Nov. 11:
The following is over in the thread "Stories", but is appropriate for yesterday. I really miss my old man. After the onset of dementia he turned into a sort of idiot saint (no disparagement intended; reference to Dostoevsky) & extremely easy to get along with. Wild about Mary, which just shows his good taste. Despite his short-term memory loss he had an excellent memory for what had gone on before, & was full of really good tales. We really appreciated his tenure in our house while it lasted.
I warned you...
My old man was a lawyer. He practiced in the now-obsolete field of Interstate Commerce Law, so while Perry Mason was comforting the afflicted & afflicting the comfortable (apologies to HLM) my Dad was filing suits against evil trucking companies with established routes who had the temerity to object to his clients' manifest need to obtain authority to haul the route in question or for excellent trucking companies who justly needed authority to haul a route in spite of those obviously unjust objections from previously established route haulers. From month to month, sometimes those in contention were the same companies. He didn't tell amusing stories about his Law practice.
He did tell amusing stories about his years in the USAAC during WWII as a tech Sgt. These were all in keeping with the V-mail cartoons he sent my Mother, & he was an excellent cartoonist. I'm prejudiced, but I put him in the Bill Mauldin class. The V-mails themselves have all disintegrated over time, of course, but he had them duplicated before they were gone, & later I had those duplications restored & duplicated themselves, so I have a nice little collection of very funny art.
His stories told of a war consisting of back-to-back amusing anecdotes, ranging from North Africa at the beginning to France & Germany by VE day. He was a radioman, & spent all his time on the ground, always apparently, by context, in the rear with the gear.
In the early '90s I started a software company developing products for diagnostic imaging. He became the treasurer. We were to compete in the '93Windows World Open. Microsoft wanted minibios of the officers. My Father, in his, asserted that he & some USAAC major were responsible for our initial development of close support tactical bombing doctrine.
He'd never suggested any such thing before. I didn't really want to call him on it, but he had been a little flaky since a bypass proceedure a few years before, so I watered down his statement some, making the assertion a little less cartegorical. We won the competition in our category but the company ultimately failed.
The years passed & he became increasingly flaky. He was a non-compliant type 2 diabetic, & developed pretty severe small vessel brain disease, leading to significant dementia manifested primarily by profound short-term memory loss. It got to the point that he couldn't take care of my Mother anymore, & she was developing what ultimately turned out to be completely crippling rheumatoid arthritis, complicated by COPD. We moved them into our house, where they had an aparment in our basement.
She died on New Year's Eve '99. He died in 2003. Got his service record for a VA headstone. Looks like he wasn't exaggerating much about his service record, although I couldn't completely confirm that bombing doctrine stuff. He had also won both the bronze & silver stars, plus a Heart, little somethings he forgot to mention, I guess. His commendations & wound were awarded for directing air traffic from exposed positions. Guess it might be true, after all. Got him a little shadow-box shrine, of sorts, now on the wall in the den.
Good for him. I don't know whether I want to kick his ass or give him a hug for keeping it secret.
The Prof
Prof
