CHAPTER 16
Lets talk a bit about my dad.
My father’s hero was John Wayne. He never missed a Wayne film and sometimes he took me with him. I ran into John Wayne on Market Street in Philadelphia once. He was appearing at a premier or promotion of one of his movies. I was walking back to work on my lunch hour just as he stepped out of a limo. I stopped and watched him stride up the sidewalk. He was imposing, tall and broad, with a deep tanned and rugged face. He looked every bit the rough and ready characters he played on the screen. His presence dominated the area.
My dad (right) bore a physical resemblance to the
actor. Dad wasn’t as tall, but he had the broad shoulders and rugged countenance. He was very handsome in his younger years. He sported a muscular body with defined six-pack abs and large arms. He earned those muscles, molded from building mountain roads in the CCC, working in the steel mill and his World War II service time. He didn’t build them working out in a gym. His hands were hard and rough from heavy use.
He was disdained by his grandparents for being born, punished for the perceived sins of his mother. They often denigrated him when a child. A mistaken diagnosis of Tuberculosis forced him from school and landed him in an institution for the contagious.
I wonder how common this type of diagnosis was back in those times when TB was quite a threat. A very similar instance happened to my mother-in-law to be when she was a 17 or 18 years old (pictured at Cottage Green in 1925, my wife’s mother is the one in the center with the turban on her head) She was institutionalized at a sanitarium called Cottage
Green. I believe Cottage Green was her residence at the Trudeau Sanatorium (formally the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium) in Saranac Lake, New York. This was founded in 1885 by Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau and consisted of a number of cottages for the patients, each with its own name such as Sunshine Cottage AKA as Cooper Cottage or Little Red AKA Jenks Cottage. Cottage Green may have been the Little Green Cottage AKA Reid-Folder Cottage. Like my dad, her TB was discovered to be a false read and she was released.
My father was sent to one of the many sanatoriums that sprang up in Tucson. Arizona, where it was believe the dry air would help cure the lung of Consumption, as TB was often called in those days. However, at some point, Doctor’s discovered his TB had been a speck of dust on the X-ray plate and released him. He went back home, but he never returned to school. (Right, my dad about the time he dropped out of high school.)
Dad lost his own father while still a teenager and became the soul support of the family earning his wages doing hard labor. He lost his job just before his marriage and was too poor to live with his bride.
He pleaded with his grandfather, who considered him illegitimate, to rent them a bug-infested apartment. I was taken there after being born, but to rescue me from the bedbugs, mom and dad moved in with mom’s parents. Dad left to fight in a war before any chance for him and I to bond.
I did not make it easy for him when he came
home. To me he was a stranger, an interloper and he was getting more attention from my mother who I felt belonged to me. Our coexistence was never what it should have been or could have been. I rejected him, feared him and avoided him. Part of this was my resentment and jealousy that he expected to share my mother. Part was the brutish way he often treated me. Added to this was the sense of desertion I felt when he left for the Navy, reinforced by his choice of occupation. after discharge. Our family structure resembled that of a single mother with a part-time boyfriend rather than a cohesive family of father, mother and child. This was not Father Knows Best.
Willis returned from the South Pacific, from Hawaii through the gateway of San Francisco. He took a train and a bus cross country. Between the two, he bought a bicycle for his son.
When the bus dropped him off, Helen ran to him down the lane and he dropped his duffel at the gate. He swept her up in his arms, swung her about and kissed her hard.
When he turned to his son he hardly recognized the boy. Frank was a baby when he left, now he was a lad, standing stiffly by in a miniature sailor’s blues. The boy’s hair was long and curly, reaching nearly to his shoulders. He was tall for his age and thin. He blue eyes were large and bright with the same misty quality as his mother.
Frank half-hid behind his mother. When Willis lifted him, he screamed so sudden and loud, his father immediately put him down.
Willis and Helen walked to the house, he carrying his duffle over one shoulder and pushing a bicycle with the other. Frank trailed behind.
“Now I have to find a job,” said Willis.
“They say you can get your old one back at the mill.”
“No,” he said. “I want something outside where you can breath, something where I can see different places. I thought maybe a salesman, but I’m not good talking with people. And I don’t want something where bosses are watching you all day either. Not sure what that is yet, but I’ll find it.”
Willis looked back at his son. “And we’re going to do a few things together, boy.”
Frank trailed behind with his head down.
Except from “Veteran’s Day” (1970)
Collected in A Decket County Child. (1970)
Does any of this excuse my father’s treatment of me?
Not really and I fear my dad will look bad in these pages of my childhood. However, my father never abused me physically, never struck me or beat me. He never touched me in any offensive way. He wasn’t much for hugs or pats on the back either. He wounded me many times verbally, embarrassed me in front of others and too often showered attention on other kids more than he did on me. I am certain I was a great disappointment to him as a son. I didn’t live up to his version of “maleness”.
I never saw or heard my parents fight or argue, except about me. These “discussions” often happened in public places, such as at a pool or amusement park
My dad wanted me to ride the Ferris wheel, for
instance, but I am afraid of heights and didn’t want to. He insisted I swim and tried to drag me into deep water. I struggled and yelled .My mother said, “Bill, leave the child alone. He’s scared.”
“How’s he gonna get over his fear if you won’t let him,” he said. In the end he said, “Okay, go on, go to your mommy.”
This tug of war played out often at the swimming holes we visited such as Hopewell Lake (pictured left). Dad was an excellent swimmer, mom not so much. I seldom saw my mother get in the water. I seldom saw my dad get out, unless it was to dive off the board. I loved the water, but I stayed in the shallow end where even if I sat down my head was above the surface. My father thought I should learn to swim. He would swim up behind me underwater and grab me. He would pull or carry me toward the deep water and I would begin screaming.
My mother would yell at him, “Bill, leave the boy alone.”
“It’s time he learnt to swim,” he would say.
“He’s too young,” my mom would claim.
“You’re never too young,” he would reply. Then he would say to me, “I’m gonna throw you off the diving board. You’ll either sink or swim.”
I would scream bloody murder.
“Bill,” my mother would shout.
“Okay, Gertrude, go play in the shallows with the other babies.”
Whenever my dad was peeved with me he called me Gertrude. He didn’t care who heard.
I don’t hate my father, although I may have at
times during my childhood. I took a different view in later years. I decided my dad’s abrasive approach to child rearing was akin to that man in Johnny Cash’s hit song, “A Boy Named Sue.” His early life was not an easy one. His world was a tough place where only the strong survived. He wanted to make me strong.
My dad changed in his nature as he grew older and I changed in my viewpoint of him. I came to admire him for how he always provided for us no matter what. We had many lean times where we had little, but we always had food, shelter and clothes on our backs. He worked long hours on demanding jobs. He suffered setbacks and injuries, but he never complained. He simply kept on going like the Energizer Bunny. He didn’t stop working until he was 90 and forced to stop.
I can’t say he never treated my children the way he treated me and some of his actions were unacceptable and frightened them. Usually he was civil and caring toward his grandchildren, but there were enough issues that he eventually alienated them. My regret is he and I were never able to fully close the chasm between us and there was also a chasm between him and my children as well. In the end I believe he lost more than I did, which is sad. My dad, for all his failings as a father, was basically a good man.
I believe my father changed for the better when
he shattered his arm. He was 59 years old at the time it happened. He was changing a tire on his truck when the locking rim blew off. He threw his arm up and it glanced off him and sailed several yards back into a woods.
“If’n I hadn’t got my arm up it’d prob’ly took my head off,” he said. As it was, it blew his arm bones to pieces.
He was ambulanced to Coatesville Hospital. This was the first time in his life he was ever in a hospital. The doctor put his bones back in place with a number of steel pins. The operation left a thick scar from shoulder to forearm as the only reminder. He was lucky.
It was at that instance he realized he wasn’t John Wayne. He was absolutely right about one thing. The rim would have killed him if he had not diverted it with his arm. For the first time in his life he understood he was mortal. He became a much different person after that. I consider him today a great man, but a weak father. Despite what he became and how I feel now, I can’t change the past and can only write how I saw my dad through my own eyes.
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