My Father was born on this day, January 14th, 100 years ago. His first name was Melvin and he did not have a middle one. I don’t have any strong feelings about him, one way or another. I didn’t know him very well. My Mom divorced him in September of 1971 when I was 10 years old.
I was always much closer to my Mom than I was to him. She turned me on to great music, movies and books and she taught me about the evils of things like racism and homophobia at an early age. She also encouraged my passion for drawing and writing down words.
When she my 2 siblings and I that she no longer wanted to be married to our Dad, I was momentarily devastated. It made me extremely sad to think about not having a father in my life and I remember how sad and lost he seemed before moving out of the house that he paid for. My mom made it loudly clear that she had every intention of getting sole custody of us 3 kids. That was fine by my sister, brother and I. I had absolutely no clue as to just how difficult life was about to become for me but I knew that we’d have more fun with her than with him.
I do believe that my Dad tried to be a good Dad to us. We always had a roof over our heads and always had food in the cupboards and refrigerator. There was a true sense of safety and security while he was in our lives and I think he showed us as much attention and affection as he could muster. He just never found a way to truly connect with us kids, at least, not with my younger brother and I. My sister was “daddy’s girl”.
When I was a bit older, my Mom would share little tidbits of what being married to my Dad was like. She described him as being a hard-working, thoughtful and proud man who served his country well by signing up with the Army when he was very young (rumors have it that he managed to sign up before he was even of legal age) and going off - like so many other brave, well-intentioned young men - to battle Nazis in World War 2. A member of the 501st Airborne Infantry Regiment, he saw and experienced some insane shit during some of the most intense, harrowing events of the war. Wounded 3 times (including being shot in the head), he returned to America a changed man forever. He battled through PTSD long before the term was used. My Mom eventually told me that on 2 different occasions, my Dad was committed to an insane asylum - once when he was married to his first wife and once after my parents married - for what was believed to be war-related mental issues.
Back then, they called it a “nervous breakdown” and it was extra hard on my Dad because of the popular perception that adult men acknowledging mental/emotional illness was an indication of them being weak and abnormal. He was a war hero and a law enforcement officer. There is no room for weakness or illness when you’re one or both of those.
I never noticed anything peculiar about my Dad. He was always off working so I spent very little time around him. He never showed interest in my interest in sports. When I tried out for cross-country track, school basketball or Little League baseball, it was my Mom who drove me there. She encouraged me every step of the way and when I didn’t make a team or I did but stunk it up or a team I was on lost, my Mom was the one to console and support me, never my Dad.
I do remember him letting me ride on the back of a moped he had when I was around 5.
Then there was the time (a day or 2 before the big San Fernando Earthquake) when I was 10 when he told me he needed to deliver a horse transport trailer to a customer in Los Angeles and asked me if I wanted to take a road trip with him, just he and I. I jumped at the opportunity, mainly because I was getting to cut a couple of days of school but also because it truly was one of the few ‘father and son’ things he and I had done up to that point. That trip was a blast. We listened to old-time country and western music on AM radio the entire trip. We also stopped at Interstate 5 roadside diners where I was allowed to eat as many grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries as I wanted the whole way down and back. I got to experience driving up and down the Grapevine - a sometimes-sketchy patch of freeway along Interstate 5 along the Tejon Pass - for the first time.
Once my Mom had filed for divorce, my Dad quickly made himself scarce. He briefly moved into a run-down boarding house in Orangevale, California before making his way back to Des Moines where many in his family lived. He wasted little time in finding a new woman to marry (Phyllis) and not long after, they had their first child, my half-sister Bambi. It was around this time that my Dad contacted my Mom to ask that she let us kids fly out and stay with him and his new family for a week.
I know that it nearly did her in to put us on a plane and fly the 1700 or so miles to Des Moines but my Mom believed that it was important to at least try and let us have our Dad in our lives. The trip was weird, to say the least. My Dad seemed very happy and Phyllis was very sweet and put up with his 3 kids from his last marriage about as well as anyone could have. We met baby Bambi and got to go on an all-day trip to Phyllis’ family’s farm somewhere in Missouri. It felt strange being city kids out in the middle of nowhere but we had a good time and it did give us a chance to spend some time with our Father.
I saw him one other time after that. It was years later, after my family had migrated from Sacramento to Reno, Nevada when our Dad traveled out to the West Coast and came to Reno to visit us. Dad had left Phyllis and had a new wife (Joyce) who was with him. By then, my sister, brother and I were punk rockers and didn’t have much interest in bonding with our Dad. He never bothered with child support and made very little effort to stay in touch with us and we just accepted that and moved onward. My brother barely knew him and never got a chance to feel anything for or from him.
Over the years, I’d hear that he would ask about how my brother and I’d band 7Seconds was doing. Much later, after he passed away in 2002, Bambi and I started communicating more with each other and when 7Seconds was on tour and stopped in Minneapolis with the Circle Jerks and Negative Approach in 2022, Bambi and her kids came to our show at First Avenue and she and I got a chance to hang out and catch up a little which was really great.
Getting to know Bambi in recent years has helped fill in a few blanks caused by me not knowing our father well at all. In a recent Facebook post, observing what would have been Dad’s 100th birthday, she wrote:
’He died alone, I did not get there in time to say goodbye (that haunted me for a long time as well as the solo decisions I had to make for him in my 20’s) I sang “go rest high on that mountain” to him the night before. He loved Vince Gill, I now hate this song.
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