families

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Things I Should Have Said to My Father


My father was/is my hero. He died at the age of 57 when I was just 20. And because I was so young, it had not occurred to me to ask him a large number of questions plus just talking to him about things in general.

I am the eldest of three children my parents had and simple math shows that my father was much older than most people who were having children, particularly when considering how old a parent is when having that first child. My mother was 35 when I was born. That was in 1949 and at the time having a first child at that age was considered bordering on dangerous. Of course, it wasn’t as we know today.

My father lived in a large old house, built in 1790, a farmhouse style home, that my family occupied since 1791. The makeup of my family in 1912, when my father was born, was an upper middle-class family, a family that could afford to have a cook and housekeeper. My grandfather was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had a strange feeling towards his children and their education. While two of my three uncles went to college, my father graduated from Wentworth Institute of Technology, a trade school in those days that had strong ties to the textile industry of Massachusetts. The industry was quite extensive at that time and my father, who graduated in 1932, became an employee at the J. P. Stevens Mill in North Andover Massachusetts, his hometown. When the war broke out in 1941, my father delayed his entry into the service because of his father’s impending death.

My father served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was part of the armament section for a B-26 which had him serving in Morocco, Algeria, Italy and finally France. He declined a promotion that would have required his transfer to the Pacific theater of operations. But when he returned home, a law which required J. P. Stevens to take him back, was ignored and he was told his position no longer existed. A patent lie but my father was a gentle man who was not one to take issue.

From what I have told you, you might think I knew so much about my father. But those unasked questions came to surface when I interviewed his sister Charlotte in 1988. Even that interview was wanting for a more logical and extensive series of questions. Still, I learned a lot about my father’s family experience through her. But still, it was not done in his words.

A sampling of questions I might have asked: What are your earliest memories of your family? What were Thanksgiving and Christmas like? Tell me about your going to the Center School (elementary) and Johnson High School. Why did you want to go to Wentworth instead of a 4-year college? Why did you end up getting our house instead of Uncle Ike or Uncle John? Why did you go into the jewelry business and watch repair? How did you learn to repair watches? I am certain that were I to sit with myself, I could easily come up with 100 questions I would love to hear the answer. But as I said, my father died when I was just 20 years old and too much “all about me” as is common among young men and women then and today.

Year later I got a master’s degree in U.S. history which brought home the idea of written family histories. My thesis would have been ever so much better had I known of personal journals of the people involved. After I retired from the Federal Government with 30 years of service, I went into teaching, and I frequently would tell the children to learn as much as they can about their family history. It is only to common for a person to say that their family history is boring. But it is not! Each of us is a part of history and we all witness history from out own unique view. That view can be crucial for future historians. This fact was brought home when I was writing a paper in grad school about the beginning of the Revolutionary War. I found the diary of a young man who lived just south of Boston and wrote down, albeit briefly, his take on the first shots of that war. That was invaluable.

Not to put too fine a point on this subject, I was taking the train from Boston to San Francisco (Oakland) when at dinner one day in one of the mid-west states, I was seated across from an elderly woman. I asked her the usual questions, where are you from and what did you do from work. From that modest beginning opened up a wealth of information, totally unexpected. She too had said hers was a boring background as she was “only” a schoolteacher in a one-room schoolhouse in southern Ohio. In the late 1980s that was a story worth telling.

I do not expect any young people to read this article, however, I know adults will. I implore those of you who are reading this article that you get a written history of your family of birth and that you pass on to your children your own personal experiences. The importance of having first-hand knowledge of the events of history is extremely important. What you experience is unique and worthy of being told to following generations. When history is written, it is these first-hand accounts that will give a much more full understanding of history.

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Parent Child Misunderstandings


Many years ago, on a trip to Canada, my father lost his patience with me.  He exclaimed, to my horror, “you’re just like your mother!”  My father was an incredibly patient man, but more than once I pushed him past all reasonable patience, and into something else.  That was just one such time.  I remember that incident so well because I could not believe what he had said.  And for years afterward, I made it a mission to insure that I was not anything like my mother.  She and I had always had a contentious relationship, and that is putting it mildly.

My father grew up in an upper middle-class house while my mother grew up dirt poor, and adopted by an aunt and uncle who could not have made her feel more unwelcome.  They were married shortly after World War 2.  My father was a WWII vet and met my mother after he got back.  It was a set up but a mutual friend, but a good one.  My view of my parents’ marriage was that it was excellent, a model of what a good marriage should look like.  I have not changed that view at all.  But what I have changed is my view of them as individuals.  Unfortunately, my father died right before my 21st birthday, and I never really got to know him.  That was in large part due to adolescent and teenage selfishness on my part.  I forgive myself that because I believe it is something most, if not all, teens go through.  While teens we think how dumb our parents are, and when we get older, we discover how dumb we were.

My mother lived to age 89.  I firmly believe she could have lived longer if she had desired.  But I think she gave up living.  Along the way she had lost the only man she ever loved, and she adored him.  Of that there is no doubt.  Then she suffered the loss of a child when her son, my brother, died.  That almost killed her, literally.  At some point after that I decided to discover who she really was.  My mother was very tight-lipped, and did not care to talk about her childhood.  It was miserable so why would she?  Her father had deserted the family when she was only 4, and then her mother died when she was 11.  She was shuffled around between relatives, not uncommon in those days, until she settled with an aunt and uncle.  She graduated high school and went to a hospital that sponsored a nursing school and took up her profession.  She was, by all accounts, an excellent nurse, and it served our family well during some lean times we experienced.

I was so angry with my mother for years for doing this and not doing that.  But at no point did I stop to consider the tools available to her for bringing up a handful like me.  She called me a bull in a china shop, an apt description, as I was my own little force of nature when I was young.  I had to have my way which frequently collided with her having her way.  Seldom was it a question of right and wrong, just a question of who would prevail.  That made it difficult for my father, brother and sister to contend with but I don’t think either of us ever considered that very much.

In my 30s I suffered from a particularly severe case of depression.  Although I know the reasons, they are not germane to this.  What is important is that my mother did not take the news well.  I know now that at the time she viewed it as a failure of hers.  It was not, of course, but that was what she grew up believing.  I found out some years later that she had suffered an extremely severe case of depression of her own that required ECT.

Then I became a parent and had children of my own, three daughters.  I adore them but I know for fact that my good intentions do not always come across that way to them.  I am certain they have thought of me as intrusive, and not being sensitive to their desires.  It is this realization that let me know that I was indeed, in many ways, very much like my mother.  We parents have this tendency to take our children’s problems personally, and our distaste for something they are doing is really our fear that they will be hurt.  We do not always express ourselves well, and I know that was the case with my mother.  My mother had the extra problem of having virtually not support system when she was a young parent.

The human being has yet to be born who does not have one serious problem during their life.  Usually it’s many.  As parents we want only the best for our children.  We want them to have better lives than we experienced.  We want them to be happier.  We sometimes, foolishly, want to shield them from failure, sickness, and bad people.  That is simply impossible.

If your parents are still alive, get to know them all over again.  Ask them lots of questions about what they experienced when they were children and when they were your age.  I had to learn about my father through his sister because, as I said before, he died at such a young age.  And parents, just be sure to tell your children that you love them, and be big enough to admit that you are still capable of making mistakes.