I would like to acknowledge Tom Bodett and his story, “Inside Passage” on the Moth Radio Hour for inspiring me to write this. I think our fathers might have been twins separated at birth.
A few months ago, in the middle of a sleepless night, I happened upon an online article about bigotry in the South in the 50’s and 60’s. One of the people cited as an example could easily have been my father.
My dad was the bane of my existence during my teen years. He was strong-willed, outspoken, very opinionated, and a libertarian before there was such a thing. He was a Bircher, and an embarrassment to me. He never passed an opportunity to try and sway someone to his way of thinking and I learned to keep him at a distance, especially when it came to my social life. Long after his death I found a trove of letters he had written to many people including some of my college professors, politicians, and even J. Edgar Hoover.
I never rebelled in any great way.
I went away to college, married young, and never came to terms with my feelings for this difficult father of mine. Although he became less vocal as he aged, he never completely mellowed and died of brain cancer at 68. My sisters and I hoped the cancer was the cause of some of his eccentricities, which had grown worse over time. It wasn’t until after his death, with three children of my own, that I became curious about how he had become the man he was, and I started to piece together his story.
My father was the second oldest of five children, born in 1926 in rural East Texas. His family on both sides were farmers who had made their way to Texas in the early to mid-1800’s. Their livelihood as well as food came from a small one hundred and twenty acre farm.
Their family was hit hard as the Great Depression strengthened its grip on rural America. By 1932, farm income nationally was one-third of what it had been in 1929. In those same 3 years close to four hundred thousand farms were foreclosed on. My father told us stories of having sores from nutritional deficiencies, and sharing shoes with his brothers during the winter months in order to do the chores. To his dying day, his favorite bedtime snack was a piece of cornbread, submerged in a glass of milk, which is what their dinner usually consisted of. The few pictures that survive show him and his brothers dressed in short, ragged overalls.
By May of 1932, farm conditions had worsened to the point that the first program of the New Deal directed towards farmers was enacted. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), in a move to reduce farm production and restore prices, dictated that crops should be plowed under and livestock killed. Even though many farmers’ families were already going hungry, 6 million hogs were slaughtered and discarded in our country in September of 1933 alone.
The AAA was implemented on a local level by county agents. According to my father and his brother, a man in uniform showed up at their farm, explained to my grandfather that he needed to reduce the number of his stock and proceeded to shoot several of their hogs and their docile milk cow, whose extra milk and butter they sold for cash.
In 1935 hard times grew even worse when my grandfather became sick and died of a ruptured appendix. My 33 year-old grandmother was left with five children ages 6 months to 10 years, and no ability to keep their depleted farm running. Ironically, by January of 1936 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the Agricultural Adjustment Act unconstitutional.
Tragedy continued to plague their family when my father’s oldest brother died from spinal meningitis, and his youngest sister died from strep throat. The community and family did what they could to help, but everyone was having a hard time.
In 1938, my grandmother took her remaining three children to Dallas, Texas where she enrolled them In Buckner Orphans Home and began work there as a cook. When my father graduated from high school they were able to rent a house and live on their own.
By this time, WWII had started, and my father and his under-age brother both enlisted. They joined the effort as the tide was turning and came back to their mom and younger sister in 1945.
A bright spot in this story is that my mother and father met at church in Dallas and were married in 1947. Also, he took advantage of the GI bill and went to college, getting a degree in accounting.
I will probably never know exactly when my father’s strong beliefs took hold.
I heard from a family member that he had wanted to work for the FBI, but for whatever reason he did not. I know my first memories of his strong opinions emerged during the McCarthy era, when he truly felt we were being threatened by Communist Russia. This is when he became involved in the John Birch Society. He harbored a strong antipathy toward FDR and big government his entire life. When my husband and I visited Hyde Park several years ago part of me felt like a traitor.
I am now 66 years old. My father has been dead for almost 25 years. If hating communism made him a bigot, maybe he was one. I see now that he was a good father in many ways. He was hard-working, gentle, supportive of our choices, and we never knew want of any kind. I believe now that he was scarred as a child. Those difficult childhood years were likely too much to overcome completely. He knew poverty, hunger, loss, and death in a day when there were no support networks other than family and the church. He could have turned out a lot worse.
I will always regret the distance between me and my difficult father during many years of my life. Hopefully in telling this story, there will be some who delve into the past and find a way to connect with their difficult dads before it is too late. I wish I had.
—
Do you have previously published work that you would like to syndicate on The Good Men Project? Click here:
◊♦◊
Photo credit: Nicolas Gras/Unsplash