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Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Remembering My
Dad
My dad and I were “best buds”.
As a child I tagged along with him wherever his day took him, me in my blue
and white striped coveralls, him in his blue overalls. When he hitched up
the team and went to the field to plow, I’d tag along and jump lister ridges
after he’d cut them in the soft dirt. There isn’t anything that smells
better than a fistful of fresh turned earth on a morning in early spring.
by Joyce Whitis
When Dad took a bale of cotton to the gin I liked to ride with him up on top of the wagon, often with a greyhound wedged in between us, his eyes on the fields looking for a rabbit. If Dad stopped at Paul’s Place downtown for a hamburger and a cold Ni-High while the cotton was being ginned, I would straddled a stool beside him at the counter and eat lunch along with the farmers who had also brought cotton into town.
A real love for the land and what it produced and what happened when it just never did rain is bred into every farmer and my Dad and his friends always had something to talk about. They were trying to grow crops in spite of winds that blew down from the north bringing Kansas topsoil with it and taking ours further south. But even during those years when the depression held the land in an iron grip, those farmers never gave up. They always believed that someday it would rain and someday they would get a decent price for all their hard labor.
As my Daddy’s buddy, I collected a pocket full of pennies and nickels that his friends held out to me in their tanned and callused hands. My dad and I often “made the town”.
We’d leave the wagon at the gin, tie up the mules, grab lunch at Paul’s Place and be off for a walk down Main Street. I’d pull on my daddy’s overall pocket until he’d go with me into that wonderland for children called Simm’s Variety Store. You could buy lots of stuff for a nickel or a dime in the ‘30’s. We’d go in and spend some of that loose change his friends gave me, for a pink celluloid doll with real hair or a small cast-iron fire truck. Whatever I bought seemed to me like the greatest toy ever.
If they had any “jumping jacks”, I’d get one of those. These toys had a painted wooden figure suspended on stiff string between two wooden paddles. When those paddles were pushed back and forth the “jack”, which resembled a clown, would hurl himself up and over the string. It was a fascinating thing for a child to watch.
There were other farmers in town, our neighbors who had brought cotton to the gin and they were now waiting for a check. Some waited in the shoe shop where they sat with one shoe on and the other in the hands of the shop’s owner who was nailing a half-sole to the bottom of an almost worn-out pair of leather boots.
Others used the time to buy a few grocery items needed back at home. Bananas, apples, oranges, stick candy, flour, sugar, and coffee were at the top of the list sent in by the wife.
I loved bananas and they were generally on my mother’s list for Dad to fill. However she only asked for enough to make a banana pudding on Sunday with one left over for me. I remember the day that my dad bought twice the number of bananas my mother had written on the list. On the way home he said, “Joyce you can eat all the bananas that you want.”
I looked in the brown paper bag and it seemed like there were dozens of yellow bananas there. Mentally I calculated the number that my mother would need for a Sunday banana pudding for the family. When the wagon made the last turn onto the dirt road leading to our house with a couple of miles to travel, I started eating bananas and throwing the skins into the ditch. By the time we drove into the back yard, I was wishing that I had not been so greedy.
That was one time that I just went on into the house and let Dad unharness the mules and turn them into the lot without my help. Mother put a cold rag on my head while I lay back on the living room couch and nobody mentioned bananas to me for several days.
My dad was a hard worker. He never made much money but somehow we always had whatever we needed. When the war came, he adapted to the wartime job of welding together Liberty and then Victory ships at Oregon Shipyard in Portland. This was a job completely foreign to him but he did his best. Part of the driving force behind this was that his only son, my brother was in the Army Air Force. He wanted to do his part on the home front.
After the war we were all back at home but how the world had changed! No longer did we go to town in a mule drawn wagon. We had electric lights with the pull of a string and the outhouse out back had been replaced by indoor plumbing. We had enjoyed radio for years and soon we had television, although we had a really hard time believing it. Who could imagine that we could see baseball games in our living rooms that were being played in New York City!
My dad and I went from nickel hamburgers and five-cent dolls to $10 steak dinners and $50 dolls but somehow he always stayed the same. He died on February 10, 1970 but there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and remember how it was to grow up in the 30’s and 40’s and how it was to follow my dad around town. The best memory of all is that I was always proud of my dad and that he had a reputation for being honest and that his word was good, good as gold, they said.
I grew up during very hard times in America but the strength of the people endured. It was a great time to be alive.