The Worry-Wart, 1947

When I was about seven years old I was plagued by a wart infestation on my hands and arms. This was uncomfortable, not physically painful mind you, but undesirable in a social way. I had no idea why I should be cursed with that particular scourge. I was told that touching toads would cause warts, but I had not handled any such creatures. Brother Don was clean of warts, and none of the other family members were afflicted. So, why me? I do not remember anyone ever making fun of me or even bringing up the subject, but I was sensitive to it, and very self-conscience. I wanted them to go away. Mom took me to a doctor, and he removed a small torch-like instrument from his desk drawer. When he plugged it in a bright blue arc erupted at its tip. It popped and snapped when he trained it on one of my warts, creating a hurt that exceeded any social pain. The cure seemed a bit excessive and I feared my hands and arms might resemble charred stumps by the time all the warts were burned off. I let Mom know later that the Doctor’s methods resembled torture more than treatment, and I hoped to find a more benign cure.

Art Moore was to deliver my benign cure. He had come to visit my Grandma Frank in 1946. Art was my first cousin, once removed. His mother and my Grandmother were sisters. Art’s mother, Lydia, had been the oldest of a very large family, and Grandma had been the youngest. There were eight living siblings between them. Grandma was twenty-three years younger than her older sister, and so she was closer in age to her nephew Art, than she was to her sister. Art had been discharged only recently from the Navy. He had served on a ship in the Pacific during the War, and was now making the rounds, renewing family ties.

I remember Art as being an all-round round person. He had a round face sitting on top of a round body. His eyes were round and his glasses were round. He might have had a round belly later in life, but when he visited I think he was fairly solid. He was born and raised in Maysville, Kentucky. He was the youngest of four sons born to Lydia and John Moore, but he was still single when the war began and was one of the older enlisted men to have served. He married his home-town sweetheart a couple years later, after both his parents died in 1948, just three weeks apart from each other. Art was a nice guy. He was friendly and jovial. Though I only met him two or three times, I liked him right away, and never had reason to change my mind.

Art stayed with us for several days - maybe a week. A couple of days after he arrived, he noticed my warts and said, “Remind me before I leave, and I’ll take them warts off you”. He said nothing more for the rest of his visit, but I wasn’t about to forget. I don’t think I said anything more to him until the day came for him to leave. I could keep mum no longer, and reminded him of his promise.

Art Moore sat down at the kitchen table and ask Mom and Grandma if they had an apple. “No”, there was none in the house. “How about an onion?” “Yes”, a medium yellow onion was produced. Art cut a thick slice of the onion, and then proceeded to dice it into a number of small pieces. He rubbed a piece of onion on each of my warts - one onion chunk for each of the fifty warts. He would select a piece, ceremoniously rub it on a wart and then place the piece in a discard pile. He was very deliberate and precise in the procedure. It was ritual at its best. I was impressed. When he finished he told me that there was more to it than that, but he could not tell me. He had some excuse that Mom and Grandma solemnly agreed to - something about a man could not tell a man. Art told me I had to do one thing before the warts would go away. “What is it? What is it?”, I asked. He answered, “You have to forget about them”. He said they would not go away until I forgot about them. He left that day.

I had been told to forget the warts, and I found it nearly impossible to do so. The suggestion made me look at and think about the warts constantly. I looked at my hands, and studied them all that day. When I woke the next morning it was the first thing I did. That went on for a week or more. I was focused. I could not forget. Then one day, after a week had passed, I remembered that I had forgot to look. I looked at my hands and arms. The warts were all got, every blessed one of them - just like Art said they would.
THE END

My First Real Job, Summer 1958

Glenn and Marsha Drysdale were family friends. Mom and Dad got to know the couple through the Moose, and I often saw them at the lodge. I know very little about them, though Mom once said that Glenn had traveled the world in his younger days. They were ten or fifteen years older than my parents, and had no children that I ever heard about. They liked Don and me, maybe because we reminded them of the kids they never had. At any rate, we seemed to find favor with them and they found reason to bestow small blessing on the two of us.

We worked our way through college by painting houses in the summers, so they hired us to do their house. Another time they asked us to pick cherries from a tree that was laden with fruit. They owned a small machine shop on East Monroe Street, just west of the railroad tracks, and they asked me to work during the summer of 1958 - right after I got out of high school. I had worked for Mom and Dad since I was thirteen, but this one was my first real job - I got a pay check every Friday afternoon.

The shop was located in a one story building with four or five big “screw machines” sitting on a concrete floor. There were a few other smaller tools off to the side, drill presses mainly, but the big ones dominated the scene. They had a restroom, but no office that I remember. Glenn and Marsha were the owner/operators, and I was their only employee. My first day of work was also the first day I’d ever been in the shop. I use to pass it on the way to downtown when I lived on Lafountain, but had never much noticed it before. It also happened to be close to where brother Don had thrown the black boy over his shoulder ten years earlier.

Glenn was the master craftsman and he alone adjusted the machines for specific jobs. Metal rods were the raw material he fed to his machines. All kinds of things popped out the other end. The rods varied in diameter, the smallest being about half an inch, and the larger more than two inches. They measured ten or twelve feet long, and the big rods were real heavy. I found that out very soon as one of my first tasks was to unload a shipment and store the rods on metal racks. The steel rods were coated with a thin film of oil, making them difficult to grasp with leather gloves, and I had to be careful not to pinch a finger when laying them in. And I got dirty doing it.

Each machine could hold five or six bars. They were arranged in a circle, looking somewhat like a Gatling gun with ten foot barrels. The bars were fed into sharp tools that cut away pigtail shavings of unwanted metal. Glenn could program the machines to make a wide variety of products. I mainly remember two, because I put the final touches on them. One was a type of bearing made from the larger rods. Each bearing that Glenn made had two parts . An assembled bearing was similar to a wheel bearing, and looked somewhat like a doughnut with a hole in the middle. I would take the first part, a hollowed-out doughnut with the top missing, and fill it with a circular row of small ball-bearings. Then I’d set the other part, a cap like piece, on top and place it in the press, step on the foot pedal, and the two parts would be clipped together, each part rotating on the balls independent of the other. It was a revelation. So, that’s how things like that are made - neat!

The other piece was simpler. He made small aluminum nuts less that half an inch in diameter. Each nut had a smooth hole in the center. I sat at a drill press working a foot pedal, and a special bit cut threads in it. I found this job very satisfying as there was a certain rhythm to it. Glenn had a special device sitting on the press platform with a channel in which to thread the nuts. I could feed four or five nuts into it and then shove the lead nut under the drill, press the foot pedal, and the drill would descend.

After a while I discovered that if I pressed the pedal and held it down the drill bit would keep going up and down at a constant pace. I finally got the rhythm right and could sit there threading nuts as fast as the drill would work, but every once in a while the drill bit would miss the nut and break. The bits must have been expensive as Marsha thought I was breaking too many, but Glenn came up and said not to worry for I was drilling a lot more nuts per hour than anyone had ever been able to do. He said it was okay to break drill bits as long as I was being that productive.

I was making a dollar fifty an hour so I was expecting sixty dollars in my first check. I was shocked to see it was less. Something called Federal taxes was taken out and State taxes, and social security, and workers comp. Gee! Then I noticed that the gross pay was only fifty-two fifty. I ask Glenn about it and he pointed out that we worked Monday thru Friday, eight to four, with an hour off for lunch - that was seven hours a day, and only thirty-five a week. I said, “Oh”. I forgot that the lunch hour doesn’t count.
THE END

My 50th Kokomo High School Reunion

My Dad went to his 50th high School Reunion in 1980. His was a small class compared to mine and their newspaper group-photo showed a gang of thirty old people looking into the camera eye - a bunch of gray, wrinkled, heavy-set fossils. That was my impression at the time, and my own 50th was so far in the future that I did not much think about it. I remember him saying that it had been a lot of fun, and he said it had been interesting. I could understand the fun part, but I had to wait till my own reunion to discover what it was that he found to be so interesting.

I graduated from Kokomo High School in 1958. The ceremony was in the school Gym, and about 450 of us occupied folding chairs on the main floor. The bleachers were filled with proud families. Mom, Dad, brother Don, and Grandma Frank were there, and Uncle Joe and Aunt Gail had driven north from Connersville to help commemorate the happy occasion. I can’t recall much other than some guy droned on for an extraordinary time giving a commencement address that missed the connection between my ears and brain.

Fast forward 50 years and I’m landing at O’Hare Airport on a pilgrimage to meet those with whom I had spent my formative years. The first night we stayed with Ed Raab, a fellow graduate living in Michigan City, and then completed the hundred miles to Kokomo the following day.

After checking in with our motel we immediately headed down the By-Pass to the corner of Markland Avenue to feast on a large number of White Castle hamburgers. We have a steel plate advertizing White Castles on our kitchen wall at home. Its an antique - "Hamburgers 5 cents". That is the closest we get to them in Alaska, and the supermarket frozen ones are no substitute. After satiating that particular hunger we proceeded to the town square.

There was an informal gathering of classmates at a place called Sondy’s Martini Bar. We entered, found a table with blank name tags and pens, and then turned to see a crowd of people I’d never seen before - very interesting. Everybody I met bent over to read my name tag, and I did the same. Why! Dick DeWitt. The last time I saw you, you were skinny, thin faced and had hair. Ramona Wilson, you use to be a voluptuous blond.

About an hour later someone walked in that I could recognize from afar. Dick Chegar was tall and thin, and still wore the face I remembered. I experienced the same pattern the next evening at our formal reunion. Only about one in ten could I recognize - Dick Campbell, Barbara Ehrman, and Ralph Williams to name a few. I thought about taking a camera, but elected not to, as it would be futile to match old names with new faces …that were old.

One woman repeatedly hid her name tag by placing her hand over it as I repeatly tried to see with whom I was talking. When I finally discovered it to be Sandy Beck I accused her of sticking a pin in my leg when we were in eighth grade math and causing a blood stain on my pants. She denied the incident, but I could tell...

The host announced that 170 of the original class attended the reunion. I was able to identify four or five without cheating. We were all given a copy of The Kat Kaller, the name of our school phone book (We were the Kokomo WildKats). It gave all our names and present addresses. Sixty-seven were listed as deceased. That’s about 15 percent of the total. It was interesting.

I remembered a scene from thirty years before - one of my Mom sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of her. I was home for a visit and we were talking about things past. Her age came up. She was about 65 then. A look of awe came over her as she stared into a distant past, and wondered aloud, “How did I get here so fast?” Yes, its interesting, for that was the thought that often came to mind during my 50th reunion pilgrimage.

Homer and Kachemak Bay, First Visit in 1968, Part 2

The remaining drive to Homer proved uneventful. We marveled at the beautiful grassy meadows that topped the sloughing bluffs along the coast, at the sight of the Redoubt and Iliamna volcanoes standing tall across Cook Inlet. We were impressed by the giant fragments of ice floes that had been stranded on the mud flats by the receding tides, some the size of trucks.
We took the main drag, Pioneer Street, through downtown Homer because the by-pass swinging south of there didn‘t exist, so we did not see some major landmarks along that stretch - Alaska Island & Ocean Visitors Center, the Carrs/Safeway store, the U.S. Post Office, McDonalds - all lay in the future.

East End Road is a paved highway offering sweeping views of Kachemak Bay for most of the twenty plus miles it runs along the high ground overlooking the bay. It was not like that in 1968. The road disappeared in a mud rut a mile or two east of town. Wes and I did not explore that feature. Its “cow pasture” attribute was left for us to discover a couple years later.

We went straight through town and headed out the long, narrow sand bar known as the Homer Spit. The Spit is one of the longest in the world, stretching four and a half miles into the Bay. Its not very wide, sometimes no more than the road, and its elevation above sea level allows big storm waves to crest over it at some spots.

In 1968 the Spit could claim a few facilities: the small boat harbor; the Whitney-Fidalgo Cannery; a couple restaurants; the Alaska Ferry dock; and located at the very tip, Lands End Hotel - but not much more. There use to be more to the Spit, a copse of trees in one area for example, but the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 lowered the whole region by about six feet, and a portion of it now resides in Neptune’s domain.

Four years had passed, but we could still see evidence of the quake’s reshaping of the land. There were buildings along Turnagain Arm, near Girdwood and Portage that sat on land now invaded by tidewater. Standing forests of dead trees offered further evidence. Some of the bridges on the highway were still doing temporary duty awaiting new construction.

It was a bit early in the season for the annual invasion of the “Spit Rats”. That is the term applied to the young, mainly college age summer adventurers that descended on the Spit every year. Many worked the cannery, some found fishing jobs. They camped in make-shift housing: tents, drift wood shelters, etc, wherever there was an unclaimed few feet on the Spit. By mid-summer the spit would be overrun with rat’s nests. It was a free-wheeling time, and when shrimp were present, the Ferry Dock would be loaded with people lowering homemade nets and then quickly raising them full of the wiggling crustaceans. An ice chest could be filled in an afternoon. You can’t even go out on the dock any more.

The Rats were driven from the Spit years ago, and it was gradually commercialized. Expensive condos now block the view of the far shore mountains, and there are numerous piers aligned along both sides, crowded with shops that offer a variety of products: tours of the bay, fishing charters, souvenirs, art, and food - everything that a tourist might covet. Some days, especially during high tide, when there are so many parked vehicles, and people milling around, one has the sensation it’s sinking.

Wes and I explored the Homer Spit, walked the docks looking at the fishing boats, ate dinner at the nearby Porpoise Room, and then started the long drive back to Anchorage.
THE END

Homer and Kachemak Bay. First Visit in 1968, Part 1

The first time I visited Homer, Alaska on Kachemak Bay was in early May of 1968. The trip was impromptu, the decision made after a Saturday night of bar hopping. Some might conclude the midnight adventure was nothing more than an impulsive, alcohol fueled piece of foolishness, but people of northern latitudes would recognize such an act with sympathetic understanding. Those who have endured a dark, seemingly endless winter, will appreciate the need that wells up when longer days and cloudless skies clearly register the impending spring; when cabin fever finally breaks, when the need to get outside, to do something, go anywhere, becomes overpowering.

So, Wes Warner and I were off on our first look at the Alaska that exists outside of Anchorage. Wes and I shared an apartment with two other guys. We had been friends since the previous September. He was a recent divorcee just arrived from Idaho, and I had pulled into the state over the ALCAN a couple months before.

I don’t remember why we arrived at a Homer destination, but were, never-the-less, driving through a moonlit night along Turnagain Arm, climbing the long incline onto Turnagain Pass, and going by landmarks that we would revisit hundreds of more times in the years to come. The road through the mountains was narrow and tortuous as it followed the contours of the land, but oil money, flowing from the North Slope, would eventually transform it to super-highway quality.

Fatigue replaced exuberance after three hours. Morning light showed behind us as we cleared the mountains and preceded through the “Kenai Burn”. We figured the fire had swept through the forest, maybe a year or two before, but were surprised to learn those white skeletons of dead trees, thousands of them, had been standing there for more than twenty years. I discovered at a later date that there were as many trees crisscrossed on the forest floor as were standing - obstacles, one after the other, to step and climb over.

I don’t remember Soldotna, partly because there wasn’t much there, a filling station, maybe a restaurant, but mainly because I’d dropped off to sleep with my head resting against the front passenger window. Wes, driving his little foreign car, bumped to an abrupt stop, and announced that we had just ran out of gas. I roused from slumber to see a “Y” intersection, of which I’m still trying to figure its location. He said the gas station in Soldotna, only a short way back, was closed and he had hoped to make it to the next one - where ever that may have been. I gallantly offered to stay with the car, and rolled into the more comfortable backseat as Wes took off down the road with a gas can in hand.
GO TO: Part 2

Fishing in the Far North of Canada, 1964 - Part 2

We set up the trailer, launched the boat and mounted the outboard. The next morning, with scattered white puffy clouds against a beautiful blue sky, we set out boating north across the mouth of a bay that was formed by a long peninsula jutting east into the open lake. There was a slight breeze and small waves as we passed the end of the peninsula and headed on across the channel that lay between it and a long island that ran parallel to the peninsula.

We passed the end of the island and were surprised by a strong wind blowing big waves at us from the north west. In what seemed like an instant the conditions changed from mild to menacing. We were suddenly tacking head long into 4 foot waves. Our boat, with low gunnels and only14 feet long, was too small for such seas. I was piloting the boat; Dad was in the front seat and our large tackle box sat on the floor between him and the middle seat.

The urge to turn the boat around and head back was compelling. I didn’t yet have a whole lot of experience in boats, and I very much wanted to throw the tiller sharply to the left and start a quick turn, but it seemed the boat would probably broach in the trough and swamp as the next wave hit us broadside. It was best to just head into the waves and attempt a landing on one of the many islands that lay ahead.

We continued into those waves for forty-five minutes. I aimed for one island, couldn't make it, and then went for the next. We were catching a lot of spray and the bottom of the boat was starting to fill. Dad was catapulted skyward by a large wave. He landed hard on the aluminum seat, bending it in and leaving a three inch impression of his backside. I missed the first few islands, but was finally able to beach the boat. There was a shallow rocky bottom to the approach so I pulled up the engine and rowed to shore.

We were soaked and the boat had about four to six inches of water in it. We gathered wood, built a fire to dry off, and waited for the wind to abate. A hour or so later we set sail heading back south. We found ourselves in an archipelago of small islands, and tried to maintain a southern bearing while weaving our way past one island and around another. It seemed like there might be hundreds of them, and they all looked alike. We were soon hopelessly confused, but the lake was placid - not even a ripple, so we didn’t much care; we were alive, and only a little lost.

After an hour of wandering we came upon and guy who was standing in his boat while fishing with a long fly pole. He told us how to get back to camp. We didn’t get any fishing done that fist day, but we did strap the boat back on top of the car and rent a bigger one for the rest of the stay.

Fishing in the Far North of Canada, 1964 - Part 1

Our old friend, Lamar Hammer, had been on a fishing trip up into northern Manitoba and returned full of big fish stories and praise for the area. His enthusiasm for a subject could border on infectious, and anything dealing with fishing usually grew to epidemic proportion. So, after hearing Lamar’s often repeated tales of Reed Lake, giant Northern Pike and five pound Walleye, Dad was mesmerized by a fish-eyed contagion that could only be cured by a trip to the infecting area. Brother Don was in his second year of marriage, so Dad enlisted me as a willing participant. Reed lake was at the end of the road with northing much in the way of civilization as we knew it - no lodges, no restaurants, no stores.

Lamar brought over his maps and information showing that the only thing on Reed Lake was a Provincial Camp ground, which included both a boat dock and an outhouse - all other amenities had to be brought in. We didn’t own a tent so Dad went down to the local rental agency and rented a small camping trailer, a 14 foot boat and small outboard motor.

We drove up there in the fall of 1964 and spent what was mostly an enjoyable week of nice weather, good fishing and great adventure. Lamar’s map showed us that Reed lake was big - twenty miles long on an east-west axis, and ten miles wide. The camp was mid-way along the southern shore. The western half of the lake was dotted with many islands, and the eastern end was open water. Lamar instructed us to stay on the eastern half and to fish the river flowing into the western end of the lake.

We drove north into Minnesota, then west across the rolling plains of North Dakota and then on north into Canada. We followed Canadian Highway 10 to a point halfway between the villages The Pas and the end of the road at Flin Flon. From there we headed east on Hwy 39, a gravel road, more that 60 miles long, to the camp at Reed Lake. It was the longest gravel road I’d been on, and it seemed to go on for ever. It was rough enough that the back bumper on the trailer shook loose and broke off on the way back over it.

GO TO: Part 2

William R. Buckingham - Part 6, Dad's last Resume

I found the following in Dad’s papers. He had completed it in about 1981, maybe for a job resume. I think it gives a good first-hand synopsis of his life in his own words.

Personal, Educational, and Employment History of William R. Buckingham

I. Personal
a) Lives at 1628 E. Sycamore St., Kokomo, and have lived at that address for 31 years.
b) Married with two grown sons. Both are graduates of Indiana University.
c) Born in Connersville, Indiana on May 27, 1912.
d) Telephone No. is 452-2483
e) Social Security No. is 304-12-8201
f) No conviction record.

II. Education
a) Graduate of Connersville High School in 1930. Third in class of 110. Course pursued was College Preparatory.
b) Received B.S. degree from Ball State Teachers College in 1934. Majors were Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, and General Science.
c) In Summer 1937, started work on Masters Degree in Education. It was never completed.
d) Other undergraduate courses were taken at Indiana University, Butler U. and Yale U. III.

Employment History
a) Davison Enameling; Connersville; general laborer. 1934-1936.
b) Harrisburg High School; near Connersville. Teacher of math and science; also basketball coach; 1936-1937.
c)Clay Township High School (Howard Co.), now Northwestern; Teacher of math and science; also basketball coach; 1937-1939.
d) Omar Baking Co. Door to door route salesman in Kokomo; 1939-1940.
e) Stellite Company; Routine Chemist; 1940-1942.
f) Civil Service; Instructor in electronic engineering at Yale University for the Army Air Force; 1942 - November 1944.
g) Delco Radio; Jr Electrical Engineer; Nov 1944 to Nov 1946.
h) Loyal Order of Moose; Kokomo; Secretary and Manager; 1946 -1971.
i) Substitute teacher in High Schools of Howard County; math and science; 1971-1972.
j)Western High School, Russiaville; teacher of math and physics; 1972-1975.
k) Since 1975; Substitute teacher in math, science, and Industrial arts at Haworth, Western, and Northwestern.
THE END

William R. Buckingham - Part 5, The Day Dad Died

Mom called in the late morning of April 20, 1985. There was a momentary silence after I said hello, then she said, “This is your Mom. I have some bad news. You father died this morning.” Her voice was matter-of-fact; her words, steely hard, without emotion. There was another silence as my mind fought to reject the meaning of her words. I don’t remember her saying anything more and I tried to fill the empty silence with reassuring words that meant nothing. I ask if anyone was with her. I don’t remember if she answered. I told her I’d get home as soon as I could arrange it.

Mom was in shock. They had been married for nearly fifty years, had shared a life through hard times and good - the Great Depression, World War II, raising two boys, working together at the Moose Lodge, vacations, travel, and the usual bouts of marital strife. Life as she knew it had come to an abrupt end.

Dad passed on a beautiful Saturday morning. He was in the front yard, on the west edge of their house when his heart failed, and he laid down on the grassy yard to die. Mom saw him laying there a short time later. He was on his back with his right arm laying over his chest, his left knee, bent slightly and pointing upward. He looked like he might have been napping, but Mom said she knew he was dead as soon as she got out to him.

I told my classes on Monday that I’d be leaving the next day, and would be out for the rest of the week because my Dad died. One of the students raised his hand and asked if I had been close to my father. I said, “No, not really”, and wondered immediately why I answered in such a way. It wasn’t a truthful answer; it was accurate. In truth, I had a good father-son relationship with Dad; it was accurate in that we had lived 4000 miles apart for the last eighteen years.

Dad was short by a month of turning seventy-three. I’m writing this when I’m a bit short of turning that age myself, so it seems to me that he died too young. I’d say that he had plans for things he did not get done.

“Buck”, as he was called by almost everyone (even Mom), would have described himself as a practical man, but his nature was positive - he saw the glass as half full. He seemed to always have a project going: planting a garden, planning a trip, or repairing a radio/TV. He was always ready to demonstrate his latest culinary discovery such as a new pizza recipe, or a Ruben sandwich.

A couple days later I stood before his casket during the funeral, reached out and touched his hand. It was stone cold and just as hard. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t there.
GO TO: Part 6, Dad's Resume

William R. Buckingham - Part 4, The Father I Knew

Dad was not a reader. I do not remember him ever picking up a book. As far as I know he never read a novel, a biography or a history book. Books were expensive and paperbacks did not become plentiful until well after he reached adulthood, so I doubt that there were many books in his home while he was growing up. Mom said he claimed that reading weakened a persons eyes. That was just an excuse. He simple was not into reading - other than consulting reference books. His was not an introspective or contemplative nature.

He was more of a hands on guy, a practical man - the original do-it-yourselfer. The first project I remember him working on was the remodeling of the kitchen on Lafountain Street. I was only five or six, but remember him standing between the floor joists while working on that project. He and another guy moved an inside wall of the house, maybe at the same time. I think the wall was in Don and my bedroom, they moved it over a couple feet, but that memory is very vague. He also did electrical rewiring of houses, both our own and others. Mom said he and Uncle Joe did some original wiring of several older houses in Connersville before they moved to Kokomo. When we bought the “Buckingham Palace” (another story), Dad directed and worked with Don and I in redoing the whole place.

I'm not absolutely certain, but I don’t think Dad believed in God - definitely not the Hereafter. The only occasions he attended churches were at marriages and funerals - mainly funerals. I don’t recall him ever speaking harshly about any religion, place of worship, or holy book. He expressed neither negative nor positive opinions on the subject. I remember him saying only one thing about the “Afterlife”. It was something like, “There is none. You die. Your body rots. That’s it.” The statement might have shocked me had he related the thought when I was at a younger, more tender age, but I was in my mid-twenties by then, and somewhat insulated against such radical ideas. He was the only atheist I ever met that did not seem to be angry about it.

In a way he was satisfied with his level of knowledge and understanding of the world and felt no need to seek anything more. That is not to say something new would not grab his interest. I got an Apple II computer in 1978 and showed Dad a little about it when he visited a couple years later. It was the type of thing that was right up his alley. He played around with it for several days, and could have gotten deeply involved, but computers were still very basic and expensive in those days. I have often thought of Dad as being the last Victorian. This is because he seemed so satisfied and certain with the progress that was taking place in his time. The momentum of the Industrial Revolution reached steam engine force during the Victorian Age and the movers and shakers of that era seemed complacent in their certainty. They knew what was important; they knew what they wanted; and they knew how to get it. Dad was born a few years after Queen Victoria died.

I grew up in a period when, after the war, the American economic engine ran full throttle. Progress and positive attitude seemed to be the rule, and Dad exemplified it. He had a background in math, physics, and chemistry, and he felt confident in that knowledge. He knew what he knew, and he knew a lot… and that was enough for him. Lastly, I think Dad was a would-be adventurer. He and I went up into northern Manitoba fishing in 1964 (another story), and I remember him talking on our drive home. He spoke of life experiences forming the memories we hold on to, and that’s what life was all about. There was a part of him that craved adventure. After college he hoboed/hitch-hiked to California and back on his own. Mom told the story of when he brought some papers for her to sign during the war - while we were living in Connecticut. He wanted to volunteer for a dangerous mission to parachute into occupied France, set up a two-way-radio for members of the French Resistance, show them how to work it, and then find his way out - probably with the help of the Resistance. She would not sign the papers.Brother Don told me once that he thought Dad had a pride in me because I was leading an adventurers life that he would have liked to have experienced. Mom and Dad visited me in Seldovia in 1975 when I was commercial fishing halibut with a friend (yet, another story). Dad was so taken by the place that he applied for a teaching job and almost got it. He wistfully said he wished he had come to Alaska years ago. Mom retorted that he could not have been pried out of Indiana back then.

GO TO: Part 5, The Day Dad Died