Perspectives
Fri., March 13, 12:58 PM
Sometimes you look at stuff with a different set of eyes. You may just think this is Friday the thirteenth; to me, it is exactly one hundred years since my father was born.
When I think of World War I, I see it first from the viewpoint of an eight-year-old, because that’s the description Dad gave me. When I think of kids leaving school without graduating, I remember classmates of mine who left because school was more difficult for them. But then I remember that Dad left school after tenth grade — although he was a good student — because his family needed another income. Y’know, not every family was prosperous during the Roaring Twenties.
In college, I knew people who took “Twentieth Century History” because they really knew nothing about it. Strangely enough, even though I didn’t care much for history at that time, I knew the material in that course. My father explained most of it to me, just in the course of many things that he taught me.
Dad had always intended to go back and finish high school, but the opportunity never presented itself. A couple of years after he left high school, the stock market crashed, followed by the Great Depression. By that time, his family really needed his help. He usually had some kind of job, as he was not only an experienced driver (including trucks), but he was capable of fixing his vehicle if it broke down.
If he had had access to GED testing, he would have had a diploma. “If in the past,” as I’ve said before, is fiction. Nevertheless, he was constantly learning, reading whenever he could and retaining what he had read. As a matter of fact, when he was in his sixties, he took an exam required of all potential employees who had not finished school. He did better than most high school graduates. So there!
It was especially interesting that he knew different ways of doing things — methods that were no longer taught. Do you “borrow” when you subtract, taking one from the top of the column to the left? That’s how I was taught, but Dad added one to the bottom of the column on the left. Not only does it work easier, but I found that I could use that method to do column subtraction. I used that in my checkbook until I designed an Excel check register. He really got cheated, y’know; he would have loved using Excel.
When World War II started, he was not only a little old to be drafted, he also had three dependents: his mother, his wife, and his daughter (me). By 1943, there was my brother as well. So, too young for the first one and too old for the second one, he just worked two jobs — his regular job during the day and swing shift on a defense-related job; oh, yes, and Civil Defense as well.
It is now thirty-one years since he passed away, just a little older than I am now. That passage of time means that I am no longer likely to meet people who knew him, for his contemporaries are gone too. I used to go back to our home town — we were both born there — and meet people who would say, “You’re his daughter? I loved your father.’ That’s not surprising, of course; he was a people person, though he never would have put it that way. He just went about his business, doing his job (or jobs, often two or three) and caring for his family. That’s why we miss him still.
