Behind Every Successful Daughter

June 17, 2023

They used to say that behind every successful woman was a supportive dad. I can’t find that phrase anymore, and it was probably one of those sayings back in the dark ages, back before the Internet. But I do know this – everything I love in life, from ancient history to Greek mythology and the start of western civilization, to literature, art or music, comes from my dad. Even the fact that I look out into the universe and imagine the communication that comes from beyond what we can see comes from Dad listening to his antique radio in the garage, its vacuum tubes lighting up and whiny noise crackling from its ancient speakers.

“There are radio waves in the air,” he said. “You can’t see them, but the sound comes in pulses that can be captured by this radio.” As a three or four-year old, I didn’t really understand how that machine with its rows of dusty tubes and wires (its cover having been lost long ago) could capture anything, but the machine would warm up, and wavery noise from far away would sound when he turned the giant dial. Although I didn’t understand the technicalities, my imagination was caught by the idea that unseen, unheard voices bounced around and through us.

At five-foot-four, Dad wasn’t a tall man, but he always carried himself with military bearing. He had wavy dark hair, hazel eyes and a stocky build. He was not given to saying much but was famous for standing at the edge of a group, holding a coffee cup in his hand, smiling.

Born in Oklahoma just before the Great Depression started, growing up as the child of sharecroppers in the Dust Bowl, the eleventh and final child, he left school at fourteen to seek his way in the world. At eighteen, he was off to war in Europe, enlisting as a conscientious objector for religious purposes. By twenty-six, he was home again, a decorated WWII veteran, not that he ever said why, trying to live his life. He married and had a child just as everyone did in the 1950s. But something was missing for him, an education that he always dreamed of, so he studied, took the GED, and enrolled in college under the G.I. bill in 1964.

He never got to finish college. That is because, after twelve years of trying to have a second child and failing, my parents adopted me. Six months later, my mother was unexpectedly pregnant with my brother, and experiencing complications. While my mother spent several weeks in a hospital in another town, my dad withdrew from college to work nights and care for me by day until my fourteen-year-old sister got home from school. They would both care for me in the evening until he went to work. I remember sitting on his lap, rifling through the pages of his art history tome, looking at the drawings in his mythology book, tracing the letters of the Greek alphabet, all while listening to Nat King Cole or 101 Strings on the record player. They are some of my earliest memories. Years later, as a young adult travelling through Europe and seeing the art from the photos in my dad’s textbook, it was as though I was meeting with old friends.

To this day, I don’t know what Dad planned to major in, although I think he may have planned to be an engineer or an architect. He never spoke of it, the same way in which he never spoke about his medals from the war, one of which, ironically, was earned as a sharpshooter.

Instead, Dad had to make do with Los Angeles’ KNX News Radio (a station of all news except when it broadcast horse races, baseball and football games, and Radio Mystery Theater in the evening), the crossword puzzle, and playing in chess tournaments at work, which he often won. He also loved tennis, ping pong and badminton, and helping young men with mechanical things – like building car fenders out of nothing for my teenaged boyfriend and fiddling with that radio in the garage.

Dad could build anything out of nothing. He could build an entire house, make furniture out of scrap wood, plant a garden, slaughter a deer, make cinnamon toast with butter and sugar to the edge of the bread.

Perhaps he made me out of nothing, too.

When I was a teenager, he came home with a paper from work one day. It was about a scholarship from his employer, Fleetwood Motorhomes, where he worked as a prototype builder. Each year, Fleetwood gave away $4,000 to a girl and a boy from the employees’ children across all their U.S. operations.

“I can’t pay for your college,” he said. “But if you go for this, I’ll support you any way I can.”

I was a 14-year-old sophomore at the time.

He drove me to college exams, events after school, to volunteer jobs, and student activities. One early Saturday morning in February, while it was still dark out, he got pulled over by a cop.

He wasn’t driving fast. In fact, we had all the time in the world to make it to my 7 a.m. exam.

“Roll down the window,” the officer tapped on the glass and shined his flashlight into the car. “What are you drinking from that paper bag?” he asked when Dad complied.

Dad laughed, a bit nervously. “Coffee, sir,” he said.

I didn’t understand what the officer wanted, but my dad must have understood immediately what he had done wrong.

“Let me smell it,” the policeman demanded, and Dad handed the cup up through the open window.

That was Dad. Using the brown lunch sack as insulation for his coffee cup because he had brewed the coffee scalding hot to sit through my SAT that morning in the cold car. He had a clip board with a pen attached to work the morning’s crossword, carefully scissored out of the newspaper that had landed on the lawn just before we left. After his short stint in college, he didn’t read any more books, just did the crossword, but somehow, he kept up with everything so that even the New York Times crossword that the Riverside Press Enterprise ran on Sundays was completed neatly in ink before he went to bed Sunday night.

And he taught me what he knew – changing the oil in the car, pulling an engine, replacing a tire, spackling a wall, reading blueprints, putting in new plumbing. How to buy a new car. How to parallel park – okay, I hate parallel parking, it gives me migraines. And I never asked him how to gut a fish – no need to go that far.

Those high school years of studying hard, working part-time jobs, volunteering, trying to get perfect grades, were difficult. Sometimes I would say, “I can’t do this, Dad. I don’t know how I can solve this problem,” or I would say, in a panic, “I don’t know how I can get all this work done on time.”

“Everything will turn out all right,” Dad would say, quoting a bit of scripture.

His simple faith taught me to look to the end result, then work toward it. I still use this visualization at work today to see my way to the end of a complicated project or deadline, then plot the steps to get there.

Dad trusted me to figure it out and didn’t try to solve my problems for me.

In one of the last conversations I had with him, when he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for years, I told him about everything I was doing for a job in Mexico, after a hurricane had blown through a hotel. I was negotiating with the bank to get funds to flow for rebuilding. My dad, who couldn’t say a lot then, just said, “Well, you better get to it.” And I did.

Today I use many of the lessons my father taught me, both in life and at work. Sometimes when I am facing a trying situation, I go out on my balcony and call him from the universe, asking him what he thinks about something, and his pithy sayings will come to me.

I was the girl who won the scholarship Fleetwood gave out in 1982.

Happy Father’s Day in Heaven, Dad.

This is Dad, probably at the age of 94, trusty coffee cup beside him, reading a book. He told me, “I don’t know what they want me to do,” which in Alzheimer’s speak, was, “I want to engage with a book.” Books always want us to do something.