Memories of my Dad,
Chuck Okonski

Updated 12 June 2004

I think a lot about my dad because there's a lot of my dad in me. This may sound like a self-evident truth, but I mean it in a way that goes beyond drawing a simple family tree. Several times I've dragged my half-awake carcass out of bed to the bathroom mirror and, yawning and scratching my hairy spots, was electrically awakened by the kind of thrill you get when you turn a corner and are surprised by somebody you didn't know was there, because I thought I was looking at a reflection of Dad. Even the bugged-eyed look of surprise on the guy in the mirror was unmistakably Dad's.

I've got a crazy idea that maybe there's some kind of recording mechanism born into you, and your parents and their parents and your whole gagglish family brood become imprinted on it over the years to come back to you later, not just as a memory, but as a life. One day I planted my fists on my hips as I was overlooking some scene of mayhem the kids were committing, and I heard myself bellow, "What the hell's going on here?" in exactly the same tone of voice Dad used on me and my brother many times before. I froze where I stood. My mouth hung open on the last word. "Oh My God," I thought, shocked, "that was dad speaking! I'm channeling my dad!"

Hundreds of these little living reminders surface in my day-to-day doings. My brother says they happen to him, too; he calls them visits from Dad. When Dad's reflection surprises me in the mirror, the impression doesn't quickly fade; even after my eyes have cleared a bit, I can still see his sandy-colored face, his sweep of jet hair, his W.C. Fields nose, and that wide-awake but not quite focused look he used to give me, eyes as wide as tea saucers, when I woke him up from a sound sleep. He never did like it when I did that, even when he asked me to.

Chuck Okonski was from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Well, not really, but that's what he sometimes told people from out of state, because it was too much trouble to explain where Algoma was. You'd have to draw a map or explain what Wisconsin looked like, and it became a geography lesson. It's much easier, Dad told me, just to say you're from Green Bay, because nearly everybody knows where that is. And we actually lived there for some years, so it's not even much of a white lie. Dad was actually born somewhere near Kewaunee, Wisconsin; might've even been in Kewaunee. He said he was from Casco, and his mother always said they were from Pilsen, but for as long as I knew Dad's family, they all lived in and around Algoma.

My first memories of Dad are in the basement of the house on South Roosevelt Street in Green Bay. He had a darkroom down there, and kept the basement warm with a coal-fired pot-bellied stove. Pot-bellied stoves are straightforward and no-nonsense, like Dad. They could also burn one heck of a memory into you, again, sort of like Dad. When he built a fire in the stove, he checked the draught by holding his cupped hand a fraction of an inch from the flue. I had no idea what "the draught" was or how to check it — it looked to me like he was just slapping his hand on the bare metal pipe, so one time, just to help out Dear Ol' Dad, that's what I did. The heat immediately seared all seven layers of skin and probably cooked a good bit of the meat in the palm of my hand. Never felt the urge to do that again. I was no more than six years old.

The darkroom was in a corner of the basement. I have an irrational fear of the dark, but I've liked photography ever since I stood in that tiny room and watched images appear like magic on the papers Dad dipped into the trays filled with slippery soup. "Watch it now," he'd say, nearly whispering, when he knew the developer would bring the image up, "here it comes!" And a portrait of my mother or a snapshot of the family at the lakeside would suddenly fade into view, like people stepping toward you through a fog. I dabble in photography from time to time, and I've always loved that moment.

Dad had the simplest kind of darkroom: a basic enlarger, a counter top crowded with pans, each filled with its own smelly, slippery chemical bath. He rinsed the prints in a pan in the sink that was connected to the faucet with a hose, and was shot full of holes down one side, to let the water run out. To dry the photos, Dad flattened them under a canvas against a heated stainless steel drum that looked like a funhouse mirror. A thin, misty steam rose up through the canvas as the prints dried. They went in limp and dripping wet, and came out hot and stiff as starch.

He may have had more than one camera back then, but the one I remember from that time was a Yashica 44 twin-lens reflex, which today is recognized as a very well-built medium-format camera, on a par with a Graflex. It was a grey steel box with two lenses on the front, one over the other, shotgun style, which was the "twin-lens" part of the name. The bottom lens took the picture; the top lens focused a duplicate image of what you were pointed at on a ground glass. It's so unlike cameras today that it's a bit hard to imagine. The ground glass was a sort of smoky window on the top of the camera, so you could compose the picture. A metal shade flipped up around the ground glass to make the image easy to see.

Dad used to let me play with his Yashica quite a bit. It had so many cool little doodads: the flip top and a self-timer, a folding crank on the side that advanced the film, and complicated levers that set the shutter speed and the f-stop. For his professional work in later years, he mostly used 35mm SLRs. They're nice cameras but not very interesting gadgets, which may be why he bought another Yashica many years later — although he probably would have explained that the larger film it used would have produced a finer photo.

He told me once that he sold photos to one of the Milwaukee papers, I can't remember if it was the Journal or the Sentinel. He said it was a lucky break; he knew a guy at the paper who asked him to send in some photos. Dad kept sending the photos in, and the guy kept on printing them. Then, the guy at the paper moved on to another job. Dad sent in another batch of photos, but the new guy didn't buy them. He said he could never sell another photo to the newspaper again.

When we lived in Green Bay, Dad was a newsreel photographer for one of the Green Bay television stations, WFRV-TV, Channel 5. If my memory isn't completely whacked, we lived just blocks from the broadcasting studio. I think the building was a single story, low brick affair with a reception area, newsroom, darkroom, studio, and that was about it. Most of today's Qwik-E-Marts are bigger. Dad took me there at least once. I don't have any solid memories of the place, but I can tell you that there is nothing cooler than having free run of a television station when you're five years old. It was, at the time, the coolest Johnny Quest adventure I'd ever been on.

I have no idea how often dad was allowed to turn his brat loose like that. I remember the desks in newsroom, and a visit to the broadcasting studio. The anchorman and the meteorologist said hi to me — they weren't exactly nationally-known celebrities, but I was awestruck anyway, because I saw them on the tube every night. Dad read the news for the television cameras at least once, although Mom says he used to do that all the time. In my memory, it was a big deal.

Shooting the newsreels seemed to be the biggest thing he did there. They must have had other newsreel photographers, but he had awards hanging on his wall, so he must have been pretty good at it. Two brass plaques, and two small trophies, proclaimed him newsreel photographer of the year for two years in a row.

He did his newsreel work with a brown, hand-held Honeywell 16mm film camera. It was driven by a clock spring that he wound with a crank on one side that looked like a chrome-plated butterfly wing. He use to sit in a small box behind the scoreboard at Lambeau Field and shoot Packers games through a small loophole. It got so cold up there that the oil in the gears of his Honeywell turned to glue if he didn't tuck it into his coat between shots. Sometimes even that didn't keep it from freezing up, and he'd have to retreat to the relative warmth of the men's room, where the floor was covered in ice from the burst pipes. From a whole football game or similar event he'd shoot two, maybe three reels of filmed highlights; each reel was just three minutes long. From those three reels they'd show no more than thirty seconds of highlights on the television.

On one of our trips to the television studios, Dad showed me the station's darkroom and the machine, big as a city bus, that developed his newsreel film. Years ago, my brother found a fourteen-inch reel of 16mm color movie film packed to the rim with the scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. More often than not, it seems, Pete or I are in the shot, standing on the deck of a Lake Michigan charter boat, holding up a big fish, or peering down into a hole cut through the ice on the frozen surface of Green Bay.

Once, my dad appears on shaky footage, driving an old silver Chrysler while his lips move silently, telling me how to operate the camera.

The basement in Green Bay had one other Dad-like artifact — he had a phonograph that looked as though he built it himself. The turntable was mounted on a rough plywood box. I think the speakers were in plywood boxes, too. I don't know that he knocked together this frankenstereo himself, but I like to think he did.

Dad loved stereo equipment. I don't know what happened to the plywood stereo, but it seems to me there was always a tape player or phonograph around for him to listen to his records. His taste in music was wildly eclectic. Dad seemed to love jazz most, but he would listen to just about anything at least once. The one album I clearly remember him playing on that plywood turntable was Olatunji, Drums of Passion. I'm not kidding. When he put that one on, Mom and Dad and I would hop around the basement floor and howl words that almost sounded like the African tribal music. I can still yell most of the words to "Akiwowo." Honestly.

As I said, Dad listened to a lot of different kinds of music, and what he liked he kept listening to, so his collection was full of polka, show tunes, classical, instrumentals, honky-tonk, and lots and lots of jazz. He was a nut for classical dixieland jazz, and had an impressive collection of recording of the jazz greats. I don't know how many of his Satchmo recordings I have, but it's a lot. He had a boatload of big band recordings — Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Les Brown — and what I'd call piano lounge music — Anita O'Day and Ella Fitzgerald.

His collections were impressive, and although it seemed as though he would listen to just about anything, it still stunned me that a man of his experience and diverse musical taste should consider Neil Diamond the be-all end-all of music.

Neil Diamond, in case you're somehow unfamiliar with is work, sings the kind of music you might belt out on a dare after getting loaded in a karaoke bar on vacation in the boonies somewhere. It's awful stuff, if you ask me, but Dad loved Neil Diamond. He declared that Neil was the pinnacle of musical showmanship, or something similarly outrageous. I was sure he was putting me on at first, but when I saw how many Neil Diamond recordings were in his collection, I had to take him at his word.

To this day, I actually feel a little guilty about instantly, almost reflexively, turning the radio dial whenever I hear a Neil Diamond tune, because I know that Dad would've wanted to listen to that. I still turn the dial, but alwasy after a moment's hesitation.

Guilty Admission: I once claimed that there wasn't enough beer in the world to make me sing a Neil Diamond tune. That is no longer true. I sang "Sweet Caroline" with a bunch of drunken skiiers in a karaoke bar in northern Japan. The stain will be upon me forever.

Dad not only loved to listen to music, he had a deeply burning desire to play it, as well. He owned a guitar for the longest time, and I have dim memories of him strumming one or two chords on it while accompanying himself as he sang, "Did You Ever Hear A Mockingbird Cry?" If I had to guess, I'd say the last time I heard him play it was in the mid-1960's. I said it was a dim memory. Much later on, he tried to learn to play piano. I honestly don't recall how much success he had with that. He used to play trumpet in high school, and my high school band director, Mr. Erickson, recruited Dad to play in a city band that never quite took off. The one time I tried to sneak in to hear them play, Mr. E chased me out of the room, waving his baton as a weapon.

So, unfortunately for me, I had the idea in my head that Dad's musical abilities approached nil. Then, one weekend while we were visiting my grandmother — his mother — she teased him into picking up an old accordion that had been sitting on a shelf in her living room for I don't know how long. I thought it was just decoration. She begged him to play her a tune, and you could have knocked me over with a feather when he belted out The Red Handkerchief Waltz. As soon as he finished that one, grandma asked for another, and he belted out that one, too. I don't remember how many tunes he played that night, and he couldn't always finish them, but they sounded every bit as good as anything Frankie Yankovic could crank out on a Sunday afternoon.

During the Great Depression, Dad's family survived by running a farm, a general store, and a tavern — not all at once, but I think they had the store and the tavern at the same time. Dad provided some entertainment, and made a few coins, by playing the accordion in the tavern. He said he also got paid to clean out the spittoons — not much, but there's probably no amount of money that makes cleaning spittoons seem worthwhile.

I remember once Dad had a hundred-dollar bill in the cash box at the newspaper office. I could count on one hand then the number of hundred-dollar bills I'd seen at that point, so I kind of made a fuss over it. It reminded him of a time during the depression when his dad took him into the basement of their house with a cigar box tucked under one arm. Grandpa shushed him, then slowly opened the box to show Dad a hundred dollars in cash that he'd scraped together. It was so much money that he didn't want to expose it in the light of day, but he just had to show somebody.

On the same visit to Grandma's that Dad played the accordion, she told me how Dad started school. After Grandpa got a job teaching, they moved into a house in town just down the street from the schoolhouse. On the first day of school, all the kids passed right by their house, and Dad, playing out in the front yard, got up and walked to school with them. Grandma couldn't figure out where he'd gone, but somehow thought to look in at the school, where Dad was with the kindergarteners. She wanted to take him home, but the teacher said, "Don't worry about it, he'll get tired of it and go home."

But he didn't. And he went back again the next day, and every day for the rest of the school year. Because he started a year early, and because he skipped a grade later on, he was sixteen when he graduated from high school on D-Day. He remembered his mother woke him up that morning by shouting up the stairs that the Allies were invading.

After he graduated from high school, Dad served a little more than two years in the Navy. I don't remember if I heard that from him first, or if I found his Navy photo album and asked about it. I loved that album. It was leather-bound, with some kind of colored flocking painted on the front cover. "Aloha from Hawaii" was impressed in the flocking over a picture of a hula dancer under palm trees. The album was filled with tiny pictures, most of them about an inch square, of people he served with on two small weather ships based out of Pearl Harbor.

He didn't tell me very many stories about the Navy. I don't know if he thought it would make boring stories, or if he thought he hadn't done anything for two years and didn't want to admit it. Whenever he did loosen up and give me a story, I ate up whatever details I could get out of him.

The weather ship was a PCE, a patrol boat purpose-built to chase submarines. A lot of the anti-submarine weapons were still on board, mostly depth charges, and a few of the photos show the crew at the anti-aircraft batteries during drills, but Dad joined the Navy after the war ended, so the ship never came under attack while he was assigned to it. For their current mission, taking weather readings, they patrolled a wide area of the ocean, mostly adrift. Dad tracked weather balloons with a radar. It wasn't the most challenging job.

To try to break up the days, Dad sat on the fantail and played his trumpet. He said the ship's executive officer (XO) didn't like him, and the feeling was mutual. Dad knew the XO hated it when he played the trumpet, and at some point the XO realized that Dad was trying to get under his skin, so he took Dad's mouthpiece away.

Dad was a radar operator on the ship; he not only knew how to run the radar set, he knew how to fix it, and that meant he knew what made it work. After the XO confiscated his trumpet's mouthpiece, Dad picked a few essential vacuum tubes out of the back of the radar set and flung them overboard. Now, this part I'm not sure about: He couldn't have been the only radar operator on board; somebody else must have known how to fix the radar set. But Dad says the radar was out until they returned to Pearl, and he got his revenge.

Or almost. The XO must've realized something was up, because he put Dad on restriction. Dad laughed when he told me that story. "That meant I couldn't leave the ship," he said. "We were in the middle of the Pacific! Where was I going to go?"

And those are just about the only stories I ever heard Dad tell about his two years in the Navy. Sometimes, something we were doing would remind him of an experience he had in the Navy — we went fishing a lot, for instance, and one day while we were talking about the varieties of fish and how they tasted, he threw shark and flying fish into the conversation, fish he'd eaten while he was stationed in the Pacific. "Tastes like chicken," he said with a laugh.

If there is anything I do these days that reminds me of Dad, it's photography and fishing, although I don't do enough of either any more. It seems to me we used to go fishing a lot, usually by dropping the boat into the Wolf river at Fremont and boating to whereever the fishing was good that weekend, or sometimes by driving a couple hours to a lake Dad heard of through the grapevine.

Dad experimented with all kinds of gear, rods and tackle, live bait, but even though it sometimes happened that Dad caught quite a few fish when he went into the great outdoors, I got the impression that he was not in it so much for the fish as he was for the cooler of beer and sandwiches. This impression was especially strong when he was ice fishing.

He went ice fishing a lot. Well, more than I would have. He inherited his dad's fishing shanty, a box about the size of two telephone booths. The idea was that you drilled your hole in the ice, parked this shanty over the hole, fired up the stove, then set your lines and settled in, waiting for the fish to strike. The way I remember it, though, ice fishing was almost as much about socializing as it was about catching fish. Dad rarely stayed in the shanty. He'd fish a little bit, then he'd go have a look-see who else had a shanty on the ice. The shanties all had signs with the names of the fishermen on them, so Dad could find his buddies pretty quickly. Then they'd talk about what fish were biting, and what kind of bait they were biting on. It took a while to properly trade this information; usually one beer, or at least a smoke.

And that was the best part of ice fishing, really. I don't remember him catching more than a few fish, but I seem to clearly remember that there were always snacks and drinks on hand. I might be doing him wrong, but I don't think I'm that far off the beam. And that wasn't just Dad. My impression is that most fishermen were like that, and with any luck, they still are.

In the Spring, when the rivers of central Wisconsin are in full flood, all the grown men are filling sandbags to keep the rising waters off the main streets of their towns. No, only kidding. Nothing's going to keep the floodwaters off main street, so when the waters of Wisconsin rivers rise, the men do the only thing that makes sense — pack up their tackle, put their boats in the river, drop a line in the water, and pull in as many walleye as they can.

Or, if you're like my dad (though few people are), you get a big old raft made of about a dozen 50-gallon oil drums lashed together under a platform with a chicken coop on top for shelter. You tie it up on a river bank, stock it with plenty of junk food, and go fishing all night long. It was the "all night long" part that Pete and I thought was pretty cool. Although I would later in life be paid a great deal of money by the military to stay awake all night long, it was never as much fun as going upriver into the teeth of free-floating semi-submurged elm trees and jagged chunks of broken-up ice in a wooden boat to catch walleye pike.

The nights were about a million years long, because walleye fishing, like war, is 99.9% boredom, and one-tenth of one percent all-out batshit chaos. We passed most of the night just sitting in the chicken coop, staring out at a row of cane poles hung along the the rail. Walleye move upstream in inconceivably huge waves; if walleye were birds, they'd be carrier pigeons, blotting out the sun as they passed. Since it was the middle of the night, though, the only sign that you were smack in the middle of a walleye run was when all of the cane poles suddenly went BOING! and bent into huge question marks.

That's when the raft became a scene from a Keystone Cops movie. Pete, Dad and I climbed all over each other trying to pull in the poles, unhook the walleyes, and bait the hooks and swing them back into the water. When a run of walleye came by, there were so many fish in the water that the cane pole would BOING! as soon as the hook hit the water. It was a Mad Minute that went on and on.

I was no good at unhooking them. A walleye's got a sharp row of teeth and a face that make barracudas look cute and cuddly, so I was a little timid at first. "Grab their tongues," Dad said, and showed me how to clamp a walleye's tongue under my thumb. They can't bite down when you do that. When it was over, there was a huge mess of walleyes on the stringer and three huffing, wide-eyed guys who were awake and upright mostly thanks to huge jolts of adrenaline surging through each of their brains.

Of course, to get to the raft and do all this midnight fishing, we had to have a boat. To go fishing, most people got flat-bottomed aluminum boats with swivel chairs, powerful engines to get there, and tiny electric engines for trolling. Dad got a sixteen-foot wooden v-hull that was built when Eisenhower was president, and an outboard engine that could develop about eleven horsepower. I feel certain that he found it in some farmer's shed and paid a bargain price for it. The engine died on about the third or fourth trip we made — Dad gingerly nursed the boat up the river at about three miles an hour while the outboard banged away on one cylinder, trailed by a thick cloud of blue smoke. That gave him an excuse to buy a seventy-five horsepower replacement that made the little boat go VOOM! And he used to let me drive it. Whoa.

I couldn't have been more than thirteen, maybe fourteen the first time he told me to take the wheel. I have no idea whether or not I was ready for that kind of responsibilty, and probably Dad didn't, either, but he knew that it was crazy fun for me, and in the end he was a big kid who liked big toys. Got to share them with somebody. I was lucky enough to be there.

At first, I'm sure he had me just hold the wheel while he pulled up the anchor or tied up to a dock; he liked to let me play, but he wasn't dumb. But after a while he let me actually turn the wheel as we were moving, probably on a lake where there was almost nothing to bump into. When I recall the memories of him showing me how to handle the boat, I hear equal parts calm explanation and shouting. When Dad taught me almost anything, he did a lot of it at high volume. He was not always a patient man, but he was persistant, so he kept at me until eventually we were roaring down the river at high speed.

Here's something I didn't know about wooden boats: They leak. Ours leaked like a seive. Dad said that was normal. I believed him, because I didn't know squat about boats. For all I knew, he didn't, either, but he acted like he did. For instance, after we'd been out on the river all day, so much water would leak in that it slopped over the top of the floorboards. To let it out, there was a small rubber drain plug in the back that we'd pull after taking the boat out of the water.

One day, as we were speeding along the river, Dad stepped to the back of the boat and casually pulled the plug. I couldn't see what he'd done, so when I asked and he told me, I just about peed my pants. But there was no danger: At that speed, the boat was hydroplaning, skimming along the water so fast that the hull was almost entirely above the surface. The bilge water just drained out. "Whatever you do, don't slow down," Dad said firmly, then started laughing. It would never have occurred to me that you could pull the plug while the boat was in the water.

We named our antique wooden boat Charlie Brown and took it all over Wisconsin — down the Wolf river from Fremont to Oshkosh, and up and down the Fox river; to dozens of other lakes all across Wisconsin; and out onto the big lake, Lake Michigan. We hooked it up behind the camper and dragged it along when we went on vacation. You've never seen anything scary until you've seen my dad back down a boat launch ramp in a pickup truck that's already crushed under the weight of a camper the size of a Wal-Mart.

I remember driving up to the cinder-block ranch house in Manawa, Wisconsin. Other people remember this differently, but I for some reason remember seeing him standing in the front window in his underwear, brushing his teeth, as we pulled into the driveway. Why I should remember that and not remember that my grandmother was in the car is beyond me.

We moved to Manawa because Dad bought the local newspaper, The Manawa Advocate, a small-town tabloid that was usually only twelve or sixteen pages, and was filled mostly with grocery advertisements and social columns. Because the Advocate was a family-run operation, dad took me into the darkroom and became my first employer when he showed me how to develop film and photos and do all the other darkroom magic for the newspaper. We worked together in the darkroom for years.

The Advocate office was a high-ceilinged brick building that probably dated from 1900 and hadn't been updated since. Dad and I spent quite a few nights rewiring the electricity, building a drier to hold the photos and negatives from the darkroom work, knocking shelves together — whatever odd jobs needed doing. Dad was a pretty handy man, when he had to be, and he indulged his gadget fetish by collecting lots of tools. He built himself a workbench in the basement, and kept another workbench in the garage, and hardly used either of them until it was a matter of life or death.

We left Green Bay when I was six, when Dad got a job working for a tabloid newspaper in Marquette, Michigan. For some time he was working there while we still lived in Green Bay, and he shuttled back and forth a couple times before we took the trouble to finally move to Marquette. We were there only two years, because the newspaper folded — little accidental humor there, sorry. There wasn't much in Marquette to keep us there, I guess, so we moved back to Wisconsin. One relic of Marquette that we brought with us and even kept for a little while was the big green truck.

I don't remember why we had the big green truck. We already had a car, a gray Chrysler two-door sedan that we bought after Dad totalled out a little Corvair he drove when he hit a deer one night, a story that I learned years later. My uncle Jim was dumped out in the countryside in his underwear, back before fraternities could be sued for that kind of fun. When he could talk somebody into letting him use their phone, he called Mom, who sent Dad out in the Corvair. Dad was driving Jim back to campus when they hit a deer. Corvairs are tiny little cars, about as substantial as VW Beetles; hit anything bigger than a poodle in one, and it'll fold up like an accordion, which ours did. So that's how we ended up with the Chrysler.

I know that story, but not the story of the truck. When the Marquette paper went toes-up, Dad got a temporary job at a publishing house in Ishpeming, quite a drive away; maybe he used the truck as a commuter. It would've been a poor choice, because it was a real junker, an old utility vehicle that probably belonged to the power and light company before a plumber drove it nearly to death. I'd be surprised to find out he paid more than fifty bucks for it. It never ran worth a darn. To start it, Dad sometimes had to get under the hood and short circuit the starter coil with a screwdriver. The engine was so worn out that, apparently to lighten the workload, somebody helped Dad cut the insides out of the steel storage lockers on the back end. They did a poor job, leaving ragged, rusted edges all over. My mother told me the rusty steel was teeming with tetanus and if I climbed on it, I'd get lockjaw. Scared the crap out of me. I climbed on it anyway.

Dad did what he could to keep the truck in good working order. The garage behind the duplex had a grease pit, and he'd let me crawl down there with him while he reached up into the dark guts of the truck crouching over us. When he clapped a box wrench over a stubborn nut and reefed on it he would focus on the job by sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. I've never seen anybody else quite match his expression. He bared his upper teeth and clamped them over his tongue and lower lip, brows arched high, eyes filled with desperate certainty that he was going to skin his knuckles.

I think that we had the big green truck in Manawa, so he must have driven it all the way down there from Marquette, the crazy goober. And some time shortly after, it went to junker heaven. In a way, I think Dad missed it, because he bought an old jeep. I think he just liked having a junker around that he could tinker with.

The jeep was a 1943 Willys that some farmer had used for a while to get around his back forty, then stashed in his barn for years. It didn't run very well, but one of his friends helped him put in a new engine, and then it still didn't run very well. The only time I remember him driving it was when we went out to a riverfront lot that we owned near Royalton. On one of those trips, he let me drive a bit. I'm pretty sure that jeep was the first car I drove. The road down there wasn't traveled much, so Dad let me have the wheel and I went maybe a quarter mile without going in the ditch or hitting anything. Cool.

I've met people of Irish stock who practically brag about their hair-trigger tempers and their willingness to start a fight at the drop of a badly-chosen word. Every one of those guys was a shandy-drinking sissy compared to my dad, who had a temper that, when it flared up, could quickly melt boilerplate. His face would burst into flame and steam would shoot from his ears as he gave either Pete or I a good bawling out, which he was as likely to do by mistake as it was for any valid reason. By 'mistake' I mean something like this:

Dad was out mowing the back yard one day while Pete and I worked in the garage. He was at the very back of the yard, near the compost heap, when he stopped the lawnmower engine and yelled for one of us to bring the Vaseline. One of us shouted back at him, "What?"

"Bring me the Vaseline!" he shouted.

The way Pete and I remember it, we looked at each other, completely confused, and one of us asked, "Did he say 'Vaseline'?" And the other one of us answered, "That's what I heard."

"You want Vaseline?" I asked dad, yelling across the yard.

"Yes! Bring the Vaseline! For the lawnmower!"

It was a power mower, powered by a two-stroke gasoline engine, and the gas tank ran dry at least once during the afternoon it took to mow the huge back yard, so it would only make sense that he wanted gas for the mower. We kept a couple of gas cans full in the garage all the time; one of them was in plain view of dad, but so was the work bench, on which sat a super-huge jar of Vaseline petroleum jelly, which we used to keep tools and other mechanical gadgets lubricated. Dad hadn't checked the gas tank when he shut off the mower, so we couldn't figure it out. Both Pete and I very clearly heard him ask for Vaseline, and if dad asked for Vaseline and we brought him gasoline, he would blow up just as if he'd asked for gasoline and we brought him Vaseline. It was a no-win situation, and Pete and I both knew it.

One of us asked again, yelling across the back yard, "Vaseline?"

"Yes!!" he yelled back, clearly becoming irritated with this stupid question. "Vaseline!" The tone in his voice clearly implied: What in hell do you think I'm asking for? Gasoline?

The episode couldn't have lasted more than a few minutes; my dad's temper would not have let this go on very long before he stomped across the yard in a blazing stink and snatched up whatever he needed. To Pete and I, though, it seemed to go on forever. "Gasoline?" one of us asked experimentally.

"Vaseline!!" he yelled, red in the face, almost ready to explode. We couldn't let that go on. I don't recall now which of us finally went out there; in my memory, I scooped the jar of Vaseline off the work bench and marched across the yard, growing more confident with every step. He could see I didn't have the gas can; we must've heard him correctly.

No, of course we hadn't. I proudly presented him the jar, at which he just stared. "You asked for Vaseline," I said hopefully.

"Vaseline?" he said, still puzzled, and then the light went on in his head. "I asked for gasoline," he shouted, practically hopping up and down. "What in hell would I want with Vaseline?"

Our dog Dusty used to crap all over the back yard. Dogs are so inconsiderate that way. Pete and I were responsible for gathering it up and throwing in on the compost heap, theoretically every day, but in practice about twice a week, and often much less frequently. I don't think I'm out of line to say that both Pete and I were sloppy kids; the conditions we kept in our rooms gave mom plenty to write about in more than a few weekly columns, and when our parents complained to us about it, we knew that they had cause. Not that we ever cleaned up our act, so to speak. In other words, we were like most kids; whatever we picked up, we tended to drop in the very spot we were standing on when we ran out of interest in that object, and that didn't hold true only in our rooms.

Dad loved to harangue us on this subject. Well, I don't know that he loved it, but he certainly went on about it when he got the chance. One day he blew through the living room where Pete and I were watching television, and started in on the familiar tune: We never picked up anything, never cleaned up after ourselves, the whole house was a mess, "and," he wound up, his voice building to a crescendo, waving his arms toward the window and a view of the yard, "the back yard is full of shit! You never pick up in the back yard! There's shit everywhere." He was pretty steamed, and, we knew, with good cause. We didn't care for the yelling, but I suppose that's a parent's privilege, so we let him run out of steam, then we both trooped out the door. Under normal circumstances, just one of us at a time pulled this duty, but we both knew that there was no way that Pete could pick up the yard while I lounged in the back room watching television, or vice versa, so each of us grabbed a shovel from the garage, then scoured the back yard, several times, until we had without doubt removed every single turd hidden in the grass.

Some time later, dad blew into the back room again, where we were again lounging in front of the television, satisfied that he couldn't possibly have anything to gripe about this time. Boy, were we wrong.

"I thought I told you to pick up that shit in the back yard," he stormed.

"We did," we both insisted, probably in unison. I myself couldn't believe that he could possibly find a single crumb of a dog turd anywhere in the bounds of our yard, and. judging by the look on Pete's face, he was as confident as I.

"You didn't!" he ranted. "There's still shit everywhere!"

"There couldn't be!" we cried back. It wasn't possible! We went over that yard time and again.

"Look!" he insisted, pointing out the window. "Just look! I can see a frisbee, a shovel, a bunch of broken plastic model planes -- just look! I can see shit everywhere! Now get out there, and clean all that shit up!"

Oh. That shit.

My father passed away at his home in August 1995. I was assigned to a military base near Denver, Colorado, and I drove home with my family for the funeral. As the family members took their seats, my grandfather said in an aside to somebody, perhaps a notch or two louder than he thought, "I sure hope this isn't going to take too long." Barb remembers the priest answering, "I'll try to keep it short." When I was talking to Mom afterward about the service, I just had to menton that. "You know what?" she said. "Chuck would've thought that was hilarious, wouldn't he?"

Dad was cremated and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered in the Tomorrow River in northern Wisconsin, a location that has no significance that I know of other than the nifty name. Before Mom scattered the ashes, though, there was a brief time when nobody seemed to know where they were. About the best explanation we got then was they were lost in the mail. After I returned to work, a co-worker stopped by my desk to offer her condolences and ask how things were going, and as I told her about the postal snafu a thought occurred to me so suddenly that I blurted it out loud: "Hey! Chuck's in the mail!" My co-worker had absolutely no idea how to react to my rather crude joke, although I couldn't help feeling that Dad would've liked that, too. I didn't repeat it, though.

Without too much begging, Dad sang a nonsense song to me when I was a kid. I have no idea where it comes from; I've never heard anybody but Dad sing it. To my delight, he sang it again years later for my kids.

There was an old man and he had an old sow
(snort) sow
(burp) sow
(whistle) lass ah fah row
There was an old man and he had an old sow
las ah fah row dee ayyyy -- ohhhhhhh --
Suzanne was a funny old man
(snort) man
(burp) man
(whistle) man
Suzanne was a funny old man

I first wrote out a few of these memories just a year or so after Dad died. I've added a lot and changed quite a bit since then, but, if you're interested, the original page still appears unaltered at http://www.geocities.com/o-folk/chuck/chuck.html