- - - - -
One
summer, a beautiful collie walked quietly onto our front yard. She didn’t bark or make any sounds, even when
we played with her. She was very gentle
and tame, but had no tags. She didn’t
leave and it got to be sundown. So we
made her up a bed on the back porch, in a big box. Like most dogs in the summer, she wouldn’t
stay in it and lie down, but after some coaxing she did. We were hoping we could keep her. Dad said we’d have to check the paper because
a dog that nice would be sought by her owners.
She stayed one night, then the next.
Our hopes were rising and we thought it was pretty certain she was ours. She seemed to get braver and we got her to
bark a little bit. One afternoon she was
resting in her den and we were talking on the porch. All of a sudden, Dad opened the back door and
called, “Sally!” The dog jumped up and
went straight to him, very excited, her tail wagging. It was quite a mixed moment. The collie seemed overjoyed to hear her name,
but it was curtains for our keeping this pretty dog. That very day the owners came over and got
her. Boo hoo. I think Dad would have let us keep her if she
had not been claimed. He also seemed sad
to see her go.
- - - - -
One of
Dad’s enjoyments was watching the antics of Chuck Osborn on WIMA-TV when he
would do the local ads. He would start
talking about lawn furniture, standing alone on a blank set, and all of a
sudden a beach chair would come lobbing in at him and he would leap aside
because the studio guys would darned near hit him with it. He’d catch the chair, nonchalantly hold it
up, talk about this fine quality chair from Rink’s
- - - - -
Dad knew a lot of colorful people whose
services he might call upon from time to time. He brought over Wild Bill the Tree Man to
transplant some saplings. He had a black
man who was from
Once I was interested in fuel cells and thought maybe I could make one
for a science project. Dad asked Fred
Towner to come over from across the street and tell me about them. This man was an electrical engineer at
Westinghouse. This was going to be
great; I could hardly wait to get my battery to work! Fred came into the lab; Dad introduced him
and then departed. Lucky
Dad. The introduction was the
last I understood of Fred for the next hour.
Or was it eight hours? It felt
like it. “This is the anode; this is the
cathode,” he said. Then, BOOM! He just took off into some region of the
atmosphere beyond gravity. Like a lot of
scientists, when asked a question he’d make his answer more confusing than what
I asked about, and then would barge right on.
He left behind some articles which might as well have been written in
Hindi. I never did figure out how to
build my fuel cell. Just think what the
Internet saves kids nowadays!
- - - - -
Of course, Dad loved football and
basketball games, and driving to and from in the car
was half the fun. Often we would take
Dennis Burns with us.
While
riding to a Lima Senior basketball game, we were looking at the program and saw
this one black guy, Leslie Saucer, who had one of those bad pictures you are
always afraid they’ll print of you. He
face was all puckered up and Dennis and I said, “What happened to THIS
guy?” Then we started trying to imitate
what we thought he would say in a caption:
“I don’t like dem LEMONS, deh!”
We started laughing and saying it back and forth. Dad got mad and told us to stop and we
didn’t. Then he got REALLY mad. It was
to his credit. He didn’t like us mocking
the honor of this black boy who was also a good athlete. We managed to stop ourselves. Later we put somebody up to getting Leslie’s
autograph for us on a little square of paper.
Whenever we would see it, we’d start spasming with laughter again. But not in front of Dad,
of course.
Another time we were riding down to an
I never saw Dad get more excited than at
those OSU games. He would yell and
scream like a lunatic. I guess that was
the point. We would look for Mike
Currant, from
- - - - -
Our car was the scene for many comic
moments. When we were small, Dad would
tell us stories that would always involve some kid or other’s getting scared
and running away. After suitable
suspense and buildup, Dad would make the sound of the kid screaming and we
would all just LAUGH! Once in the car we
all enjoyed a moment when Lyndon Johnson was being interviewed on the radio about
nuclear wear and said don’t worry he wasn’t gonna mash on the button. Another Southern moment happened when we
made an endless search for the
- - - - -
We had some great moments on
Mom had an old tub washer and wringer,
with a waste hose near a drain. (I don’t
think she had a
dryer; she would just hang the clean clothes up on a line to dry in the hot
basement.) One night Dad and Mom were up
very late working on something and let us stay up. I went down the basement to the washer that
was making that friendly rumbling noise and saw all that good ice cream water
coming out of the hose, and drank some.
It didn’t stay down long.
Dad got us a coke machine with two
spigots. It was kind of crude because
you would just tilt the bottles up on some kind of lever to get the coke to
pour out of a spout. But we thought it
was neat.
Sometimes on a lazy Sunday afternoon,
Dad would play his classical LPs. Boy, I
hated those opera ones. I even had some
for my 45 rpm record player and it was all I could do to make myself hear them. However, I liked to try to give all my
records a regular playing. I thought it
was probably good for them. Anyhow, I
remember watching the flecks of dust falling in the rays of the sun coming in
the front window. With my glasses off, I
could see those flecks clear as anything when they would float near my
eyes. On one slow day, Dad and everyone
left the room for a long spell. I
thought it was time for the records, so I started pulling them out from the
cupboard, pulling them out of their sleeves and skimming them over the floor. After about ten records, they looked pretty
good, all out there like a great big puzzle.
They were so colorful, with vinyl of different shades of red, blue and
brown, and the big labels were all so unique.
Pretty soon, Dad came back in and my music abruptly ended.
- - - - -
On
Dad’s bathroom was the audio arena for
many of his radio favorites, such as Don McNeil, The Grand Ole Opry, Karl Haas,
Mike Warf, Renfro Valley Gathering, JP McCarthy and, the least favorite of the
rest of us, Bud Guest. Dad enjoyed the
toned-down humor of the Don McNeil show and it probably gave him material
suitable for entertaining his older patients.
There was an Aunt Edna or Aunt Maude or Eleanor or Fanny or somebody who
was always out-of-date despite her best efforts. She did some mildly funny scenes and would
always tell a story about something she saw when she had been watching the ”T and V”. Dad
picked up the phrase and the rest has been history.
It seems
we never could escape Bud Guest. Even
the morning after our sailing catastrophe on St. Mary’s, Mom and Dad were
getting up breakfast on the Coleman and we were watching the lake. Suddenly our tranquil thoughts were broken by
the old familiar presence. I can still
hear the sound of old growly Bud Guest on the radio that sunny day, cutting
through the quiet, talking about fishing or whatnot and trying to make
something grand out of something that wasn’t.
Maybe I was just too young.
- - - - -
We used to visit Dad’s office at all its
stages of change. For a while there was
a drugstore next to it, before Dr. Chung came along. In the earlier days of practice, Dad’s doctor
friends would get together at one of their houses now and then to talk
business, with families in tow. The
doctors would sit down in a circle, cross their legs, and light up. Once we went to Fox’s and I remember Dr.
Fox’s grabbing me as soon as I got inside and saying “Robin, ya look like a
million bucks!” At one of these
meetings, another little kid about three or four was brought in to play with me
on the floor. He seemed kind of quiet
but we got along all right. I didn’t see
him again for years. He was Dennis
Burns.
The lab in Dad’s office, like pharmacies
themselves, was in those days much closer to basic chemistry. There were a lot of reagents and indicators
there. About the only bottle I ever
understood was the hydrogen peroxide.
Likewise, Matthews had a stock of many basic chemical compounds, things
you would never find in a modern day pharmacy.
I could go and buy 6 ounces of copper sulfate or potassium permanganate
(Betsy’s favorite chemical to tease me about was cobalt chloride), or a bottle
of sulfuric acid. Dad had a few acids at
the office, too, I believe, especially hydrochloric, in some much-used,
specific dilution.
Once WIMA Radio had a Medical Questions
show and Dad was on the panel. We on
Cole were all listening attentively, of course.
Somebody called and asked how to treat a burn. Dad said put ice on it. They asked what does it do if you put butter
on a burn? Dad
said, “Makes it slippery.” We all looked
at each other with a big smile and said, “That’s our dad, all right.”
- - - - -
Once after dinner in the dining room,
Dad sat down at the typewriter in a creative mood and began composing. We were surprised at what a good typist he
was. He quickly wrote a funny impromptu
story about a little frog. We thought he
would later write his memoirs. He
thought so, too. Maybe he still
will! He might have been a little
deterred because of the time he bought an autobiography he thought would HAVE
to be great! It was Chet Huntley’s life
story and to say he needed an editor is an understatement. He would repeat himself every few chapters
and he had a way of putting quotes around expressions he thought were
regionalisms that was just "downright” irritating. Also, he would repeat himself sometimes. It was just “plain terrible”! Dad was underwhelmed by the book but I
thought maybe he was just being too hard on poor old boring Chet. Then I read it, too; it truly was awful.
We should work on Dad to start on his
stories.
- - - - -
One day when I was in seventh grade, Dad
brought me home from the office some guy’s workbook from high school
chemistry. I couldn’t believe my
luck. It smelled like a lab bench, like
chemicals I wasn’t allowed to buy yet.
This was the Big Time! Over the
next few years, I worked through most of the book, carefully filling in the
answers to all the problems and question sets.
I didn’t want to miss any of those important details.
- - - - -
Once when we were in grade school, Dad
had us taste beer in the front hall. It
didn’t seem to turn off the other kids, but I have always had a minor social
gap in not liking beer. It has never
tasted any better to me than that first hideous dose. I may pretend to drink some now and then, if
that’s all my host has, but I hate it.
- - - - -
After a big family dinner on Cole, there
was always a very comfortable rhythm of conversation. The ritual of seeing people off was
particularly pleasant. We would walk
and talk into the vestibule, eventually making it one at a time onto the front
porch, with its hanging lanterns shining at night. The light at the end of the sidewalk would
reassure that it was safe to go.
(Originally, we had a very old-fashioned lamp down there with a green
painted iron pole and frosted glass.
Eventually it was replaced, but never eclipsed.) The voices of Nana and Papa, and Uncle Ken,
and all our cousins and their families, as they would depart, are still in my
memory. I can hear Nana’s laughter and
her saying, “Oh, mercy!”, “Why, for pity’s sake!”, “Well, I should say!”, and,
of course, her most versatile trademark, “Well!” Sometimes Dad would walk the guests to the
sidewalk to finish some grownup conversation we would leave them to.
- - - - -
Once at Aunt Kap’s, Dad read us
stories. He read us “How the Sea Became
Salt” and “The Blue Light”. After that
second story, I had a nightmare about a bluish light that would dribble down
lethal electric current on anyone below.
I had this dream dozens of times for about 5 years. Often it was followed by another one, where I
was being pursued by Evil in a dark room full of big crates I’d have to
climb. I would feel I was being
suffocated. Then a third one that would
come along had me having to argue down Satan.
Still, the stories were wonderful and we all wished we could hear them
again.
-
- - - -
Dad always had a little frustrated nautical man in him. He would get on the loudspeaker to the attic
and say, “Now hear this! Now hear this!
Dinner is being served in the mess hall!” He would always tape the
- - - - -
Dad had a knack for picking out good
presents, and some of them were truly magical.
The first I remember was a little dashboard and steering wheel, with a
motor sound. Then I got a robot with a
blue light on top of its head that could magnetically pick up metal disks and
put them on a moving conveyor belt. Once
I got a transistor radio for my birthday, and they’d hardly been on the market
for any length of time. (Once Papa borrowed it from me to listen to a ball game with the
earphone in. Boy,
was I proud to have something HE wanted to try out for a change!) When I was ten, I got a very beautiful dark
red Spanish guitar. One Christmas, I got
an Ohaus chemical balance, lab stools and glassware. Dad had a way of putting together a really
good surprise when he put his mind to it.
And usually you could count on him to be cooking up another one for you
between times. His love always came
across.
Once he got us all a ten-power telescope
that we would use to look at the moon, especially in
- - - - -
These are all the reminiscences I have
time to write today. Here are some
titles for other events you may remember:
1
Getting our Sabin Oral Vaccine
2
When Dad Brought the Latin Cards Home from
3
Rib Eye Steaks and Shrimp Cocktails at the Thunderbird
4
“Under the Rooftops of Chevrolet”
5
First Time at Chen’s Chinese Restaurant
6
Going to the
7
Flying up to check out
8
The Lima Citizen
and the
9
Sally Stout
10
Waiting for Dad to Pay the Rent at Mrs. Wessel’s
11
The DeSoto, the Impala, and the other cars
12
Watching Dad Pack for His Trips
13
Poor Dad Can’t Swim Because of His Ear Drum
14
Joking with Reverend Trout after the Kennedy Inaugural
Speech
15
What Happens to You if You Blow off Your Mattel Sonic
Blaster in Your Brother’s Ear Right When Dad Walks By
16
“That Damned Opal!”
17
Studying the Hymnal
18
Learning to Mow the Grass
19
Bach’s Oboe Concerto
20
Letter to the UCC in
21
“Pilot to Co-Pilot”
22
When Scotty Went to the Wedding
23
Buying a Stereo with Dad
24
Dad’s Talk with the Chemistry Professor.
25
Paul Warner and the Ayn Rand Phase
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!
Love, Robb