My Mom and Dad

My mom was a child of the Great Depression. She was one of five daughters of a woman who was for all practical purposes, a single mom. Grandma was married, but grandpa was a gambler, who did not stay at home for any length of time. Those facts really shaped my mom.

When mom met my dad, both were college students at the University of Iowa. She wanted to make sure he would be dependable, a hard worker, someone she could rely on. They were engaged for five years before they finally tied the knot.

My dad was the oldest of four brothers and two sisters. When he was a boy he found his father in a river bank. His father had just fatally shot himself. My mother finally told me about it when I was a teenager, but made me promise never to talk to dad about it. She was trying to help me understand why dad had bouts of sadness.

If it was reliability and dependability she wanted, and it was, mom chose the right man in dad. After college he became a teacher, coach, and principal of a school in rural Iowa. When he was stricken with Rheumatic Fever, the school had to hire three people to replace him. Mom was so proud to tell that story to me again and again.

Dad went on to have a successful career as a life insurance salesman, selling almost exclusively to farmers. He was a district manager for a while, but couldn't stand the petty in-fighting of the salesman he had to supervise. He loved the freedom of getting in the Buick and hitting the dirt roads that separated Iowa's wonderful cornfields.

If mom wanted to instill in me a pride and respect for my dad, she was successful. I just wanted him to be as proud of me as I was of him. When I was three or four, he installed a basketball hoop in our basement, and we would play one-on-one. Later it became an obsession with me, as I played hour upon hour at a neighbor's hoop one-half block down the alley from my house. I set up tournaments, and I would be the play-by-play radio announcer, as well as the only player of all the games.

When I was a high school freshman my parents joined a golf club, and I soon had a new sport about which to become obsessed. Dad would take me to play in tournaments in the summer. He would shag balls for me while I warmed up for the day's competition. The two sports paid off for me in a full scholarship to college. I think dad was proud.

As you can tell, I was closer to my dad than to my mom. The depression just put such a stamp on her. She was incredibly frugal. She never discarded anything. If I was reading by a lamp, she would move me, chair and all, next to a window so I could read by God's light. I knew it had nothing to do with God, and everything to do with not using electricity.

But I always admired mom's spunk. Nobody could intimidate her. She did what she wanted to do and said what she wanted to say, any time, any where. In the summers she would spend hours tending her flower gardens, while dad tended his vegetable gardens. He was so proud of that garden, rightfully so. A vivid memory of mom is of her watering her prize roses, of which she was also rightfully proud.

Another thing dad was proud of was his prowess at hunting. He hunted pheasants in Iowa, but the duck and goose hunting of North Dakota in the winters were his true love. I never went duck or goose hunting with him, because it was basketball season, and because crawling several hundred yards on my belly in sub zero temperatures in snowy cornfields did not really interest me.

One time I did go pheasant hunting with my dad and his brother, who had been a tail-gunner in World War II. My uncle had the right rear window, and my dad the front passenger window. My job as a sixteen-year-old was to drive slowly along the dirt roads and wait for one of them to start screaming for me to stop, so they could shoot at one of those beautiful birds. We always had both duck and pheasant at Christmas and New Year's Eve.

Dad was a wonderful brother to all of his siblings. The one I just mentioned in the above paragraph was special to dad. I think dad felt badly for the experiences my uncle had fighting the Germans. Dad helped all of his siblings financially.