My dad was born in 1921 in Fallsburg, Kentucky, a small Appalachian crossroads near the county seat of Louisa. His father was a nasty sonofabitch, whose wife left him when my dad was twelve. He remembered standing in the middle of a dirt road screaming for her to come back as she drove off with her boyfriend and later husband. Appalachian Kentucky was a cruel stretch of land, poverty-ridden, its chief sorces of income tobacco farming and coal mining, and when my dad was fourteen, my grandfather lied about his age and enrolled him in Civil conservation Corp, where he ended up working on either Boulder or Hoover Dam. The money my dad sent back to Kentucky was used to send his older brother Dewey to college.
Around 1940, my dad moved to Middletown, Ohio, looking for work and staying with his step-brother Jay and his wife Irene. Jay paid for my father's welding classes. At the time Irene's brother Harold was courting my mother's sister Lois, and eventually my dad met my mother. Pearl Harbor happened one week before my dad turned twenty, and he ewnlisted in the US Navy. His aircraft carrier was reported missing three times, which must have been emotional hell for my mother. In 1945 they married and she followed him to New Orleans while he was ending his naval service. I was conceived there in an old haunted house in the French Quarter where they rented a room and born nine months later in Middletown, Ohio.
I grew up dirt-poor with my brothers in Middletown. When I went to college, my parents applied for a loan to pay for it, and they were told my dad made too much money! I remember my dad telling my mother that if he were making too muchg money, then he needed to make more. Within a year, 1965, he had started his own construction company, and he died a wealthy man. He remains to me a model of ethics, kindness, and generosity I will never achieve, and I miss him to this very day.
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Topic: THE BROWNING VERSION AND THE FATHER'S DAY VERSION (Read 2945 times)