduated high school, they went to a preacher’s house and got married. She was nineteen and he was twenty-eight.
He surely would have liked a son, but he got three daughters. I was the last daughter and I have no doubt he hoped I would be a boy. But instead he had a houseful of females. But we were farm girls and worked in the fields and helped with the crops. Made for plenty of family time. We worked together. We ate meals together. We sat around the wood stove to stay warm in the winter time. We watched television together and generally the program he liked best on one of the two channels we could get to come in with the antenna.
He loved to play cards and was very competitive. He taught us girls to play Rook at a young age. My two sisters still don’t especially like to play Rook even though they like other card games. Dad had a wooden checkerboard that he would play solitaire on. He also liked any kind of puzzle that took brain power to figure out. He went to high school one day, didn’t like it and didn’t go back. But he could work all our algebra problems when we were in high school. Maybe not like the teacher worked them, but he got the right answers. He had an old math book and worked the problems for fun. He taught my son when he was four that six times seven was forty-two.
When I got my first camera, I never had to ask him twice to take a picture. He liked to pose for me. I like this picture of him with my mom on the left and my aunt, his only sibling, on the right. He and his sister were very close. She never married and was a special aunt for us girls.
He was a good dad back in the day when dads didn’t generally change diapers or wipe runny noses. But he did love us and would have fought tigers for us if tigers had been a threat. He taught us how to work and be responsible in doing whatever needed doing. He loved making homemade ice cream in the summer time and especially after the grandkids came along.
Sometimes, when we all came visiting with our young families, he would tell Mom to just look around the table at us and the seven grandkids and see what the two of them had started. If he was here now and able to look around at the extended families, he might be even more proud.
I remember his smile. Happy birthday in heaven, Dad.
What special memories do you have of your dad?