Dad; Reconnecting

 "For many years fathers who have said or done things that may not always have made sense to their children have found themselves saying or thinking just as their fathers had, "Someday you'll thank me."  From Wisdom of our Fathers by Tim Russert.

I spent last evening reading some blogs from 1949.  That’s ridiculous, you say, there were no blogs in 1949.  Of course there were; they just weren’t called blogs.  They were called opinion pieces and they were columns in print; newspapers and magazines.  Not everyone could do that sort of thing in those days.  You actually had to be employed by the journal that your work appeared in or be invited as a guest columnist.  Today through blogs and various social media on the internet anyone can be a writer or even pose as one; I’m living proof.  But I’ve digressed. 

Last night I looked through a scrapbook of columns written by one Richard O. Anderson, columnist and news editor for the Kaysville Weekly Reflex; and my father.  Dad had a regular column called Cabbages and Kings.  The Reflex was published on Thursdays in little Kaysville, Utah; population in 1949 less than 2,000.  I’d come across the scrapbook some years back while doing one of those house cleanings that exhumed everything from some of my college report cards to the kids grade school drawings to letters from old girlfriends, to yes, a scrapbook of dad’s newspaper columns. When I first found it I took a quick peak then relegated it to a box with some other artifacts and forgot about it until just recently.  Somewhere in that cobwebbed cave called my memory I had recalled that dad did write for a newspaper a few years before I was born.  I’d just never been interested enough to go into the details.  A few months back I once again rummaged through the box and skimmed over a column or two.  On this Friday night I pulled it out and read for hours. 

                On deciding where to go on vacation: “If you’re a married man don’t fret about this problem at all.  Let your wife do the deciding.  She will anyway.  If you don’t belong in this category it’s possible to get all the general effects of a vacation by staying right at home.”

As I read through his works I found that I was discovering a connection.  Right there before me on fragile, yellowing newsprint was my style of expression, my, yes, sarcasm and my sense of humor; and it was 63 years old.  But I also realized that I was seeing an even more far reaching connection.  It was that biting humor, the irony and sarcasm that often show up in my son and daughter especially in those verbal sparring matches of theirs; the grandson that he barely knew and the granddaughter that due to the ravages of dementia he really never knew.  I read through his columns, smiling, chuckling, and laughing out loud.  I’m writing this the next morning through a mist of tears. 

In recent years, late, much too late I’ve gained a great appreciation for my dad; more so than when I was a kid and much more so than in those last few years when he was plagued by Alzheimer’s.  I remember in the years leading up to his dementia how flustered he got when he would forget those things that he knew he should be remembering.  I didn’t have the empathy at the time to realize how frightening, how devastating it must have been for him to realize the dulling of his once sharp wit.  My mom in some prescience that she would pass before my father admonished me that I would probably be looking out for him.  When she did pass suddenly he plunged deep into dementia and the remaining years were not pretty.  They don’t inspire any pride in the way I handled the situation and in fact they revealed many personal imperfections.  Suffering from pneumonia he took his last labored breath in March of 1999 and the most sage comment of that evening came from his then 16 year old grandson; “He’s free.”

                My wife and I just watched the movie J. Edgar, which briefly touched on those popular movies in the forties and fifties that were advertised as being “from the secret files of the FBI.” From November 1949; “Are we to believe that a movie scout walked into the FBI office in Washington, announced that he would like to borrow a little secret material to make a movie and then rummaged around through the files until he found the type of material that would appeal to the moviegoer.”

Sadly the memory of his confused years had been the clearest when all this while they should have been banished to obscurity.  I know those years weren’t dad even though I never knew a lot of the details of his life.  I know he was born in Toeele, Utah and grew up in the Salt Lake City area.  He graduated high school and that’s where his formal education stopped.  He spent some time in the Civilian Conservation Corps (C.C.C.) working in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho and then served in the Army-Air Corps (The precursor to the Air Force) in World War Two.  He came home with an Italian war bride and they kicked around between Utah, West Virginia, and California until finally settling in San Mateo, California in 1956.  He held a variety of jobs; he repaired radios and televisions, was a writer and news editor, a radio operator at San Francisco International Airport and finally an engineering writer at GTE in San Carlos, California.  Much of what he knew for his job at GTE he taught himself.  His writing skills came from his voracious reading and appreciation of the power of the written word.  He was self-taught in geometry, trigonometry and calculus.  Beyond these linear facts there’s very little that I know about the events of his life.

I’m aware of those things that he held dear because he passed them on to me.  He fancied books and classic literature.  When I was a young boy he would read to me before turning out the lights.  Not fairy tales but classics like Treasure Island, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, War of the Worlds and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Probably the most memorable of those bedtime stories was Jack London’s, The Call of the Wild.  I was captivated by that book and I still remember its blue binding with an image of an Alaskan Husky on the front cover. That copy is long gone but I’ve reread the story a number of times.  When I was older, he would often go to the bookshelf, scan the titles, pull out a book and suggest, “This one’s pretty good.”  And so it was with Willi Heinrich’s Cross of Iron, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a book that I would one day suggest to my own son. 

                On the impending nuclear arms race and the term “the atomic age”:  “Go ahead and call it the atomic era if you want but leave off the age business.  When two nations take up for the conversational peace; “My atom bomb can lick your atom bomb,” the only age likely to ensue is the stone age for a return in one of the swiftest transitions from one age to another, on record.”

Rummaging through another box of relics some months back I found something else that he held dear; his books.  Some I donated to the library but others, the older leather bound collections I kept.  Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens have all been rescued from a dusty garage, their faded bindings and yellowed pages now resting comfortably on our bookshelves.  I kept Ernie Pyle’s Here is Your War, remembering that dad very much admired the famous journalist.  I’ve boxes and files yet to go through.

Dad gave me his values.  I was reminded of that as I read some of his columns that took to task the bigoted, the narrow minded and those who would stifle personal freedoms.  I imagine that if the Reflex hadn’t been a small town weekly, dad might have found himself on Joe McCarthy’s radar.  Many years later dad would take days off from his work at GTE, a defense contractor, to march in the streets against America’s misguided military adventure in Southeast Asia.  I recall his fear that his picture might chance to appear in the news at one of those rallies and that his employer might see him figuratively biting the hand that was feeding him.  Like me he was a student of war, found it fascinating, read about it voraciously but hated it nonetheless.  He never spoke of his service in World War Two.  He often talked to me about history and its relevance, stopping to explain about the historic sites we passed on our many road trips.  Dad didn’t suffer bigots, the muzzling of free speech, incursions of religion into politics or those who would generally seek to stifle progressivism.  He saw the rampant fear of Communism that characterized the fifties and the sixties as so much irrational paranoia.  And living in Utah he harbored a rather untenable dislike for the LDS (Mormons) or more properly that organization’s ability to insert itself into the lives of everyday heathens like himself. 

                On a neighborhood protest against the opening of a local package store (liquor store); “I would suggest that all liquor stores be moved to some isolated and little accessible spot outside the city.  Also make it a law that (liquor) can be purchased only on dark moonless nights”…”The words whiskey, gin, rum and even vodka are all in the dictionary.  You can either tear out the offensive pages and burn them or destroy the entire book”…”Well kids, keep up the valiant crusade.  I’m going to the ice box and if nobody is looking I’ll mix myself another (cocktail).” 

I’ve finally managed to put aside his last years and recall the times when we were buddies.  Like the Friday afternoons when he would come home from work and pack the station wagon for one of our weekend camping trips in nearby Memorial Park; just him and me.  We fished, shared camp duties, lounged during the day and played chess in the evenings under the light of a Coleman lantern.  On warm summer nights, dad would pull out a couple of fold out cots and we would sleep in sleeping bags on the back patio, looking up at the stars and talking until one of us fell asleep.  In what my mom might term our less dignified moments we would spend a Saturday afternoon in front of the television watching Laurel and Hardy or The Three Stooges.  I recall one afternoon when the two of us were literally howling with nonstop laughter and tears running down our cheeks while my mom looked at the two of us shaking her head with uncomprehending scorn.

                On the free spending of taxpayer dollars by legislators; “As taxpayers it is our role to be meekly generous with our dough and remain stoically silent while the boys in Washington romp around with it at will.”

And so 13 years after my father’s death, I come to realize that we had the same passion for writing.  We just didn’t have it at the same time and so we never got the chance to share it.  Many years after he had quit writing for that little newspaper dad would continue to write.  He would sit up late of an evening, pipe clenched between his teeth; maybe a bourbon and rocks off to the side, and hammer away on an old Smith Corona typewriter.  That late night tapping of the keys drove mom nuts; quiet computer keyboards came much too late.  I don’t know what became of any of that work.  As for my own work, I’d not yet developed an interest for writing.  That would manifest itself years after he was gone. 

Walking the dog early on this chilly morning I thought about what it might be like if he was still around, still writing.  Would we critique each other’s work?  Would we share ideas?  Maybe even collaborate?  I can but imagine the long, late into the evening conversations that might have been.  I’d like to think he would favor my writing and maybe recognize some of his influence in my work.  But I suppose that even if he found it to be outright trash he would be proud and happy to see me plug away and to know that his love and respect for expression through writing had been passed on to his only son. 

So what comes of all this?  Before you think that this is a lament, remember the title; this is about a reconnection, a discovery.  The bleak years are gone.  And I guess looking back at my dad and then to my son and daughter I see that the good things span generations.  My kids are both, in the end, reasonable and logical; two virtues that were at the core of their grandfather. I’d like to think that I was the conduit.  Both are clever, witty and when they need to, can turn a clever phrase. Is there something of the writer in each of them?  Happily and with some measure of surprise (No offense meant Jess) I often see my daughter on the social networks deploring the decline and abuse of the English language.  Somewhere her granddad is looking at her with pride and flashing a knowing smirk.  And of course when I look at my son the physical resemblance is unmistakable.  I still don’t know that much about my dad.  He was inscrutable and my feeling is that was largely by choice.  Not that he had something to hide; he was just introverted by nature.  The scrapbook was a small window into the man before I was a “glint in the eye.”