Sustainable Gardening Blog

All the media hoopla over Father’s Day reminds me of something I recently learned about my dad from a relative. 

What I already knew is that Dad and his 3 sisters were raised by a single mother in Richmond, Virginia, but spent summers visiting relatives in the country.  And it was country stories that he loved to tell.  Like the popular menfolk custom  - and I’m not making this up - of friendly fart-making contests.  Cane-bottom chairs with the cane removed somehow helped, I seem to remember.  Oh, yeah, I come from high-class stock all right. 

But what Dad never told me was the reason the kids spent every summer in the country with relatives, which is that his mother couldn’t afford to feed them.  That would have seemed unimaginable during my lifetime except that just recently reports of food insecurity for untold Americans are reaching us, and  it’s suddenly imaginable again.  

But back to Dad.  Other Greatest Generation dads might have told hard-luck stories about surviving the Depression, but not this one.   What we heard about were his triumphs as a newspaper boy and about playing his violin for weddings and on the radio - for "good money".  I knew that his "Ed Harris Dance Band" played all the fraternity parties and paid his way through college.  And that scholarships made it possible to get a Ph.D. in psychology - way back in 1949 when it was a new and suspect field.  And that he made sure his kids didn’t have to work their way through school.

Dad died a few years back at the age of 86, but I can still wish him a Happy Father’s Day, right?