I’ve written about my father in a page entitled “Fathers” In this post, I want to add more context about my father’s influence on me, explain why girls need fathers as much as boys need fathers, and why fathers should live with their offspring.
I was born shortly after World War II, when my father, Harry, and many thousands of other young men came home to their wives and families.
Irene. Like many American women in the early 1940s, my mother took a support-the-war-effort job at a manufacturing plant. Her ability to communicate clearly, her reliability, and her natural leadership skills made her a “forelady” among Rosie the Riveter types, and she left my infant sister with her own mother or her mother-in-law during her work hours.
When the war ended, Irene eagerly left her job, and Harry eagerly returned to his. I soon came into the world among the earliest Baby Boomers. The maternity ward was so overcrowded that supplies ran out, and my first “blanket” was a newspaper. My mother cried. My father just saw another healthy young child to love, and he took Irene and me home to my sister and the house he was building with his own two hands.
Harry’s background. My father was named Harry (not Harold), and he had no middle name. (The army later assigned him a middle initial, “A.”) He used to say that his mother was running out of names by the time he was born.
He came from a large family so poor that he and his five brothers and two sisters were only permitted to attend school until they could legally quit and look for work. Harry observed that job prospects improved with a high school diploma in hand, so although he was a good student, he told his parents that he couldn’t quit school because he had failed too many classes. He felt guilty about lying, but he hoped the ruse would give him time to graduate.
Harry courted Irene, who was two years younger, while they were in high school. She was literally the girl next door. Irene was also from a large family, but a family more working class than poor. Her parents respected my father for his work ethic, good character, and willingness to help others build and repair things, so they looked forward to the prospective marriage.
When my father’s own parents discovered that he could have quit school but had not, they threw him out of their house. Mom’s parents told Daddy that he could sleep in “the boys’ room” of their house until he finished high school, so throughout his senior year and for the first two years of his work life, he slept on the floor in a small room also occupied by my mother’s three brothers.
Work life. After Daddy graduated high school, he literally started working the next day for the city’s power company. Using the skills he acquired in a variety of high school vocational courses, his personal ambition, and his very good brain, he moved quickly from general handiwork like painting, basic wiring, and carpentry to the dangerous but much better-paid job of overhead lineman. He climbed poles in all forms of weather to work on transformers and electrical wires. Athletically built, he thrived on the rugged outdoor work.
Harry used his wages cautiously, paying rent to his future in-laws, purchasing the vacant lots next to their house, and buying his future wife a cedar wood “hope chest.” I have it here in my apartment, just across the room from where I sit as I type.
For any readers too young to know about hope chests: young women in my mother’s era genuinely hoped they would be married one day, and two years was a standard, respectable length of time for being engaged. In that time they made and collected useful items, which they stored in cedar chests. The “hope chest” might include pillow cases the young woman embroidered, doilies and tablecloths she or other women in her family crocheted, family heirlooms like china pieces or candlesticks, and practical items such as coffee pots, skillets, and sauce pans.
In my father’s era, being born poor and breaking into the working class was a major achievement. A high school diploma had meaning, and employment opportunities were enhanced for a strong, steady, and sober young man whose school records included good marks in vocational courses such as electrical shop, auto shop, carpentry, and drafting. (These courses have been wiped out of many American high schools. A male who can build his own house is rare these days.)
A young man like my father had potential. Once they took on a new worker, employers of that era kept careful watch over him for signs of alcohol abuse, tardiness, and a host of other human behaviors. My father was respected by everyone in his workplace, bosses and fellow employees alike. He worked all his life at Dayton Power and Light, and by the time he retired, he was the manager of a substation. He was the first and only man to rise that far in the organization without a college education.
Respect for my father also came from his peers outside the workplace, as well as his own family. After my father’s death in 2001, I found a handwritten letter among his possessions. The husband of one of his sisters had written it only a few years earlier, thanking Daddy and crediting him for the great happiness of his family life. It seems that he had, in the early years of his marriage, caroused and womanized, but my father had “set him straight” by example and through various interventions. The letter so poignantly described the joys my uncle found in life with his wife and daughter that I cried.
Our home. Harry started building a house, the home in which he and Irene would rear a family, a house which he sold only after retirement from the power company and Irene’s death.
At some point I my early adulthood, I asked my father how he could build a house all by himself, a house of his own design, and his answer surprised me: “I watched construction workers very carefully, and I volunteered to help other men who were building or remodeling their own homes.” And when I asked how he could manage such a project in his spare time after doing physical labor for at least forty hours every week, he just said he was young and wanted to have his own home. His father could not afford that, he said, because his father never had anything but too many children to feed. He laughed.
[When I was in college, and the birth control pill was a favorite conversation, a friend asked me how my parents managed to have three children who were exactly five years apart in age in an era when there was “no birth control.” I replied that they had birth control, but it was called “self-control.” But honestly, I marveled at it myself. They wanted their children spaced out so that they did not have two children in high school at the same time.]
Daddy drew the plans for his house on pieces of graph paper. He began by constructing one room, which would ultimately become the attached garage, and he added a second room as he saved the money for more materials. He wanted to avoid any debt. Because he did virtually all of the work by himself, the slow-but-steady acquisition of materials worked out for him.
Throughout my childhood, I played on any number of “construction sites” as my father took the lead adding rooms and otherwise remodeling homes belonging to members of his extended family. Daddy helped one of his brothers-in-law build two different houses in our neighborhood. We lived near Wright Patterson Air Force Base, a SAC (Strategic Air Command) facility, and a wing tank fell from an in-flight B-52 on the first house, sinking straight through to the basement. So my aunt and uncle got federal compensation to pay for building another house, and Daddy stepped in to direct and participate another time.
We kids played around the construction areas, and the men didn’t mind at all. Men in that era enjoyed having their children around them, and only when something potentially dangerous was being done would they call the women to come corral us kids.
Sex roles in the Forties and Fifties. I feel compelled to write these paragraphs, in part because no one would have thought of the term “sex roles” in that era. My father was the undisputed “head of the household.” I know this because the phrase occurred on various documents and forms. My mother would have been called a “housewife” by most people, but she always corrected anyone who tried to apply that term to her: she was a homemaker. “I am married to a man,” she would say, “I am not married to a house.” Census takers must have loved knocking our door.
Chores at home were mostly gender-specific, but not nearly as rigidly so as many people think. My mother did the housework until she could pass most of it off on my sister and me. But after we kids had left home, when my mother was ill, my father cooked food without fussing about it. How he knew how to cook, I don’t know. Maybe because he watched my mother do it. He was a keen observer of just about everything.
Mom planted gardens (for me to weed), but Daddy trimmed trees and shrubs and mowed the lawn. The equipment could be heavy, dangerous, and dirty, and he didn’t want females to deal with that. My mother would drive the family car to shop or pick us kids up from after-school club meetings, but when my father got in the car, he would drive. He worked on the car and washed it, so the vehicle always seemed more his responsibility. But during lengthy drives on family vacations, he would often stop to gas up the car and then hand the keys to my mother. Safer, he said, not to stay behind the wheel for too many hours. Daddy wouldn’t allow Mom to drive in bad weather because that was stressful. He loved to shield her from burdens or unpleasantness.
In those days, we burned much of our trash in a brick fireplace Daddy had built in the backyard. Burning rubbish was his task–unless he was working overtime. Then Mom or I could do it.
Necessity rules. Now, please tune in to this. Carefully.
I don’t remember my mother ever lifting anything that weighed more than ten pounds, unless the object was a child. My father lifted anything “heavy.” Mom would call my father to come to the kitchen to open a tight jar lid for her or to reach an item on a top shelf. She seemed downright helpless at times.
So, imagine my shock, when after my mother’s death, my father recalled a disagreement he and Mom had about the direction of flooring they were putting down. Together. What?
“Oh,” Daddy said, “Your mother hammered and nailed right by my side after the war. Some things can’t be done without another person holding the other end in place. She did a lot of the painting and some sanding, too. Really, quite a bit.” I protested that I had never seen Mom with a paintbrush or a hammer or screwdriver. He responded that she did what they needed done, but when it wasn’t necessary, she didn’t want to do it and didn’t like to talk about having ever done it! It had to something to do with upward mobility. “Ladies,” in my mother’s mind, didn’t do men’s work.
To my parents, a mother staying at home was both best for the children and a status symbol. Sure, Mom worked during World War II, but not because she needed money. She worked because her country needed capable women as factory foreladies. When it was no longer necessary, she stayed at home with us kids. It said, “My husband is capable and hardworking. He’s the provider.”
There were a few couples in our neighborhood who both worked, even if they had a child or two. I remember my parents looking across the street at one such couple returning home in their separate cars. The couple started an argument before they got to the front door. Harry kissed Irene and whispered, “That’s not a marriage. It’s a business arrangement.”
Daddy lives with me. After my mother’s sudden death, my retired father was alone in the house with my invalid sister, who was back at home because she had been diagnosed with a rare, debilitating disease at age twenty-four. By then I lived several states away, so I asked Daddy to move there with my sister, and I purchased a house for the three of us.
The first time we were going shopping for something, my car had Daddy’s car parked in. We moved toward my car, and I handed him my keys. I really don’t know why. Daddy laughed and said, “Shit. Why would I drive? I don’t know where the grocery is.” It was actually the first time he had been in a car with me driving. He remarked that I was a good driver, and he said that women often weren’t because the didn’t get to drive very much. I thought it was an interesting observation. [Note to Andrew Tate: I do admit that I never have parallel parked worth a damn.]
The next day, Daddy got out the lawnmower that he had moved with him and began mowing the backyard. While I lived on my own, I had paid someone to cut the grass for me. Now I asked Daddy to show me how the lawnmower worked, and he was genuinely offended. He had never let my mother mow a lawn, he informed me, and by God, he would die before he would see me doing it. I think I was the only woman on our block who did NOT mow a lawn.
During this period of our lives, I worked long hours. When I got home from work, Daddy would have vacuumed and done other housework if he ran out of stuff to build or fix or mow. One day he installed an extension phone next to my bed while I was at work. [I didn’t notice it until I got a late night call from an old boyfriend two days later. I think Daddy must have been having to take Johnny’s calls at a late hour. Johnny didn’t think that it was really my father on the line.]
Daddy put an “attic” space and an additional window in our attached garage. Two tiny neighbor boys, recently adopted from somewhere in the Far East, showed up to hang out with him. They spoke only a few words of English, but they quickly began calling my father “Gampa.” Their embarrassed parents came to retrieve them, but Daddy said they were no problem, and they became regular fixtures in our lives, shadowing Daddy and trying to hitch rides with my sister on her mobility cart. A day after the little boys visited, bigger boys from the neighborhood, guys in their thirties who owned their own houses, showed up. They were in wonder at my father’s skills, and of course, they wanted advice. As one said, “I never thought of doing things this difficult on my own, but your dad says he will help me.”
Daddy was the primary caregiver for my sister. I did the tasks I could on Saturdays and Sundays, such as making soup and baking muffins for them to eat at lunch over the following week, and on weeknights, I would either set a roast in the Crockpot before going to the office or make the meal when I got home. But sometimes Daddy would insist on taking me out to dinner. He missed doing that with Mom, I thought. But he said no, he just did not want me to work so hard.
Reflections. Many people asked me how I “tolerated” living with my father at that time of life. I was always flabbergasted. My father, as much as my mother, built me into an adult human being. The bond I had with him extended through my entire life. I would have wanted him in my home even if I didn’t enjoy his company, but I certainly did.
- I learned just as much, or more, from my father as from my mother. My mother had a problematic temperament, which only my father could calm. Daddy was even-tempered, in control in a crisis, and reasonable while my mother was, at times, overly emotional. I was an intelligent child who liked school and reading books and even writing essays. I instinctively modeled myself on Daddy, not because I wanted to be a man or thought I was one, but because I liked the orderly way he handled things and how people respected his opinions and wanted his help. All that capability made him my role model. Even as a child, I thought Mom seemed to me to be too interested in material things and her status in the community.
- While both my parents were community-minded, Daddy did things because they needed to be done. He was an elder in the church because someone with good sense and practical knowledge had to determine how to allocate the budget. When our local school board was in trouble over poor decisions, Daddy ran for a place on it, won, did the necessary work, and left the board when I graduated high school. On the other hand, my mother was the President of the local PTA because it held status. She was still president after all her children had graduated college. The name of the organization had been officially changed to FAPS (Friends and Parents).
- My father came home after work to have dinner with his wife and children every night. Only having to work late could interrupt that routine. When our school report cards came in, Mom placed them next to his plate. Decisions about events and plans for vacation trips were announced during the meal.
- At the dinner table, both Mom and Daddy collected the information they needed about what their children were learning at school, what we liked, what we wanted to do. That’s how my parents learned when I had a new boy interested in me or had a crush on a boy who did not return my interest. They took in the information, and after dinner, they discussed things fairly privately, either taking a walk together, going for a drive, or sitting in a big swing in the backyard. I knew what they discussed because of what they said when they returned to the house. “Yes, you can go to that party if we drive you there and pick you up.” Or, “He sounds like a nice young man, but we want him to come to the house before you go anywhere alone with him.”
- Nothing recreational ever got in the way of my father spending time with his children. While other men went to see professional sporting events with other men, Daddy took the whole family to Major League Baseball doubleheaders in a nearby city. My father was athletic, but he did not bowl or golf, common activities among his peers. When I asked my mother why that was so, she said that Daddy did not like to spend his money on things we children could not share. He did pitch softball for both his company’s inter-departmental league and our church team. We kids were in the stands for every game.
- My father was always my personal champion. I remember an early “parents’ night” at my elementary school. My teacher told Mom and Daddy that I did very well in class, but perhaps it was time to do something about my left-handedness. My father motioned the teacher to follow him to the bulletin board where our class displayed our writing samples. Daddy had looked at them earlier and praised me. Now he turned to my teacher and said that to his eye, his daughter had the best handwriting in the class, and if that ceased to be true, he would be willing to discuss the matter at that time. But only then.
- For some reason, Daddy loved my left-handedness. It was as though I had developed it as feature, rather than a bug, and that I had done so just to make him smile. The earliest thing I can remember was Daddy handing me objects and smiling at me because I reached for them with my left hand. (Mom said he started doing this while I sat in my high chair for meals. Years later, when we lived together in his old age, Daddy would still say things such as, “I wonder what left-handed person put the paper towels in the holder backwards.” He also informed me that one of my cats was a literal “south paw,” and demonstrated that the little furry guy reached for dangler toys as a Lefty.
What I see around me. For decades, I have been watching girls grow up in fatherless homes. I feel as though they miss half the opportunity to understand adulthood and most of the opportunity to understand the other sex. And I know they have missed learning about how men and women can enrich each other’s lives. They almost always choose the wrong men to date and marry, and once married, they don’t have “relationship skills.” You can’t replace growing up with two parents, one of each sex, through reading books about relationships.
In my growing years, I saw, firsthand, my parents discussing their problems and settling their disagreements. I saw the interplay of two adult personalities. I learned what they considered proper sex roles, but I learned at the same time that necessity could overrule those patterns. I saw the different physical nature of male and female adults. But beyond the sexes, I saw humanity.
I never, ever thought that my father would have preferred that I were male. Curiously, I knew that my mother would have. The only name she picked out for me was James Harry. When, years later, I brought this up with Daddy, he laughed and said it was true, and he couldn’t understand why she wanted a son. As far as he was concerned, he liked being the only guy around the house.
Most of all, as I grew up, I learned that human beings are complex, and both sexes can be loving, kind, considerate of others, honest, playful, devoted, and more.
My father, for example, was more generous than my mother. He would give things away to other people rather than sell them. If he didn’t use an electric saw anymore or my little brother (Mom eventually got her son) had lost interest in his toy train collection, Daddy would advertise the unneeded items in the local paper at a reasonable price. But when a decent person inquired, he would give the item to the person if he thought they genuinely needed it. My frugal mother thought he should take the money. “What’s wrong, Irene,” he would say, “Don’t I make enough money for you?” She would say that of course he did, but the object represented his hard-earned money. He would counter that he didn’t need it, so it was of no value to him, and it clearly had value to the recipient.
I just don’t understand why people don’t see the importance of father-daughter relationships.
Cyclonejane
January 3, 2023
Conundrum Andrew Tate 