Life with father

Fishing in the Northwest -- when the fishing was still good

It's hard to believe, but today would have been my father's 106th birthday.  He died just one week before turning 70.  His life was far shorter than it should have been, but a life well led.

He was an excellent tennis and handball player, a very good basketball player, and a tolerable softball player. (He hated that my main memory of the latter was of watching him kick a ground ball four or five times across the outfield trying to field it, while runs were scoring.)

He had two unathletic sons, whose idea of sports was playing laid-back games of HORSE in the driveway, and a daughter who loved horses. From reading novels and memoirs of guys with similar fathers, you'd expect to hear that he made our lives miserable, attempting to change us into competitive young versions of himself.  But he didn't.  He gave us an introduction to each sport, and let us decide whether we wanted to become proficient at it.  We didn't.  Now, looking back, I suspect it would have been worthwhile to have picked one fairly congenial sport and to have devoted the time and effort required to become at least reasonably competent at it.

Whatever his private thoughts, however, he never expressed disappointment.  He knew we had other interests, which he respected.  I think he may have found each of us baffling at times, but he was proud of each of us for all the right reasons.


As a newspaper boy

His life was the sort of life that's no longer possible in America.  He was born in Chehalis, Washington, but lived in many areas of the Northwest Corner, both in cities and out in the sticks.  His father was a gyppo logger at times, an established sawmill operator and real estate investor at others.  His mother was highly social.  He was a good student -- his mother would have seen to that -- and headed off to college at Oregon State following high school.

His timing was bad.  He graduated from high school just as the Great Depression hit the country.  After only one year at Oregon State, the family's business collapsed and he had to leave school.  For much of the next decade, his main daily concern was finding part-time labor and getting enough to eat.

About the time he married my mom, he became employed as a simple laboratory assistant at an aluminum plant in my home town. He taught himself chemistry, and ended up as the plant's Chief Chemist, with a number of patents to his name. His expertise in certain aspects of aluminum production was in demand across the country, and he visited other plants owned by the company, sharing his thoughts and discoveries. He helped his company open a new aluminum plant in northeast Scotland.


With my brother and me

He was a man straddling a cultural divide in America -- with one foot in the rural logging economy of the early 20th century, and the other foot in the more sophisticated and increasingly technological economy of the 1950s and 60s.  He told great stories of his adventures as a child and young man -- which to me felt like adventures from the early years of the American Republic.  But he also appreciated the revolutionary changes taking place in American life following World War II, and understood  -- and strongly impressed on his kids -- the growing importance of an excellent education for our generation.   

The varied interests and personalities of his offspring both bewildered and delighted him.

His own interests derived partly from the more open years of his childhood -- he was a devoted fly fisherman until the streams became the playground of modern families in campers -- and partly from his own social and athletic interests.  He was the kind of guy who could spend an evening playing poker at the Elks or handball at the YMCA, and then come home, stretch out on the bed with his young sons, and keep them wide-eyed with stories from Greek and Roman history that he remembered from his own school days.

I wish now I'd told him more often how proud we all were of him. But I suspect he knew.