Looking through the memories I have written about my family through the years, I realized that people could wonder why I have not written much about my father.
There is a good reason for that, because my father passed away in 1947, when I was just nine years old. I do have some great memories of him when I was a boy, and I have written about those, but I did not have the opportunity to make the kinds of memories most kids have with their dads in their teens and adulthood.
I remember how my older sister and my mother became something more than mother and daughter as my sister grew up; they also became fast friends. I saw the same thing with some of my male friends and their fathers as they became adults. I never got to have that kind of relationship with my dad, and I missed out on things most kids had by having their dads around longer.
I never got to have “The Talk” about girls, or seeing the pride in his eyes when I got my first job; something that would have been important to my Dad because he was, according to Mom and other people, a very hard worker himself.
Dad delivered coal in the winter and ice in the summer in Sedalia. My mother said that in the winter, Dad, who worked for both Stanley Coal Company and E. L. Calvert Coal Company, two of the coal companies in Sedalia at the time. Mom said he had to load a dump truck by hand from a railroad coal car, and then deliver it to a customer and unload it by hand into their coal bin or shed. It was hard and dirty work.
I can still remember him coming home with his face black with coal dust, and his clothes so dirty that Mom wouldn’t let him sit on the furniture before he cleaned up and changed his clothes. In the summer, he would load and haul hundred-pound blocks of ice that he would custom-cut to fit a customer’s Icebox. Some of my favorite memories of Dad came when he took me with him on those ice deliveries.
Those memories, along with the one where he attempted without success to teach my mother how to drive the old company dump truck he drove in the winter, are among the few columns that I wrote about him. I loved my father, and I would have loved to have known him into his old age, but he was only 37 years old when he died.
My mother told me a few things that filled in some of the blanks about his life, but it would make her sad to talk about him, even years after he was gone, so my sister and I did not ask about him very often. Mom did say that Dad was a dreamer, like me, and one of the things he liked to do was go out into the backyard at night, where he would lie on his back in the grass and talk about the stars.
She said he was sure men would go to the moon and stars someday-that impressed me because in the 30s and 40s a lot of people, including scientists, thought that was going to be impossible. I guess Dad was ahead of his time. I wish I knew more of those kinds of personal things about my Dad; they would make some great columns. Dad was a hero to me, something I know is common with most young children, but it is the lucky ones who have their Dads around long enough for them to become friends, too.
Jack Miller is a longtime Sedalia resident and former radio news reporter.
