Father, son ended up on same page

An anniversary passed quietly a few days back.

On March 16, 1983 — not long before midnight would shift the calendar to St. Patrick’s Day — my father died. He was 71. Had he lived about eight months longer, he would have been 72.

But he did not.

That — and this is very hard for me to wrap my arms around — was 36 years ago.

I was 34 at the time, not a heck of a lot older than our youngest daughter.

In other words, I was still a kid in many, many ways.

Dad was born in 1911, the same year my wife’s father was born.

Dad was the second of eight children born to a Presbyterian minister and his wife, who had trained to be a Latin teacher.

Dad was born in Thorntown, west of here by about 100 miles. But when the Portland church called, the family moved to Jay County.

That was in the 1920s. By the early 1930s — with the Depression going full steam — he graduated from Earlham College and set out into the world.

It was not, to say the least, an opportunity-rich environment.

He sold soap door-to-door for Lever Brothers, riding the trains with other salesmen and learning the etiquette of cleaning up for yourself when you shared a rail car bathroom with more than a dozen other guys. That was just one of many lessons he taught me over the years.

At one point, when he was sharing digs with his older brother James in Washington, D.C., Dad landed a gig as chauffeur to a member of Congress.

Her name was Jeanette Rankin, and she was a fierce and unflappable pacifist.

I never knew what lured him back to Portland, though I suspect it was my mother.

She was seven years younger. There’s an old family story about my father having to hold my mother on his lap in the car when she was little more than an infant and he was a boy who wanted to be doing anything in the world other than holding a little girl in his lap.

At any rate, he came back.

He went to work at The Jay Garment Company as a bundle boy. The Jay, in those days, was essentially a manufacturer of overalls and work clothes.

A bundle boy was the bottom of the food chain, doing manual labor and hustling all the time.

It must have been humbling for a guy with a recent college degree. But this was the Depression, and a job was a job.

About the time the decade wound down, my parents married. My brother Steve was born in August 1941. My sister Linda followed a couple of years later.

Dad, meanwhile, kept moving up the ladder at The Jay.

By the time I was born in 1948, he was plant manager and secretary of the corporation, having benefitted from the mentoring of J. Arthur Williams.

But he walked away from that post in 1959 to become publisher of The Commercial Review.

My parents had acquired The Redkey Times-Journal in 1946 from the late Max Coble. It wasn’t much of an operation, but it had a number on a waiting list to receive a Linotype machine. Those machines had been rationed because of the need for steel in World War II.

The Times-Journal stumbled along for a few years, then my folks launched The Graphic on Nov. 17, 1949, my first birthday.

It was the first shot in what proved to be a newspaper war lasting nearly 10 years.

In May 1959, The Graphic won that war, purchasing The Commercial Review and the Dunkirk News and Sun.

All of that might have been enough, but in 1967 my father called the family together again for one more leap into the unknown. He had been offered the position of vice president for development at Earlham, and he wanted to talk about it before he said yes.

He said yes and took the job in the spring of 1968.

It was half a dozen years later that I was lured back to my hometown with limited skills but a desire to make sure the community had a credible, thoughtful newspaper.

That was 1974.

It would be nice to say that the years between my return and my father’s death were all sunshine and light. But that was not the case.

More than once I pounded out letters of resignation on an old beat-up typewriter.

But we always managed to talk it out. And by the end, 36 years ago, we were on the same page. 

And I was incredibly honored to be on that page with him.