Dear Old Dad

 

                                                               Arthur W. Gould, 1900-1973

I was working in temporary office quarters, in a swanky high-rise office building in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.  It was early; I was, as is still my custom, among the first to arrive at the office.  The elevator doors closed.  I glanced up and noticed a man in a suit, staring at me.  I blinked.  He blinked.  I’d seen this guy before, but where?

I snapped back into reality.  I was alone in the elevator.  The man staring back at me was my own reflection in the mirror-surfaced elevator door.  Of course, I’d known this all along.  But there had been something unsettling about my split-second inner reaction as the doors closed and I caught the visual.  It was as though, in that fragmentary moment, I was seeing someone else.   

I connected the dots that evening at home, when I saw the framed photograph on my dresser: a very old, black-and-white, studio portrait of a businessman in a suit.  My father, at about age forty – roughly the same age as I was. 

I’d known my father only as a much older man.  He had become a father very late in life.  I was his only child.  We had a close, albeit too brief, relationship.  He taught me the fundamentals – knowing right from wrong, being honest above all else.  The life lessons I’d learned from Dad were conveyed less often by words than by the example he set.  His was a high bar to clear.

Although he didn’t achieve extraordinary wealth or fame, my father led a remarkable life – one that would be literally impossible to recreate in modern times.  He was of a different era.  He was, as are we all, a creature of his times. 

I am thinking of my father because this week marks what would have been his 112^th birthday.  That’s not a typo – my father was born at the turn of the 20^th century, November 21^st, 1900.  President William McKinley was in office.  Before my father’s first birthday, McKinley would be assassinated and his Vice-President, Teddy Roosevelt, would assume the presidency. 

As a young boy, Dad lived on a farm.  There was no electricity, no running water.  He had a pet goat (I have a picture of this, somewhere.)  His formal education ended after the eighth grade.  These were not markers of a poverty-stricken background; they were simply facts of life, at that time, in that place.

Following in my grandfather’s footsteps, Dad went off to work on the railroad.  It was a “good job.”  He started at the bottom, as a “fireman,” shoveling coal into the giant steam engines.  Over time, he worked his way up to conductor – walking the aisles of the passenger cars, checking tickets.  There he came to know a regular passenger named Mr. Murphy – the inventor of the “Murphy Bed,” the popularity of which had made him quite wealthy.  Mr. Murphy took a liking to the young man.  Somehow, through their conversations, he convinced him that there were greater opportunities, and more money to be made in construction.  Dad took a correspondence course to learn the basics of carpentry, and became a carpenter.   

Although he would never have used these words, Dad “reinvented himself,” in today’s parlance, several times throughout his life.  He spent many years working in the building trades, ultimately as a self-employed general contractor.  Although it’s a detail lost to history, I can identify several of “his” houses that still dot the landscape in North Jersey. 

My father witnessed the rise of the automobile and the telephone, two world wars, and the Great Depression.  At the time he sat for the photograph on my bureau, he was married, soon to be divorced, the owner of a small business  - a coal and lumber company that bore his name.  In the years that followed, he became a real estate investor and banker.  He indulged his lifelong love of horses and boats.  At one point, he acquired a sizable cabin cruiser by negotiating it into a real estate deal (it had belonged to the seller.)  He remarried and, at 59, became a father. 

 When I was a very young child, we moved into Dad’s dream house.  He had designed it, and oversaw its construction.  It was a “gentleman’s farm” in what was then a rural area of Orange County, New York.  We had acreage, a barn, a corral and a track.  There were horses for riding, and Shetland ponies as pets.  Both of my parents were at home most of the time.  It was an idyllic lifestyle, of sorts, but sadly, it was not to last.

The symptoms were sporadic, strange, and progressively worse.  There was no conventional diagnosis.  Exploratory spinal surgery was recommended.  A well-renowned New York City neurosurgeon performed the operation.  It failed, massively.  Dad returned home, paralyzed from the waist down, in excruciating, unrelenting pain. 

The seven years that followed were a poor substitute for a childhood, but during my father’s remaining time on this earth, he taught me more than many people learn in a lifetime:  determination, humility, resilience, pride.  Counter to what the doctors had predicted, he eventually did walk again, albeit with two canes, slowly, and always in great pain.  Through sheer force of will, he re-established something approaching a normal life.  Only we, his family, were privy to his daily struggle with pain and ongoing medical complications. In my eyes, his most significant legacy was this: he never complained.  Even on days when his body betrayed him most, he managed a smile.     

The farm boy with the eighth grade education had, by the end of his life, been named Chairman of the Board of Directors of a bank.  This is the man I remember – intelligent and well spoken, with never a hint of arrogance or self-pity.  I’ve spent my life in the shadow of his achievements.  When I was a younger man, full of piss and vinegar, I believed that one day I would emerge from that void.  But the days have grown short, and I now realize that that will not happen.  He was the better man.  I am left to honor his memory with mere words; and so, I shall.

Happy birthday, Dad.  And thanks.