Fathers' Day, Part 1: Jim W.

Yes, I know where I put the apostrophe.

Originally posted June 2020 on Tumblr; minor additions in 2022

This will be a combination photo essay and text post, and it does get a bit personal, so feel free to click away now if you're not up for the sharing.

These are pictures of Jim. My adoptive father was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1942 and grew up in Warren, I believe. He attended Warren G. Harding High School and should have graduated in 1959 but finally got it done in 1962. He struggled with alcoholism his entire life; he became sober in 1971 after my younger brother was born, but then dove head-first off the wagon in the late 1990s–early 2000s, which led to his demise from liver disease in 2013.

So, I had a fraught relationship with my dad. I loved him, but I didn’t particularly like him, and he made little to no effort to understand who I was as a person. People would say, “That’s just his generation.” People would say, “At least he’s not beating on you the way his dad beat on those kids.” And “At least he quit drinking.” Yes. He did quit drinking. When they adopted my younger brother in 1971, when the agency threatened to take Jason back unless my dad got his alcoholism under control.

Dad had a rough life coming up—I can’t ignore that. Evidently, they moved a lot, and he must have suffered greatly from that instability. His dad was his mom’s second (at least, that I know of) husband; and he had had at least one marriage before her; so there was a Brady Bunch of children, seven in all by the time they married and had my dad and his younger brother, Tommy.

And by later accounts from cousins, my grandfather was not a nice person. Not only was he an alcoholic and an abuser, but I’m told he molested his own daughters and stepdaughter. What a horrendous environment to grow up in.

1958

Here’s my dad (at left) in 1958 with my uncle Bob (my mother’s older brother). I believe Uncle graduated from high school in 1958, so he was probably headed for the Navy not long after this. Dad, on the other hand, was still in high school and would be until 1962, even though he was only a year younger than Uncle. Yes, he repeated three grades. He always said it was because they moved so often.

Imagine being the shy, cute, 17-year-old senior in 1961 who is dating a 19-year-old junior. Yep, that was my mom.

Circa 1961

This is a photo from my aunt and uncle’s wedding, I’m pretty sure. The lady on the right is my mom, and the man and woman beside her are two of her cousins (both now deceased). To the right of her is Dad, looking awfully dapper. I don’t remember what year my aunt and uncle got married, but it was probably 1961 or 1962 at the latest, because my parents got married in September 1963.

I don’t know much about what their lives were like then. Dad used to say that his parents moved out in the middle of the night and left him in Warren on his own while he was in high school. A contrasting story from my mother makes it sound more like he knew they were moving and didn’t want to go, so he decided to move in with my grandmother (who had been a widow since 1956 and was already supporting two kids). My grandmother, sainted woman that she was, of course took him in. He always made it sound as if he were this self-made man, but lots of people helped him make that self, and he always failed to acknowledge that fact.

Circa 1969–70

This is Mom, Dad, and me before Jason was born. So, that belly on Dad is indeed a beer belly, and that smile on my mother’s face is probably forced. (Notice he didn’t bother.) This wasn’t our house—I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was my cousins’ house before they bought the house my aunt and uncle still live in today. They moved from St. Louis back to Warren before my cousin Scott was born in 1971.

What immediately strikes me about this Polaroid from about 1970 is how the cheap lens on that thing could handle only enough depth of field to get me in reasonable focus; my parents look dark, fuzzy, and somewhat distanced from me, like a mountain range behind a nearby hill. I’m brightly lit, whereas they’re in shadow. Odd, that.

There were stories back then, vague memories, that Dad used to take me sometimes to the bar with him, and he’d give me hot peppers while he was drinking, and I’d eat them all up and then cry later when I had to go to the bathroom. He thought that was hilarious. I think he must’ve thought that’s what good daughters did: went to the bar with their daddies. Like, that was his fondest memory of me as a 3-year-old.

Imagine a mother nowadays saying, “Sure, honey, take our toddler in the car with you and go out drinking to a dirty, dive bar where all your buddies from the steel mill drink. What could possibly go wrong?”

Postscript, 2022:

This photo also proves I've been riding a bicycle since before I started elementary school. #bikeislife

Circa 1971

I don’t know how old I am in this picture, but I’m guessing about 5, so it’s probably 1971—whether it’s before Jason arrived or after, I have no idea. It may have been the summer before I started kindergarten, because I remember my hair was short in my kindergarten photos. Now I notice the sandbox and swing set behind us; I have photos later, from when Jason was a toddler, of me and him in that sandbox. I understand I used to put sand in his mouth.

I do have a vague memory of this day, though. I wanted Dad to fill my backyard play pool, which was a normal occurrence, but for some reason that day, either I or he decided it would be entertaining to put dish soap into the pool.

As I look again at this photo in 2022, I can't help noticing how completely uninterested my father looks. It could simply be that my mom took the Polaroid without warning him, but it's more likely he just couldn't be bothered to pose. As a scholar of visual rhetoric, I can only wonder: Did people simply stop thinking of photographs as permanent records once the instant camera was invented? If so, that may be why he couldn't be bothered to pose; he, like many people probably at that time, had ceased to think of a photograph as something to be saved, but rather as a disposable item.

Polaroid photos were the SnapChat of the 1970s.

1974

Now, take a good look at my dad in this photo. Notice that the homemade sheet cake has the number 32 on it. My dad is puffy, overweight, greying. He looks like he’s in his 40s here. My dad was born in 1942, so this would have been April 24, 1974. By the looks of it, I wanted to help blow out his candles. Jason just looks vaguely confused (he was not quite 3 at the time).

This would have been a rare occasion—all of us awake at the same time and eating together. Dad worked at a steel mill in Warren, Ohio, until his retirement. The entire time he was there, they made him work different shifts. So, he’d work a week of days, then a week of afternoons, a week of midnights, and then the killer: a “float.” A float shift was when they would work two days, two afternoons, and one midnight in a single week. Can. You. Imagine. And he did this from his 20s until he retired at, I think, about age 58.

This is not to say I had any empathy for him whatsoever at the time. I did not. He was, more often than not, sleeping or working when I was home, so it was maybe a third of the time where we actually had Dad around. And even then, he was usually out in the garage tinkering on a car or going to an AA meeting.

AA was kind of the invisible fence around our lives. Because Dad was a recovering alcoholic, we were all expected to participate in his recovery. Like, forever. So, as a kid, I had to go to the smoke-filled meetings in church basements, community centers, and other places. I had to listen to “Susan F.” or “Bob R.” get up and tell their sob stories of how they drank and drank until they hit rock bottom, and then they found AA and now their life was pretty awesome. I’d eat donuts. They always had donuts. Mom went to Al-Anon, which was for the spouses (ladies, mainly—if men were ever in Al-Anon in those days, I certainly didn’t hear about it). Later, when I was old enough, my “attitude” got me a ticket to Alateen, which was AA for drunks’ kids. Ugh.

All our friends were from AA. We still had family gatherings, but my parents would regularly host (dry) picnics and parties at our house, because apparently, we had a nice place (I can only imagine now, looking back, what miserable circumstances these fellow drunks must’ve had to think our place was so great). Most of the kids I hung out with were AA kids. My mom’s friends were either church ladies or AA ladies.

Addiction and its adjuncts

Addictive behaviors are pervasive, as anyone with an addiction (or anyone who knows someone with one) can attest. You can take away the “drug of choice,” but that doesn’t cure the addiction. So, instead, Dad became addicted to shopping. Never in my life have I seen a man of our class (working, if you hadn’t already guessed) with so many damn suits. What the hell did he need all those suits for? He worked in a steel mill!

He wore them to church.

And every time we went shopping anywhere—Eastwood Mall, Hills, Murphy Mart, anywhere—he came home with a new dress shirt or tie.

Again, this man worked in a steel mill.

I think going to church every Sunday, and serving as a deacon, made him proud. He had our sorry butts out of bed at the crack of dawn every Sunday for 8:15 service (we were Lutheran), so he could have the rest of the day to himself. The church was another invisible fence around us—more so when my mom became a church secretary when I was about 10. She never made much money at it in 25 years, and what she did make, Dad took and distributed back to her as he saw fit.

As for whether he practiced his faith at all... well, only God knows the answer to that now.

Early 1980s

In the Christmas photo above, Dad is the ill-costumed shepherd in the zigzag head covering, beside our then–assistant pastor, Mike Hout, who evidently had a mandolin and a super sweet medieval costume. This would have been in the early- to mid-1980s, I think. Dad's beard is completely grey, and his hair was probably white under that headgear. He would have been in his early 40s.

My parents split up in 1985, when I was 19. Apparently, Dad, who had gone from just another schmo at AA to being other people’s sponsor, was sponsoring the pastor’s (not Mike's! The head pastor's) daughter, who had been a cocaine addict. At some point, that relationship crossed the line, and my mom had had enough.

Dad insisted he never slept with the pastor’s daughter, whose name was Mary, until he and Mom were separated. I was like, wow, that makes it so much better, Dad. She was in her 20s! For petessakes, Dad, gross. And our pastor’s daughter. Your wife's boss! Have you no shame at all?

2020

Fast-forward with me, won’t you, to February 2020. I’m a faculty member at a Pennsylvania university. I have been noticing this other Ohio car in the parking lot for several years and wondering who the person could be. She has a YSU sticker on her car, and I also have a YSU sticker on my car. This past February, we met at a luncheon at work, and I recognized her (stalker that I am). I stepped outside my comfort zone and asked if she was the one from YSU. Amazingly, she had been parking-lot stalking me, as well!

But that’s not the best part.

Turns out, her dad worked with my dad. He still works at that steel mill in Warren, Ohio. She called him to ask him if he remembered my dad, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I remember Jimmy. Everybody called him Rabbit.”

I’m not sure if she was as bewildered as I was or was just pretending, but for a while, I could not imagine why on earth they would call my dad Rabbit. I mean, yes, he was small (5′6″, though “my driver’s license says 5′7″”) and not terribly imposing in appearance (though he had a hellacious temper), but what a strange thing to call an old guy you work with.

I mentioned it to a department colleague, who blurted, “Well, rabbits have sex a lot.”

You know, this is not a story a daughter who was close with her father would enjoy hearing. It puts a parent in a very unflattering light. For me, though, you’d think it wouldn’t have bothered me so much. But it did.

It really did. And it does.

Now, when I think about all the times he was never around, I have to wonder, was he out schtupping the AA ladies? Is that where all his money went? Because it sure as hell didn't show in how we lived.

So, yeah, Happy Father’s Day, wherever you are now, Dad.