An Ode To A Father (Patricia Potter)

I cannot let this weekend go without acknowledging Father’s Day and all it represents.

There are some who decry Mother’s and Father’s Days as mere products of commercialization. But I always loved both. We don’t always tell those we love exactly how much we love them. Words get buried on the hectic pace of lives.

And as kids, sometimes we don’t have the full realization of all our parents have done and do for us. That comes later when we, in turn, are mothers and fathers.

Mother’s and Father’s Days are reminders to us. They give us a chance to do what we probably should be doing 364 days a year but somehow let all those chances slip by.

I was extraordinarily lucky with my parents. My dad was an engineer with NASA. He was outgoing and funny and loved my mother from the first moment he saw her. It was his favorite story and I never tired of hearing it. He was always, I think, a little bemused by me, by what he help create. I didn’t follow his idea of what a daughter should do: study education, become a teacher, marry and have children.

But he supported me when I chose journalism and resisted marriage. He was proud as punch when I took him to an opera when I was music and art editor and took him backstage. He was even happier when I was able to get him much coveted tickets to the Masters Golf Tournament. It almost made up for not giving him grandchildren. Almost.

He was a good golfer, a fine teller of tales, a great friend and a religious man who loved his pastor because “it was so hard for the pastor to be good.” He appreciated that. He liked a pastor who enjoyed a martini now and then, who didn’t object to a bit of gossip (non-malicious) and even said a wicked word now and then.
He was suspicious of perfection.

He was a historian by heart. He knew as much about history as most history professors, and his knowledge was probably more comprehensive. Mention any country and he could give you its history going back to the beginning of time. He devoured books about history. He devoured books, period. He loved to read, as his own father loved to read. I still have a set of history books ppublished in 1912 that his father, then he, treasured. We had three separate sets of encyclopedias in the house and he'd read each one start to finish.

He couldn’t go to a four year college because of money. His father had died, and there were six children to educate. He applied for and was accepted by West Point and Annapolis with high scores, but a spot on his lung disqualified him. Thwarted in that attempt, he sold his mother’s pies from door to door, and went to a three year technical school and became a tool maker. From that beginning he became one of the top engineers in NASA and a friend of Werner Von Braun. Anything could be accomplished, he thought, by hard work. He was very big on responsibility.

He was also somewhat of a prude. Black was black, and white was white. One married forever and heaven forbid that anyone had sex outside it. When I wrote my first romance, I trembled at the thought of him reading it. Good heavens above, there was sex in it, and I was his unmarried daughter. Then one day, he called. He and mom were on vacation in Canada, and they had found my first book. He went up and down the streets, showing strangers the book his daughter wrote. He loved it.

He became my biggest fan. He would go in book stores and accost women and tell they should read my book. He would stick my books in the best seller slots. He talked his golfing buddies – all retired military types – into reading my books, and they all became fans.

He died four years ago, and there isn’t a day I don’t miss him. But maybe always more on Father’s Day because that’s when I made dinner and shopped for something I really, really thought he would love. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. He would have loved anything.

Happy Father’s Day, Pop.