Dad was born 95-years ago today in a house in NE Portland.

His family was of the working class and they moved around a lot. They lived in the Rose City neighborhood, where Dad started school. He missed most of his 1st grade year after coming down with the whooping cough, so he was pushed back a half-year. This would prove providential for me.

Then they moved to Kerns, and later to Buckman where they lived with Dad’s grandfather in a house on 9th and Davis. It was crowded with relatives. Many of them worked at the nearby Palace Laundry Company. It was hard work with long hours.

In any case and for unknown reasons, Dad grew up having no kind words for his parents. So he never mentioned them at all. By the time they moved to Arleta in 1939, his parents were divorced. That move set the stage for Dad to attend Franklin High School. Since he was put back a half-year in the 1st grade, he eventually found himself in a junior English class where he met his future and life-long bride, and things started looking up.

Little things pile up in our lives that lead us down roads not imagined, not planned or plotted, not mapped with intentions or by any particular romance—only chance.

When a Kamikaze dropped his torpedo aimed for Dad’s ship in 1945, it was aimed amidships and its path was true. My Dad had died and I was never born save for the flat-bottomed landing ship, where a crew watched a deadly fish disappear beneath their hull and emerge on the other side, its target missed.

So Dad lived on. And I was born. And not a day goes by without my thanks for the providences great and small that provided me with a special man for a father.

He cut my hair when I was a boy. And while he worked, he told me stories in funny voices, and sang me ditties and recited little poems. One of them went like this.

In a very far land not very far off,
A blue jay died of the whooping cough!
He whooped so hard with the whooping cough
That he whooped his head and his tail right off!

He’s gone these 24-years, now, he and Mom.

But in my heart and in our family, they’ll never be forgot. And none of us suffers from any memory of them we share. And all of us have only the kindest words and plenty of them to say in remembrance of Jo and Clair—the Captain and his Polaris.


Image: Dad's father and grandfather in 1912 working for the laundry