June 20, 2004

• Father’s Day

  
  My
  father’s day is long past.  Born in 1905, died in 1951, he was
  definitely a man of another century.  This picture of him being
  towed across the farmyard on a shovel by his father is almost a hundred
  years old.  His time barely overlapped with the Atomic Age. 
  He never saw a computer, never heard the phrase, “political
  correctness.”  As a concept, I don’t think it’s something he’d
  care for.

  He used words like “wop” and “wetback”.  His very best friend
  was a wop.  Buck referred to himself that way, and didn’t know how
  many generations of his family had been Americans.  We had just
  come through a war where his “old country” was an enemy, and I think
  Buck took it all philosophically.   I don’t think that for
  either Buck or my father the words were indicators of bigotry.

  My mother was a racist, but not my father.  That might have been
  because she’d had a family history of church-going religion, while his
  was more in the nature of gnostic spirituality.  It might also
  have had something to do with the fact that my father’s father’s
  father, Grandpa Cyrus, owed his life, and therefore all his descendants
  owe our lives to the family of black Missourians who found him with his
  leg blown off on a Civil War battlefield and nursed him back to
  health.  The battle had moved on and his comrades in arms had left
  him for dead.  Mama had a grandfather in that war too, on the
  other side.

  Daddy
  wasn’t perfect.  Who is?  Physically, he was missing some
  fingers and had some hearing and vision deficits from having set off a
  blasting cap he found along the railroad when he was a boy.  That
  was some time after this picture was taken, because his hands appear to
  be intact here.  He had learned a different grip on the fiddle
  when I knew him.

  He still had that fiddle when I was born.  It had been some kind
  of family heirloom.  I’m sure he must have told me the story, he
  told so many stories, but I don’t remember.  The Douglasses are
  known for their musical talents and storytelling, as well as for
  mechanical skills.  I’ve learned that recently since I was able to
  contact some of my cousins through the web.  I had lost
  contact with my father’s family after he died.  My mother’s family
  and I sorta more or less rejected and disowned each other in the 1960s,
  but Daddy’s folks didn’t know me then, so I have some of them as family
  now.

  He loved that fiddle.  He couldn’t read a note of music, but
  played flawlessly by ear.  Tunes I recall hearing him play include
  Orange Blossom Special, Under the Double Eagle, and San Antonio Rose. 
  He didn’t have to hear a song more than a few times, to be able to play
  it.  I only recall hearing Daddy yell at my mother twice during
  the seven years of my life before he died.  One time was when she
  was turning the mattress on their bed and knocked his fiddle off its
  hook on the wall and broke it.  He kept the broken instrument, but
  never played again.

  The other time he yelled at her, it was my fault.  I would not eat
  apple skin.  To get me to eat apples, Mama had to peel them, core
  them, and cut them in quarters.  (I’ll eat the skins now, but I
  still core and quarter them and don’t just bite into the
  outside.)  We were fishing from a rowboat in a slough off the San
  Joaquin.  I was hungry.  She laid her rod across her lap to
  fix me an apple to eat.  A fish struck her bait and took the rod
  and reel overboard.  Daddy yelled at her for her stupidity and
  jumped in after it.  He couldn’t swim, but the slough wasn’t very
  deep.

  I
  saw him once walk across a channel of the San Joaquin, across to the
  bank and back to the island in the river near Manteca where his cousin
  Foster lived.  He was drunk when he took that walk.  We all
  watched his head disappear under the water.  Mama stood there
  calling him back, crying and wringing her skirt in her hands, until we
  saw him walk up the other side and turn around.  Then she moaned
  “nooo… noooo.” as he walked back in toward us.  This picture was
  taken on that island, and those girls (except for me, the urchin down
  front with belly button exposed) are Foster’s daughters.  Daddy’s
  the man with the cigarette.

  That occasion on his birthday when my mother’s brother Frank had given
  him a bottle of whiskey, was the second and last time I ever saw him
  drunk.  The first time as a babe in arms I refused to have
  anything to do with him, more because he was wearing a hat I’d never
  seen before than because he was drunk.  But Mama said it broke his
  heart and he went to AA and “took the cure.”  I guess he was the
  same kind of drinker I am, with some tolerance for alcohol before the
  “point of no return” is reached, because that birthday bottle didn’t
  trigger a bender, and I recall a few hot summer days when he and my
  mother would each have a single Tom Collins, which never set off a
  binge for him.  I don’t know if my uncle Frank knew about Daddy’s
  “cure” or not when he gave him the bottle.  It was good whiskey
  and in good Scots tradition, Daddy couldn’t “let it go to waste.” 
  That’s been my excuse for more than one forbidden indulgence, too.

  Politically, I guess my father was a populist.  Some of his heroes were:

  Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, the bank robber who is said to have
  made a point of destroying mortgage records in the banks he robbed, to
  save the farms of Dust Bowl families;

  Woody Guthrie, who wrote songs about outlaws such as Pretty Boy Floyd, and about socioeconomic issues of the time;

  Joe Hill, “Wobbly” (Industrial Workers of the World union man) and poet, who wrote:

  The Preacher and the Slave
  
  From the IWW Songbook 1911 Edition
  Tune “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”
  
  
  
  Long-haired preachers come out every night
  
  Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right
  
  But when asked how ’bout something to eat
  
  They will answer with voices so sweet
  
  
  
  Chorus
  
  
  
  You will eat, bye and bye
  
  In that glorious land above the sky
  
  Work and Pray, live on hay
  
  You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
  
  
  
  And the starvation army they play
  
  And they sing and they clap and they pray
  
  Till they get all your coin on the drum
  
  Then they tell you when you are on the bum
  
  
  
  If you fight hard for children and wife
  
  Try to get something good in this life
  
  You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell
  
  When you die you will sure go to hell
  
  
  
  Workingmen of all countries unite
  
  Side by side we for freedom will fight
  
  When the world and its wealth we have gained
  
  To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain
  
  
  
  Last Chorus
  
  
  
  You will eat, bye and bye
  
  When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry
  
  Chop some wood, ’twill do you good
  
  And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye
  

  Union organizer Eugene V. Debs, who said:

  “As long as there is an underclass, I
  am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long
  as there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

  

  My father and his brother Bob, who had also been his friend and
  partner, were truck drivers in the 1930s, involved
  in the violence when bosses and scabs were fighting the
  Teamsters.  Daddy remained a member of the Teamster’s Union for
  the rest of his life, keeping his dues paid up even after he stopped
  driving truck and joined the Machinist’s Union.  Uncle Bob, whom I never
  got to know, died one snowy night when his tractor-trailer rig
  jacknifed on a highway outside Ogalalla, Nebraska.  He was
  preparing to put out safety flares to warn other drivers when his truck
  was struck from behind.

  My father was proud to be an American.  I don’t know how he’d feel
  about that now.  He was not an unthinking, “my country right or
  wrong” patriot.  He believed in what he thought our country stood
  for.  He regretted that his boyhood injuries made him ineligible
  for military service in World War II, and he moved to California and
  went to work in a defense plant, making armor plating for tanks and
  putting his extra money into war bonds.

  When he died, Daddy’s savings bonds kept my mother and me going for a
  while.  His employers at Food Machinery Corporation, who had gone
  back to making canning machines after the war, also gave us not only a
  generous check but a “certificate of appreciation” when they invited us
  to the unveiling of the bronze plaque they put up for my father in
  their corporate offices.  Mama and I had known about the stainless
  steel finger protector he had fabricated for himself when an on-the-job
  injury might otherwise have kept him off the job for a few days. 
  He had never told us that the company’s attorneys had filed for and
  gotten a patent on it.  The company had also patented two or three
  other canning-machine-related inventions of my father’s that my mother
  and I hadn’t heard about.  He never asked for any compensation for
  them, since he’d made the prototypes on “company time.”

  If anyone hasn’t gotten enough yet, there’s more about my father’s life and death in the
  early portion of my memoir links in the sidebar on my main Xanga page.

  Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.
  (and thanks, MyKi, for the inspiration)
  

  • 4:02 am
  • 23 Comments