How Am I Supposed to Know?' 10 Things About My Dad (#3)

Here's the 'When We Last Saw Our Hero' catch-up: During a TV show set in Kentucky, I asked daughter #2 who was born in Kentucky, and she just shrugged. When I exasperatedly told her that my dad was born in Kentucky, she just as exasperatedly questioned, 'How am I supposed to know anything about him?' So I'm scribbling down 10 things for her to know about my dad. I posted Number One and Number Two earlier.

Number Two Postscript
I'm 6' 1" and usually around 210 pounds, which is about two inches shorter than Mohammed Ali and right in the middle of his range of fighting weight. After my last post, someone described my dad as 'larger than life,' and I laughed. He was 5' 8" and probably weighed 150-160 pounds most of his adult life. Even at that size, when we'd watch Ali, Joe Frazier, Sonny Liston and all the other heavyweight boxers, he'd tell me that he could take them all. And maybe with my height and my heavyweight bulk, he could've. Or, if you read my last post, you'd know that he would've at least made it entertaining.

Number Three
My dad's the one on the right, and nobody knows who Kelley is except that the two of them celebrated V.E. Day (Victory in Europe, ending World War II in Europe). He joined the Coast Guard in 1939 in St. Louis, Missouri, before the United States entered the war, and told me that he enlisted when he saw a poster of a ship-to-ship rescue. He later mentioned an additional sense of urgency to his enlistment.

Prior to joining the Coast Guard, my dad worked as a truck driver, delivering ice to homes and businesses in Western Kentucky. I'd like to think that patriotic duty and the lure of adventure on the open seas drew him to the Coast Guard . . . but the real story seems to involve speeding along a dark roadway, skidding the ice truck on its side around a curve and his sneaking away to St. Louis.

During the war, he became a Chief Petty Officer in the engine room of a frigate, the Tallapoosa, escorting convoys in and out of North Africa. He also spent time in Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

His stories of World War II were always funny. One of the best occurred during shore leave in Oran, Algeria, when an Algerian military policeman stopped a truckload of his shipmates. A buddy of my dad's stepped out of the back of the truck, assuring them that he'd handle it. He casually walked up to the soldier looking eager to improve international relations, then knocked him out with one punch and returned to the party in the back of the truck (I later saw this same episode in a movie, but you have to believe your dad).

My dad showed me how he cooked 'Frog in a Hole,' atop a diesel engine. It's an egg and toast combination that I passed on to my kids and that daughter #1's friends love for her to cook. He talked of friends and wild antics that made me believe that he loved his military days.

During my senior year in high school, I began recognizing the signs that our family really didn't have the money to send me to college. At the time, I wanted to go to the University of Texas, like my cousin Jack, and eventually become an architect.

I knew that my dad loved his days in the Coast Guard, so I stopped by the Navy recruiter's trailer in Port Arthur's Jefferson City Shopping Center. This was a major step for me because the Vietnam War had ended just a couple of years earlier; and I'd spent most of my junior high and high school life scared to death of being drafted and hauled off to a place that I understood only by the nightly news score cards (we always won, killing and wounding more of them than they killed and wounded of us).

I told the recruiter that I'd like to be an architect and that I'd heard the Navy would pay for me to go to school. He assured me that the Navy would pay for me to go to school to become an engineer, which he told me was pretty much the same thing.

Brochures in hand -- probably featuring photos of a '70s version of a ship-to-ship rescue -- and expecting elation from my dad, I excitedly told him and my mom of my plans. His only response was, 'Don't worry. We'll find a way to pay for college.'

I was shocked and didn't understand until about 10 years later, when my dad checked into an alcoholic recovery unit. My older sister and I had never experienced any kind of abuse, neglect or embarassment because of his drinking, so this took us as a HUGE surprise.

He was out of his room, when I arrived for a visit, and I picked up a handwritten note off his night stand. When I asked about the note, he told me that patients in the unit talked in groups about their addiction-related issues, then wrote letters of encouragement to whoever spoke during that session.

This letter said something like: 'George, I know it must have been awful for you during the war to see men burning in the water, screaming for help, and you couldn't do anything.'

A German submarine had sunk a ship in his convoy, trapping its crew and passengers in a sea of burning oil and diesel fuel. His dreams of an exciting ship-to-ship rescue had become a decades-long nightmare.

I don't think I'm ready to share all of Number Three with daughter #2. In her very sweet, caring way, she'd ask, 'Hey, buddy. What's wrong? Why are you crying?'