Fathers Day is coming up this week, and so is my dad\u2019s 85th birthday. I sure wish he were going to be here to celebrate both occasions, but he\u2019s been gone for 20 years.<\/p>\n
Digging through a bunch of old photos of him the other day, I came across one from Fathers Day 1964. I was startled. It was a photo of our entire family \u2013 me, my four brothers and mom dutifully facing the camera, posing the way conventional people do. Except for dad. He is facing backwards. Why was he facing backwards? Simply because it looked funny, I guess. Or maybe he was showing off a new haircut. There was no other reason.<\/p>\n
The photo startled me because I hadn\u2019t ever remembered seeing it before \u2013 and because for all these years, I thought that I had been the one in our family who invented posing in weird ways for photos.<\/p>\n
But as I looked through other old photos, I realized that shticky poses were a regular part of my dad\u2019s style. I found a picture of him from a charity golf tournament standing with three other guys in his foursome. As is the custom, the other three players are holding golf clubs. But my dad? He\u2019s holding a rake.<\/p>\n
In another, he\u2019s clutching one of those gadgets for retrieving golf balls from water hazards. In yet another, he\u2019s positioned himself in such a way that his face is blocked by an overhanging tree limb.<\/p>\n
The more I looked at the old snapshots, the more I got a real glimpse of the man who was my father. He was a big guy \u2013 6 foot 6 in his stocking feet, unless he was wearing stocking lifts and I didn\u2019t know it. So he often encouraged photo takers to purposely frame their shots of him so his head was partially cropped out. As a result, I have lots of pictures of him from the neck down.<\/p>\n
Leafing through dad\u2019s old school yearbooks, I discovered his penchant for photographic mischief started long ago. Since he was so tall, he\u2019s always seen in the back row of group scenes, sometimes showing his side profile while everyone else is facing the camera. Or occasionally, he can be seen purposely closing one eye or looking skyward. In one, he is leaning to one side, as if gravity affected him differently than for others.<\/p>\n
An older cousin of mine reminded that my dad didn\u2019t just restrict his whimsy to photo ops. One time, some schoolboys were walking by dad\u2019s clothing store. Suddenly, he came bolting out the door and handed them a toaster. \u201cThe bank closes in five minutes,\u201d he said to them. \u201cGet this down there as fast as you can! Tell them they can keep it if they\u2019ll open an account for you.\u201d The boys, never asking a question, grabbed the toaster and ran off to the bank in a sprint.<\/p>\n
It would be incorrect to say that my dad was never serious, because he was. He was a smart and respected businessman, and active in community organizations and charities. But he also seemed to have an instinct for whimsy \u2013 and making people happy.<\/p>\n
I remember strolling around our small town with him and watching the smiles spread across the faces of people as he\u2019d approach. He always had a ready grin, a new joke or a funny observation: \u201cMaybe I\u2019m seeing things, but wasn\u2019t that traffic light red just a moment ago?\u201d<\/p>\n
I noticed that he mostly focused on people who were elderly or infirm or just lonely. They needed a laugh, and he would give them one. As I think about it, that\u2019s not a bad example for a father to set.<\/p>\n
On vacation a couple of years ago, my wife and I saw a small sign along a hiking trail that read, \u201cArea closed behind this sign.\u201d So naturally I had her take a photo of me carefully trying to get a look at the backside of the sign.<\/p>\n
I thought that was pretty good until I found I was trumped yet again by another snapshot of my dad. This one was labeled on the back, \u201cCounty fair, 1967.\u201d It shows dad from the waist up, standing alongside one of those measurement signs at the entrance of an amusement ride: \u201cYou must be at least this (4\u2019 8\u201d) tall to ride.\u201d He, of course, must have carefully squatted from the waist down so he could appear to be just a half-inch too short to qualify. His face showed a look of crushing disappointment.<\/p>\n
It was the master at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fathers Day is coming up this week, and so is my dad\u2019s 85th birthday. I sure wish he were going to be here to celebrate both occasions, but he\u2019s been gone for 20 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-2726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2726"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}