A SPECIAL FATHER'S DAY MESSAGE

MY FATHER

Today, June 18, 2023, is Father’s Day… a day we all remember our fathers and celebrate their contributions to our lives.  In years past I would recall MY father, Robert J. West - the man who gave me guidance, demonstrated what it means to be a good man and helped me become the man I am through his example.  I will link to something I wrote about him a few years ago at the bottom of this entry.

MY “OTHER” FATHER

Today I want to recognize my “other” father - my Sweet Susie’s father, David Livingstone Cunningham

AN ADVENTURER AT HEART

David was a very special man.  An adventurer at heart - one of the family stories we recall with great love is of the time he and his pal, Jack Harbutt, climbed a church steeple in his native Bath, England.  When the press refused to believe they did it, they did an encore late at night and tied a white towel at the highest point to prove their feat.

THE IMMIGRANT

David decided to make a new life for himself and emigrated to the United States in 1937 - just 

as Europe and his native England were about to be embroiled in World War ll.  He came to New York City aboard the Queen Mary, hooked up with his boyhood pal, Jack, to see the sights, then rode a Greyhound bus to the West Coast where his uncle Larry Cunningham - a haberdasher in Oakland - awaited.

OOPS! - HE WAS AN “ILLEGAL ALIEN”

He spent a couple years seeing California, then got a job working in horticulture. He was technically an illegal immigrant, so he had to go to Mexico for a few weeks to sort things out.  Eventually he was given permission to return to the United States and work.

WOOING HER FROM AFAR

He became very successful and managed to coax his lady love, Joan Sabina Adams, to join him.  She was his 17 year old girl when he left for the US.  Through several years of love letters (all of which Joan kept) he convinced her to join him in November, 1940.   They married in Whittier on December 7, 1940.

A SIDEBAR

Upon her mother’s passing my Sweet Susie discovered the small diary her father kept during his immigration adventure, plus all the love letters he had written to her mother over all those 

years.  In order to preserve those precious memories, Susie transcribed them and created a 112 page hard-bound book, including era-appropriate photos, and distributed copies to her brothers and their children.

THE FAMILY

He and Joan had four great children - James, Susan, Lawrence and Robert - and created a wonderful life for them in Newport Beach.  He also sponsored his brother-in-law and his family
to emigrate to the United States in the 1960s.

A VISIONARY INDUSTRY LEADER

David became one of the most respected men in the southern California horticulture community.  As a past President of the California Association of Nurserymen (C.A.N.), Past President of the Los Angeles Chapter of the C.A.N. and the Past President of the California Chapter of the American Association of Nurserymen, he was a guiding light in the growth of that industry as post-World War II Southern California grew.

STARTING HIS OWN COMPANY

He worked for a couple different nurseries, including as Vice President of Descanso Distributors in La Canada/Flintridge and Chino, before he began his own company, David L. Cunningham, Inc., which served the nursery industry and developers all over the state.  It became the “go-to” source for hard-to-locate trees and shrubs and was the benchmark for superior service. Eventually my Sweet Susie and two of her brothers, Lawrie and Rob, took over the business and expanded it exponentially for the next 40 years.

OPENING DESCANSO GARDENS

Among David’s many accomplishments was the opening of the world famous Descanso Gardens in La Canada/Flintridge to the public.  He suggested to his boss, newspaper publisher Manchester Boddy, that the public might actually pay a dollar to tour those magnificent gardens - at the time a private garden complex that surrounded Boddy’s residence.  They built a small cinderblock building to house a lemonade stand on the front and restrooms at the rear, hoping to recoup the $5,000 cost eventually.  That first year 100,000 people paid $1.00 each to view the gardens.  David was known in the industry as “Mr. Descanso”.

INTRODUCING “THE QUEEN”

As a British immigrant, one of his proudest achievements was shepherding the introduction of the “Queen Elizabeth Rose”, developed by Dr. Walter Lammerts in the mid-1950s, into the marketplace.

A HAPPY CLAN MEMBER

I’m grateful to have become part of the Cunningham Clan when I married my Sweet Susie.  She and her brothers share their father’s quick wit and joy of life and have passed that on to their own families. 

         HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO YOU ALL!

This year you get two great men for the price of one.

Here’s the link to the blog post I created to honor MY father,
Robert J. West, a few years ago, HERE.

Remembering Mother

NO POLITICS THIS TIME
This is a special year for me, and this entry will be another non-political rumination for your consideration.

MY MOTHER

Some will recall that I recently wrote about my father, Robert J. West, on what would have been his 100th birthday on May 6th, HERE.  Well, today, July 23, 2015, my mother, Dorothy M. West, would have celebrated her 100th birthday, too.  Today I'll tell you a little bit about her.

LUCKY GUY...

I am a blessed man to have had two such wonderful parents, who loved each other and stayed together through thick and thin, for more than four decades.  Their lives together would have been much, much longer. but my father passed away too early.

SOLID ROOTS
My mother was a special person.  She was born and raised in rural Ohio, one of five children who grew up in a loving, supportive family.  Along with her three brothers and her sister, she had the great advantage of growing up in a small town in the heart of the Amish country in the middle of the state.  She got her math skills from her father, an accountant in a granary who could add a column of numbers by just passing his finger down the line.  That small town atmosphere created a strong "family" feel to my mother's life and she remained close to many of her classmates.  Her high school graduating class - the Class of 1933 - had 33 kids in it and when she returned for her 60th reunion nineteen of her classmates were still alive and 16 attended the gathering!

THE GREATEST GENERATION, FOR SURE
She and her peers were part of Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation", who grew up during the Great Depression, so they learned the hard lessons of self-reliance and frugality.  My mother became a hair dresser and met and married my father just as World War II was beginning to boil in Europe.  I was born just before Pearl Harbor and my first sister was born a couple years later.  During that time my mother and father worked hard to provide for the family - I mentioned in my earlier post that my father worked at least two jobs for the duration of the war since he was physically unable to serve.

POST WORLD WAR II MIGRATION
At the end of the war my family migrated to California, with my father preceding us, finding work and a home.  My mother and our Aunt Myrna drove my sister and me from Ohio to California in an old Plymouth business coupe with no back seat, but a very large trunk.  So, all our belongings were in the car with a mattress spread on top, which is where my sister and I perched and shared that great adventure - seeing Indians and Wild Horses and all manner of other delights on the trip.

A PATIENT TEACHER
As the eldest child I had the great advantage of getting most of the early attention.  My mother would sit patiently with me on her lap as a young child and read to me - no television or video games in those days.  I would read along with her and was a very proficient reader before I started to school.  That leg up was foundational to my entire life.

STAY-AT-HOME MOM
My mother worked off and on as we were growing up in Los Angeles.  While my father worked hard to keep his small business afloat, she was a pretty typical stay-at-home mother, raising the three of us - our youngest sister was born before the last century was half over.  She was my Den Mother in Cub Scouts and was a Scout leader for my sister's Girl Scout group.  She was the go-to person in time of distress, whether it was one of us kids or a family member or a friend - she was always there. 

THE FOOD!
She was a fantastic cook, who made everything from scratch - including the bread we ate.  Our home was always filled with the fragrance of some hearty meal.  It was not unusual for my friends to invite themselves to our house around meal time, knowing full well that there was always plenty of good food on the table.  We used to laugh at the timing of some of my Father's employees, who would manage to arrive at our house to drop off a work truck just in time for dinner.  I don't recall many meals when there were just the five of us sitting around that big, round table in the kitchen.  I can taste some of that food now - enchiladas, chicken and noodles (home-made noodles), fried chicken, roast beef and pork... yum.

MEMORIES
As I recall my mother there are many snapshots of her that flash through my mind.  I recall snuggled in their bed when I was sick with a cold and Mother bringing me Campbell's chicken noodle soup.   I recall her in the basement of our house, canning peaches and cherries for future consumption.  I remember her hanging the laundry on the back yard line to dry.  I remember her hiking across the desert in Death Valley, picking up stones - treasures for a future use.  I remember her with fish - lots of them - on a stringer as a result of a day of relaxation and fishing.  I remember her sitting in our kitchen, cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, patiently listening to a tale of woe from a friend or family member.

WE DIDN'T WANT FOR ANYTHING
Our family was not wealthy, but we kids didn't know that.  Many years my Mother would take a job in the fall so there would be money for Christmas presents for us.  She worked at the Post Office for the holiday rush, or for a friend who had a Christmas-oriented direct sales business.  And yet, she was always there for us.

TRIPPING THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
I recall the evenings when she and my father would take a rare night out "on the town", and she would wrap herself in her cloth coat and off they would go for a night of dancing while my aunt would stay with us.

FAMILY OUTINGS

I remember the many family outings - my father's eldest sister and her family lived nearby, as did his brother and his family.  Plus, his mother and sister and her children lived across the street, so we spent many a weekend day at places like Cabrillo Beach or Sunset Beach chasing grunion or Pops Willow Lake in the San Fernando Valley.

CAMPING
Our family were campers.  We would trek off to places like Death Valley and other sites of interest in California, pitch a tent or two and rough it.  We usually invited friends to go with us, so my sisters and I had pals along for the trips.  And, as always, with a boiling pot and frying pan my Mother would prepare some of the most delicious, simple, yet filling meals over an open fire that you could imagine.

FISHING
My mother was an avid fisherwoman... she loved just sitting in a small boat, trying to lure bass, blue gill or cat fish to her line.  It was a restful, much-deserved break from her busy life.  We began vacationing with relatives at Clear Lake above San Francisco in the mid-1950s and ended up having a series of small boats with which we water skied.  Mother would take her obligatory spin around the lake once or twice, then just relaxed and enjoyed fishing.  As you can see from this photo, she was very successful.

VEGAS!
Later in our lives - after my sisters and I were grown - my parents would frequently enjoy a few days in Las Vegas, playing Blackjack and Keno and making friends with the casino staff.  They were never high-rollers, but enjoyed the companionship and time together.  Sometimes they would win, but most of the time they didn't, but they always stashed $20 in the glove compartment for fuel for the trip home.  The friends they made in Las Vegas lasted a lifetime.

THE SAFE HAVEN
My Mother was a safe haven in our lives.  My sisters and I, as well as dozens of friends, knew she was there for us.  She was the loving grandmother to my nephew and nieces and to dozens of pseudo grandkids who roamed through her life.

DOROTHY, DOT, DOTTIE AND MOTHER
I mentioned in my entry about my Father how friends would refer to him as such - "Father".  Well, it was the same with my Mother.  Although over the years she was referred to as Dorothy, Dot or Dottie,  in addition to young people - my sisters and our friends - adults called her "Mother", too.  That was the relationship she had with folks - she was the mother to us all.

THE MOTHER LODE COUNTRY
As I said, my parents were lifelong campers and really enjoyed the hills in the Gold Country above Sacramento, where they would explore the back roads and sit with their feet in a creek, panning for gold.  After my Father retired at age 62 they spent a couple summers living in their travel trailer in that Mother Lode Country of northern California as campground hosts - staying in a campground and making sure it was habitable for the steady stream of visitors.  And, they would pan for gold in the many streams in the region.  Then my Father passed away before his 65th birthday.

NEVER LOOKED BACK
That following spring my Mother contacted the government officials who managed the campground where they had been hosts and asked if she could return on her own.  They welcomed her with open arms, and that began the next phase of her life.  She spent the first summer on her own in that campground, tending to the business of keeping it ship shape.  That fall she returned home, but quickly realized that my Father had been the link to all their friends, so she remained in the area of the campground the following winter and eventually bought a new home in an adults-only mobile home park, where she lived for most of the last fifteen years of her life.

A NEW, PRODUCTIVE LIFE
She created a whole new life for herself, spending the summer at the campground along the creek on Highway 49 and the winter living in that mobile home park, joining the Fire Department Auxiliary and helping to run the Thrift Shop.  She was active in her church and would also "call the numbers" on Bingo Night at the park for, as she termed it, the "old people" in the park - she was 75 at that time.

ABOVE AND BEYOND
Always the responsible person - she was the rock of our extended family - during her time as a campground host she would take that job very seriously.  She would arrive at the campground early in May - before any tourists arrived.  She would rake up the winter's worth of pine needles from each of the 17 campsites and put them in bags for the Forest Service staff to pick up.  Then she would go to each site and rebuild the stone fire rings that had been filled with debris the previous year.  She would shovel that stuff - bottles, cans, and ashes - into bags for the Forest Service to pick up.  Then, she would take her trusty broom and sweep every inch of the paved roads in the campground so no debris awaited the campers as they arrived.

MAKING FRIENDS
She had no responsibilities to collect money at the campground, just to be a presence there a couple hours a day, five days a week and to be sure the pit toilets were clean and had the necessary supplies.  But, she really enjoyed the folks who visited the campground, so she would fish camp chairs out of the dumpster that folks had tossed away because they had broken webbing and she would re-web the chairs and set them around her own campfire, where they would await visitors drawn to her roaring fire like so many moths to a flame.  She made many, many friends that way.

ALWAYS BUSY
When she got a little bored she would just jump in her four-wheel drive truck and drive a half mile to a local general store/restaurant/bar where she had become friends with the owners.  She would "work" - pro bono - helping the owners in the kitchen, wait tables and make friends.

FAMILY TIMES
My sisters and our families joined her at the campground each year and saw the wonderful life she had created for herself.  We would pick blackberries from the wild bushes nearby and she would use an old family recipe to make cobbler out of them.  I'm salivating as I write this.

RECOGNITION
In the later years of her tenure as a campground host the powers-that-be honored her at a luncheon as the Tahoe National Forest Campground Host Of The Year - an award that had not previously been given and, to my knowledge, stopped after she retired from that gig.  They had no other way to recognize her contributions as a volunteer for more than a dozen years.

THE END...
As she approached 80 my mother realized that she could no longer deal with the rigors of being a campground host, nor living on her own the rest of the year, so she moved to Reno to live with my sister.  A lifelong smoker - that's what folks of that generation did - the cumulative effects of that nasty habit finally took her after a year in a convalescent home, just a few days after her 81st birthday.

...ALONG A BELOVED CREEK
The family gathered a few weeks later to spread her ashes in the hills of the Mother Lode Country, along a creek on a mining claim where she and our father had spent so many happy years late in their lives.  We sat on the boulders along a little creek where they had panned for gold, spoke of our lives with Mother and left her there in that part of the country she loved so much.  We miss her every day for the love she gave us, for her soft touch on our fevered-brow, for her wisdom and steady hand in our lives and the life lessons we learned just being around her.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOTHER

Happy Father's Day!

A SPECIAL DAY FOR SPECIAL MEN

I miss my father, Robert J. West, every day.  Happy Father's Day to every one of you Dads out there.  Thanks for all you do, in every way, every day.

Remembering A Great Man

NO POLITICS TODAY
Today, with this entry, I'm taking a side road that's very important to me and my family.  Today I mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of my father, Robert J. West.  You've seen images of him from time-to-time and today you'll see a few more.

WEST VIRGINIA TO OHIO
My father was born in Wheeling, West Virginia 100 years ago today.  He was the eldest son in a family with four siblings - and elder sister, two younger sisters and a younger brother.  The family moved to Ohio for a job opportunity for his father.  His father died when he was a young boy so his mother worked hard and supported their family of six by herself by working as a seamstress and cook.

LIFE-CHANGING INJURY
Early in his teens my father fell while playing basketball - I'm told he was a good athlete at that time - and injured his right leg.  It became infected and he got blood poisoning, which resulted in a 9-month stay in the hospital and a right leg that was forever hampered with limited mobility.  He missed an entire school year due to his injury and never returned to school.  He worked to help support his mother and siblings.  The country was in the depths of the depression and times were very tough.

SKILLED IN HIS TRADE
He found a trade as a carpet and linoleum installer, married my wonderful mother, Dorothy, and had two children - me and my sister, Linda.  Because of his stiff leg he was not eligible for military service in World War II, so he worked two full-time jobs for the duration - his regular job and a defense industry job.  After the war and after almost freezing to death in his work truck that next winter he drove to California where his elder sister lived, found work,  bought a house, then sent for us to join him.  A couple years later our youngest sister, Cheryll, was born, and we spent the next couple of decades growing up in Los Angeles, where he and his younger brother established a carpet installation - and later sales - business.

"FATHER WEST"
My father was not an educated man.  He would never win a debating contest, but he was the most honest man I've ever known and revered by all who knew him.  Throughout our lives with him everyone, including his peers, referred to him as "Father West" - which got to be amusing from time to time as strangers presumed he was a man of the cloth.

"A GOOD SAMARITAN"
His youngest sister recalled my father in a short, handwritten memoir written shortly before her passing.  She described her own youth, which was peppered with serious illnesses, one of which kept her in bed for weeks.  My father, her older brother, was her primary caregiver during that time because their mother was working at two jobs to keep the family housed and fed.  She describe my father as "a good Samaritan all his life, always giving and doing for anyone that needed a helping hand.  Everyone loved Bob.  He was 24 carat gold, temper and all."   Yes, he had a temper, which manifested itself as a scowl, not a rant, most of the time.

NOT SHREWD, BUT HONEST
He was not a shrewd businessman in the cut-throat, profit-at-any-cost sense of the word.  He was an honest man who treated everyone - his customers and employees - fairly and expected the same in return.  As you might expect, he was occasionally disappointed.  I recall a time when he paid his best installers $5.50 per hour, but the union shops - he was non-union - paid $7.50 per hour.  Sometimes one of his employees would feel mistreated because of that disparity, so would jump to the union job, only to return a few weeks later.  You see, while the union carpet installers might work 30-35 hours a week and earn, maybe, about $260.00 gross, my father's guys would work at least 40 hours per week for $224.00 gross PLUS he paid his guys $1.00 per square yard of carpet they installed, and a good team could do 100 yards a day easily.  Do the math.  He had a cadre of ten men who worked for him for more than 20 years, some almost twice that long.  Twenty years after he died we chanced upon a man in the carpet business who knew my father and his brother.  He told us his best friend had worked for them for 20 years and loved them like brothers.  Yep.

A STORY

Here's a true story that will give you the sense of what kind of man my father was.  I had a high school classmate - I had known him and his twin brother since junior high school.  Following high school he wanted to become a civil engineer, but had no money.  He got a job working for my father as a carpet layer's helper - a job requiring a strong back and not much more.  He would gripe about the job, implying how it was below him, blah, blah, blah.  And yet, he stayed there, working for a couple years until he saved enough to attend college, and he also worked off and on while in college.  After graduation went his merry way, working as a civil engineer and I lost track of him.

"THE BEST MAN I'VE EVER KNOWN!"

Then, a few years ago, I was sitting with a friend at a local shopping center, eating lunch outside, when I noticed this fellow and another younger guy eating nearby.  I commented to my lunch companion that I knew the guy - he rejected that idea.  When we - the four of us - were finished eating I left my companion, walked up to this man and asked his name.  He told me his first name and I added his surname.  He stepped back and said, "Geoff West!", then quickly added, "Your father was the best man I've ever known."  We chatted, then his son returned to work in a nearby bank and my old friend and I adjourned to my home to catch up.  It turns out that he had married, had two kids, divorced and followed them to Utah, where there were no civil engineering jobs to be had.  So, he fell back on the trade he learned from my father and made a good living installing floor coverings.  More important to him were the life lessons he learned from my father.

HE DID HIS VERY BEST
My father was an uncomplicated man.  He worked hard and did his best to make a good life for his family.  If any of us expressed an interest in an activity he and our mother tried to find a way for us to do it.  With my sister, Linda, it was horses.  She loved horses from an early age, so they found a way for her to be around them  and bought her a bargain-basement retired polo pony.  Linda cleaned stalls for the stall rent for her horse and worked other jobs to pay for riding lessons and competed in equestrian events with old Sungold.  Her skills with, and love for, horses has served her well throughout her life.

THE SWIFT SWOOSE
For me it was water skiing.  In the middle 1950's we vacationed with a neighbor family at Clear Lake, above San Francisco and a kind stranger taught me to water ski.  That winter my father, not a wealthy man, found these plans in a magazine and built this weird little boat - the Swift Swoose - bought a 25hp motor for it and we began finding places nearby to use it, and to water ski.  The thing was only 5 feet wide and 10 feet long and could hold - at most - two people.  The "Swoose Goose", as we called her, lasted a couple years before we outgrew her.  My father then found an old, neglected inboard runabout, bought it and refinished it so the entire family, including my father, could ski.  That experience has been foundational in everything I've done in my life - thanks to my father for doing what he could with limited resources.

LED BY EXAMPLE
While not an overtly religious man, he lived a life that others tried to emulate.  He was a deacon in our church and Scoutmaster of our Boy Scout troop.  While not an educated man he became a director of a local bank and served as such for many years.  He was the man others came to with their problems.  He was a great listener, but not a skilled orator.  He didn't tell folks what to do with their lives, he just listened, then asked questions that provided directions they may not have considered.  My sister, Linda, recalls a motto he used to say - "A stranger is just a friend you haven't met".  That very much described our father.

PROVIDING "SUPPORT'
I've shown you images of my father holding me, standing on his big hands, in the past.  He did that with all of us and other children, too.  This image is of my nephew 50 years ago.

HONEST
I mentioned that he was an honest businessman, and that sometimes he was disappointed.  He sometimes would trade carpet or services for something - like a car, for example.  I recall him trading our 5-year old Chevy station wagon and some carpet for a 1-year old Lincoln just about the time I was learning to drive.  It was a great date car!

JEZEBEL
I mentioned our runabout.  Her name was, quite appropriately, Jezebel.  She was a wonderful old boat, but could be capricious.  This image is one of those times.  We got many years of great fun out of the old girl because my father found a way for us to get her and refurbish her.  And, for every hour of joy we got from Jezebel we may have had an equal number of interesting hours "fixing" her.

BLUB, BLUB...
She was a double-planked hull that had not been in the water for years.  The first time we put her in the water she began sucking up water like a sponge.  200 gallons later we finally were able to drag her back on her floating trailer - big mistake, there - and haul her home, where she sat for two days with a syphon hose draining that water.  Next "fix" - drain plugs and a home-made self-bailer.

ENOUGH!
He got tired of dealing with a plank-hull boat and her need to stay swollen, so we just yanked the engine out, flipped her over on her back and overlayed the bottom of the hull with 1/4 inch marine plywood (held firm with several hundred brass screws) then fiberglassed her tummy for good measure.  Jezebel never leaked a drop from that day forward.  And, even though that added to her weight, she could still pull seven skiers out of the water and go 30 mph with them in tow.

PATIENCE PERSONIFIED
And, speaking of skiing, my father was a man of infinite patience.  He would sit behind the wheel of old Jezebel and pull every skier who was willing, all day long, stopping only for some fuel.  And, speaking of stopping - he didn't much like doing that, so he perfected the "flying pickup".  Say two of us were skiing, jumping wakes and each others rope - stuff like that - and one might fall.  Well, instead of the other one having to take a dunk while the fallen skier is retrieved, he would just make a big arc around the downed skier while the other one stayed on a swinging arch on the outside.  Father would deftly guide old Jezebel around the skier, then straighten out as the rope slowly came to him.  The downed skier would just grab the handle and glide right on up - and off they would go.  I've lost track of the number of times we did that - it measured in the hundreds of times, though.  As I said, he was a man of much patience.

POWER
One of the reasons we bought old Jezebel was to be able to pull father out of the water.  That stiff leg made it tough for him, but she had plenty of power to drag him up to the top so he could enjoy skiing, too.  In fact, once my sister was driving, pulling my father and three other "old guys" out of the water and made the mistake of dragging them at an angle.  The combination of their heft and her power peeled the back deck - where the ski tow was mounted - right off the boat!  Unable to repair the boat and with a week to go on our vacation, my father made a rig so we could pull skiers off a motor stringer for that week.  Which brings us to...

TOOLS
My father was a man who didn't necessarily subscribe to the "there's a right tool for every job" philosophy.  He was a man for whom almost any tool could have many uses.  For example, a simple screwdriver could also be used as a pry bar, a chisel, an ice pick, a scribe, a can opener, etc.  As a result, we had a drawer full of bent, twisted, ground-down and handle-less screwdrivers in our house.  And, there was almost no tool that could not be used as a hammer in a pinch.  If you needed to pound a nail and no hammer was handy, a nice heavy wrench could do the trick.  You can only imagine the carnage in the wrench drawer of our tool chest.  And, speaking of wrenches, why bother to look for the right size wrench when a pair of pliers and a strong grip could do the job?  Yes, we ended up with a whole lot of rounded bolt heads and nuts that way.

NOT POLITICAL
My father was not a politically-oriented man.  Until very late in his life I cannot recall him ever uttering a political statement.  Oh, sure - we watched Adlai Stevenson and Ike on our 12-inch black and white television screen, but that was about it.  He would never even think about attending a political meeting or addressing a grievance with a politician.  He was too busy working - working hard.

RETIREMENT
During his short retirement he and my mother spent their summers as campground hosts up in the mother lode country of northern California.  They would camp in their little travel trailer, tending to the small campground along a lovely creek and make friends all summer long.  He would sit in the creek and pan for gold - it was the Gold Country, after all - and get great joy in finding "color", sometimes enough to make a "clink" in the little glass vial he used to collect it.

VEGAS, MAKING FRIENDS
For many years my parents would jump into their car and head to Las Vegas.  We didn't have a lot of surplus cash, so he would put $20 in the glove compartment for gas money for the trip home and off they would go.  They'd stay downtown at The Mint and play blackjack and Keno, sometimes winning a little, sometimes not.  And, during those visits they made friends - a thread throughout their life together.  Some of those friends - pit bosses, managers, waitresses - became lifelong friends.  Even though my folks never spent much money in Las Vegas, there was always a room available for them, just because they were nice folks.

HARD WORK MARKED HIS LIFE
My father worked hard his entire life - from age fifteen, when he helped support his family, until he retired at age 62.  That even counts the months he spent as a roustabout with a traveling circus in his late teens.  It was a working life of five 12-hour days - sometimes six - to make ends meet.  Unfortunately, he passed away before he reached his 65th birthday, having lived a rich, full life and many loving friends in his wake.  The service was held on one of those atypical rainy days in Southern California, at the church where he had been a deacon for so many years.  The sanctuary was packed with friends, employees, business associates and family who gathered to say their goodbye's.

SNAPSHOTS IN MY MIND
My head is full of little vignettes of my life with my father.  I remember him as a tall, strong man sometimes wearing that fedora in the photos.  I remember his laugh.  I remember his love for my mother.  I remember those nasty Raleigh cigarettes, the coupons from which we collected so we could order an ice chest or some other unnecessary bauble to keep them smoking.  I remember how much he loved to have his feet squeezed, and how much my sisters and I loved doing it for him.  He would feign pain, but only to keep us squeezing.  I remember the pain of disappointing him.  He was not a man who yelled at you, but you knew when he was unhappy with you and avoided that transgression again.  I remember him letting me drive our car at age 12 without batting an eye.  I remember him being the father figure for my cousins who lived across the street with my grandmother and their mother.  They remember him with great affection, too.  I remember the affection many of my friends felt for my father.  They knew I was a lucky guy, and they told me so many times.

A GREAT MAN - I MISS HIM
My father was a man against which many have been measured, and most of us have fallen short.  He lived a life not filled with riches, but with friends, and set a high bar for us all.  I miss him.