My Dad

I was wondering why I don't have very many childhood memories of my dad. As I pondered on this question, the reasons began to multiply. When I was born, I already had three older brothers. One was four years ahead of me and the other two were heading into the teen-age years. By the time I was old enough to remember much about them, they were in high school. Dad's job at Hill Air Force Base did not provide sufficient income for our family, which soon added a fifth son after me and finally a much hoped for daughter, my only sister. Dad had a second job at a metal finishing company called Wood-Hill and later called Permalloy. He would go to work there after his day job and on week-ends. I remember all of us getting up before daylight so we could eat breakfast together with him before he car-pooled to work at Hill A.F.B. I never did see where Dad worked there, but I smelled it when he came home. His clothes reeked so strongly of cigarette smoke that he would have to air them out on the back porch after work. There were no laws against smoking in offices back then. Though Dad did not smoke, he was forced to breathe his co-workers smoke all day long. I did get to see Dad's other work place, his part-time job. It was nearer our home, not far beyond the Ogden airport. It seemed to me that it was in a constant state of renovation and remodeling. Dad was the renovator, remodeler and handyman. We only had one family car, so we sometimes took him to work or picked him up. That is when he would show us around the facility. It was kind of a scary place for me as a small boy. There were huge vats of chemicals and various other solutions with overhead cranes or hoists to move the manufactured items from one vat to another as they were processed. One of the processes was the anodizing of aluminum products. I remember Dad suggesting that we take our big five gallon cans of stored and solidified honey and letting it sit in one of those steaming vats to make it liquid again. The very thought of eating that honey afterward frightened me. I did not want anything that had been in one of those steaming vats. Dad took pride in his performance at both of his jobs. He saved the federal government millions of dollars by finding unused idle assets at one air force facility and putting them to use at another facility, thereby eliminating the need to purchase new assets. For several weeks each year he went on T.D.Y. assignments in other places in the nation or the world. T.D.Y. stands for "temporary duty yonder." He would go for several weeks at a time, leaving Mother to care for our family of six children on her own. He always came home with surprises and gifts for each of us from the places he visited. Some of these places were Pennsylvania, Alabama, Texas, California and Hawaii. He also went on a long trip to southeast Asia, including Thailand and Viet Nam. Dad loved traveling and seeing new places and people. Mom, however, was content to stay home. Dad had a "wander-lust" in his personality which could only be satisfied by visiting new places he had never been before. Dad was very intelligent and resourceful. He knew how to use all kinds of tools and owned a great many of them. Our neighbors were always stopping by to get his help or advice when something needed to be fixed. Sometimes they just came to borrow a tool they needed and "knew" that he would have. Because of the war (World War II), Dad did not get a university education; but he knew how to do much more than most people and was not afraid to try much of anything. He even learned how to pilot an airplane but had to give up flying as his family grew in size. When I was young, he rebuilt a car from the chassis up--all from parts purchased at salvage yards. He had a hard time justifying the purchase of anything new because he could build it himself from components others had discarded as "unsalvageable." That word was a foreign concept to him. He felt great satisfaction in proving that description wrong. We kept the pressure up on Dad to buy something new and finally got him to agree to buy a brand new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon for the family. We younger children were so excited that we wanted to sleep in it the first night we had it. Of course, a few years later, he bought an identical one which had been "totaled" and he stashed it under the spruce tree in the back yard so he would have spare parts in case anything had to be replaced on the first one. In my early childhood, Dad enforced strict discipline on my older brothers. Once or twice I remember him threatening to use the belt or a willow branch on them as punishment for something they had done. I determined that such a thing would never happen to me. I learned effectively by paying attention to actions and consequences. I was spanked a time or two, or, as he called it, "finger printed." But Dad mellowed with age and experience. The effect of the gospel teachings at church also softened him and made him a much kinder and gentler person with each passing year. We knew that he loved us, but it was a long battle for him to overcome cultural expectations of the past and the terrible experiences of the war years. It can't be easy to switch from being a soldier to a family man. When I was young, Dad was an Elder in our ward congregation. His callings were often in the boy scouting program or in the Sunday School organization. He was ordained a "Seventy" when I was a little older and as such, he did more missionary related work. Each August, the "Seventies" in our Riverdale Stake held a banquet which they sold tickets to, in order to raise money to support missionary work. Many families and individuals supported the event. I always liked going and watching all the dads cook and fill the tables with roast beef, potatoes and gravy. They always served fresh, locally grown, corn and tomatoes. Most of the wives had also provided home made pies and cakes. My dad and the other dads who were "Seventies" advertised prepared, served, and cleaned up after the banquet. We kids "helped." When I was old enough to notice such things, I began to wonder why my dad was never called to fill any of the "important positions" in the church. He never had any "high profile" calling like being in a bishopric or stake leadership position. I was kind of upset about it and wondered "what was wrong with him." Dad went to church faithfully every week and fulfilled his assignments, yet I never saw him at the pulpit in front of the congregation. Instead, he was always teaching boy scouts how to make rope, perform first aid, or to hike or camp. He went home teaching and also took Mom to the temple clear up in Logan to do vicarious ordinances in behalf of people who had lived and died before our time. He took his sons to stake priesthood meetings and to general priesthood meetings at the stake center faithfully. It took me years to realize that his callings in the church were just as important as the callings my friends' dads had been given. In fact, some of my peers and their dads did not amount to much after a while. It all came down to their desire and commitment to endure faithfully in accepting and fulfilling their duties in the callings they had been given--including fatherhood. My dad was a consistent, faithful and dependable soldier in "The Army of God." He was not a general or commander, but, without him and many others like him, the "war" being waged could never be won. I can only hope to do as well with the circumstances and opportunities I have been given. Both my mother and my father taught me how to work; but a boy needs the special touch of a father. Fortunately, our family's financial situation improved as Dad's career matured and Mom began her preschool business in our home. Dad didn't need to work a second job anymore and had more time to spend at home with us children. This was when I really needed a dad and the friend he became to me. My childhood friends had gone other ways for the most part. Some of them began to persecute me for being "a little angel." I was unskilled at sports, very small for my age and did not fit well in my new environment at the junior high school. My self esteem and self confidence plummeted. I spent a lot of time with my dad at that time. When my brother, Lynn, left on his mission to Germany, my dad and I took on our over-stuffed garage as our work project. As I said before, he had almost every kind of tool you could think of, but finding it, getting to it and having room to use it was a problem. Our church building was being remodeled at that time, so we salvaged cabinets, lumber, ceiling tiles, light fixtures, wire and more from the church building. We used these materials to fix up and organize our garage. I talked my dad into throwing away a great many things he had saved over the years. (This made me a hero to my mom.) We insulated, sheet rocked and tiled the whole ceiling. We installed the salvaged library cabinets. We built lumber racks, set up a big work bench and table and organized all the tools and tool bins and shelves. We built a little kitchen next to the garage for home canning and added food storage shelves and closets for all our camping supplies and equipment. It was a BIG project and I worked side-by-side with my dad. In the summer, we worked together in our yard. Much of our hillside yard was (and always had been) covered in weeds. Our whole yard had to be watered by hand with a garden hose. We spent several summers installing a sprinkler system (much of it with salvaged materials) and finally had the ability to water the whole yard just by turning valves (manually, of course). This meant we could plant shrubbery on the whole hillside and finally not have weeds everywhere. New shrubs, however, were too expensive. We dug up shrubs at our bishop's house which was demolished to make room for the church expansion. This was much more work and more time consuming than buying new shrubs in convenient planting containers; but , if you have free labor, why spend money? Even Dad decided this was too much work and came up with a "plan B." We dug holes on the hillside for each juniper shrub, but instead of transplanting mature shrubs from the bishop's yard, we stuck a steel rod in the ground around each planting hole and inserted a pruned off juniper branch in each hole. Dad assured me that if we kept them watered, they would take root in the clay hill and grow. Not all of them did, but enough of them did that the whole hill eventually was covered with shrubbery. It is a slow process when done the way we did it. But maybe my dad was doing something more important than landscaping a yard. Perhaps he was teaching life skills and saving a son. Dad was not a big, strong man. Most other boys' dads were bigger than mine. But my dad could physically out-work most of them. Sometimes he attempted things that were just too hard or even dangerous. It seemed that each winter our big weeping willow tree would send its roots into the seems and joints of our sewer line between our home and the street below. It would plug up our sewer every February about the time of his birthday. He would have to go rent a big "roto-rooter" machine and lug it up our steps and over to his hand-excavated hole over the sewer pipe and work the heavy, dirty machinery himself. ( It was "to expensive" to hire someone to come do it and he knew how and where to do the job himself. After all, he had built this house himself and knew where the defective, second hand, pipes were.) Well, he was trying to run this cumbersome roto-rooter machine while standing in the muddy hole he had dug with a pick and shovel on a cold February day with the sewer backed up into our basement on his birthday when the machine jerked and fell into the hole and broke his foot. I was young and small and unable to help him. I hadn't seen my dad hurt like that before. I don't remember how the job got done, but I do remember my dad coming back from the doctor all bandaged up and in pain. I had always assumed my dad was invincible. I remember breaking into tears and crying for my dad because he was hurt and "broken." I was tender hearted and felt something for my dad I hadn't felt before. Was it concern, sympathy or empathy--or just a new form of love? I would not trade those years with my dad for anything. And I would not trade my dad for any other dad. Sure, my dad had lots of faults, weaknesses, inadequacies and idiosyncrasies; but those things made him a unique and real person. I watched and witnessed as he worked on those challenges year after year and rose above them to really make something of himself. He was loved and honored in our small community by the good people around us. Widows and others in need of help could depend on him for unsolicited help when others were too distracted to notice. It has been said that the praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards (J.R.R. Tolkien). When Dad passed away, those he had served and worked with all his life, and those who were themselves deserving of praise, came to honor his memory. Every bishop of our Riverdale Ward for the last fifty years of his life attended his funeral services except for those who had passed before him. Even those were represented by someone in their family who came to honor his memory and legacy. I too honor and love him as I come to understand him better and follow the path he made better by traveling it ahead of me.

Terry Stephens