That’s my great grandfather in the cowboy hat, his wife by his side, circa 1917, everyone decked out in homespun clothes. Look at the boy in the front row right. I wonder what he became? Perhaps he became a concert pianist. Uh, probably not.
I started my post with that particular photo because my father, the grandson of that farmer above, grew up in the same rural environment, the farmland around Wanette, Oklahoma.
Dad dropped out of school after the eighth grade to go to work. At 16, he found a job in the oil fields. Though he disliked working on an oil derrick — it’s a dirty and dangerous job — he showed up for work every day, sick or not, for the next 45 years. He was a working man’s working man.
That’s my dad, second from the right in the back row. He was a driller at the time. The toolpusher (the only guy with eyeglasses and a clean shirt) is to his right, the derrick man to his left. The cathead-man is on the far left, and the all-round guys, the roughnecks, are in the front row.
When I was a kid growing up in Southern California (the Forresters moved there around 1940), I always thought my dad was a bit slow and he was certainly rough around the edges. He was a tough Okie living in the soft suburbs of LA. Even in the hot SoCal summer, Dad daily wore a woolen long-sleeved shirt and a fedora, just as he did back in Wanette, OK.
Dad was reticent (like so many men of his generation), scratched everywhere it itched, used bad grammar, had an Okie accent, and didn’t seem to know much about the world outside his job.
Dad was hard for a young, immature California kid like me to admire. I was heavily into baseball and appearances, so I was a bit embarrassed when I saw that dad threw a ball like a girl. There wasn’t much worse to say about a guy at that time than he throws like a girl. (“Yeah, he may be the Valedictorian and Harvard has given him a full ride, but he throws like a girl. Poor guy!”)
Later, I came across the idea that throwing like a girl — elbow out, a limited follow-through, and a flipping motion rather than a fluid one — is not merely the result of the physiological differences between boys and girls, but is also the result of not enough practice throwing a ball. When dad might have been practicing baseball, of course, he was doing chores around the farm and later working as a roughneck on a drilling rig. (My dad once saw the cathead rope wrap around a man’s head and yank it off. )
That’s me and my dad around 1978. I was about 40, my dad about 67.
I was embarrassed by my dad. (No one ever called me a mature kid.) But late in his life, when I got to know him better and had more than a kid’s understanding of the world, I saw that he was a pretty bright fellow and had qualities I didn’t appreciate at the time.
As I said, Dad was reticent and kept his emotions reined in. I remember one time my Mom took me aside — I think she was bothered by the mild estrangement between me and my dad — and told me that although Dad didn’t show his love with words, he showed it by getting up every morning to go to work and keeping care of us all. Though I brushed them off at the time, my Mom’s words must have meant something because I’ve remembered them all these years.
In retirement, Dad seemed to suddenly thrive. I think that damned job got him down. At any rate, in retirement, he lost some of his reticence, started to read the paper and even an occasional book, and had opinions on current affairs. He finally even abandoned his wool shirt, though he wore his fedora (see photo above) for the rest of his life.
At this point, you may already know what quote I’m going to use. Of course, it’s Mark Twain’s famous comment about his father: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
In retrospect, I think that Dad could have been a writer or a philosophy professor. I was fooled, as others were no doubt, by his clothing, language intonation patterns, and demeanor. He looked and sounded like he couldn’t have been anything but an ill-educated working man from Oklahoma. Time and place were not kind to my dad.
It’s hard to see life’s possibilities when time (Dad was born in 1912) and place (poor and rural Oklahoma) obscure your view. Like a fish that thinks his watery world is all there is, Dad lived in a restricted world that was largely peopled by farmers, mechanics, oil field workers, roustabouts, and so on. It was a working man’s world. Very little news from the outside penetrated that world. Dad had no television or internet, of course, but also no newspaper. (Newspapers weren’t delivered to his rural home.)
If I had been born in rural Oklahoma in 1912, I’m certain I would have looked, talked, and led a life much like my father’s. And I too would have looked, first like a callow farm boy, and later like an oil-stained roughneck. No one would have said about me, “Why that kid has potential.”
But I was born at the right time and the right place. My hometown, Compton, California, was a blue-collar and rather tough city, and it wasn’t an ideal place to foster a kid’s dreams. But it was an environment, unlike my dad’s, that was penetrated by news of the “outside” world through television, radio, newspapers, and so on — and that made all the difference. And when I joined the Army, I met guys from all over, from all classes. My best friend was an intellectual upper-middle-class Jew from San Francisco. The world wasn’t quite my oyster, but my frame of reference was much larger than my dad’s. Besides, I didn’t have to drop out of school to got to work.
Obviously, the quality of one’s life is not just dependent upon one’s capabilities and willingness to work, but also on one’s time and place.
Now for my second quote. (You’re getting two quotes for the price of one today.) I’ve been saying that time and place are hard to overcome. But Chance can ruin everything.
Chance might send a car careening off the road and into your back. Chance might mean that you inherit freckles, bad teeth, and a severe cleft palate. You know in your sad and lonely little teenage heart that your nighttime fantasy of getting it on with that golden-haired, perky cheerleader with her cute little skirt is never going to be realized.
In large part, the stars (or DNA, luck, or a dice-throwing god) go a long way to determine which way our lives will turn. Sometimes time, place, and chance favor us, sometimes not. And that reminds me of my second quote of the post, this one from Ecclesiastes (9:11):
”I have seen . . . that the race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, or bread to the wise, or riches to the wise . . .but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
Like Romeo and Juliet, we are all star-crossed.
Postscript: I don’t mean to minimize the importance of blue-collar jobs. I was once a telephone installer myself, working in Watts and Compton. I was also a pole climber in the Army and worked at a variety of sweat-producing jobs outside the Army, including setting pins, dragging dynamite into the side of a mountain, cutting brush from fire trails in the mountains of Oregon, and so on. I didn’t like any of them.
But it was largely my knowledge of my dad’s grimy job that scared me away from manual labor. I had a close-up look at Dad’s job when, as a youngster, I spent a night or two on Dad’s rig on Signal Hill when Dad was working graveyard. Just hanging around the rig, I came home with oil all over my clothes and an appreciation for how hard my dad’s work was — and I began to realize that I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. (The only bright spot that night was eating mom’s PB & J sandwiches out of my own lunch pail, a miniature version of my Dad’s.)
On a cold winter’s day in 1959, I was assigned the task of digging a ditch for a slot latrine while on bivouac in the Army in Pirmasens, Germany. That was the final straw. I thought, “I want no part of this [expletive]!”
I decided then that I wanted to work in a temperature-controlled office of some sort. But where could I find such a job?
Ah, teaching literature in the pampered world of a state university. That’s the ticket! A warm office of my own, a book to read, coeds who suck up to you, and black coffee all day long. Now that’s what I call sittin’ in the catbird seat!
Time, place, and chance have been good to me. It didn’t have to work out this way. I try to keep that in mind.
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