September 25,—1935-Portrait of a Father and Some Stories Told Out of School
The Washington Daily News—Wednesday—September 25,—1935
Portrait of a Father and Some Stories Told Out of School
By ERNIE PYLE
DANA, Ind.—Perhaps you have heard of my father. He is the man who put oil on his brakes when they got to squeaking, then drove to town and ran over the curb and thru a plate glass window and right into a dry goods store.
My father is also the man who ran with Roosevelt in 1932. He ran for county assessor, was the only Democrat in the county who lost, and was probably the happiest man who listened to election returns that night. He couldn’t think of anything worse than being county assessor.
And the reason he lost was that all the people figured that if he was county assessor, he wouldn’t have time to put roofs on their houses, and paint their barns, and paper their dining rooms and fix their chimneys and do a thousand and one things for them. I guess when my father is gone this whole neighborhood will just sort of fall down.
My father has never lived anywhere but on a farm, and yet I don’t think he ever did like the farm very well. He has been happiest, I think, since the war. He started renting the farm out then, and ever since, he has been handy-manning all about the neighborhood. He is a wizard with tools, where other people are clumsy. He is a carpenter at heart.
My father did start out to see the world once when he was a young man. He went to Iowa to cut broom corn, but broke his leg and had to come home.
He never went anywhere again till he was 55, when he went to California to see his brother. He sat up all the way in a day coach. Since then he has been to New York, so now he has seen both oceans.
My father is a very quiet man. He has never said a great deal to me all his life, and yet I feel that we have been very good friends. He never gave me much advice, or told me to do this or that, or not to. But he didn’t spare me either. I worked like a horse from the time I was 9.
My father never shows much emotion. He has never seen a big league ball game. Yet my mother came home one afternoon during a World Series, and caught him sitting in front of the radio, all by himself, clapping and yelling for all he was worth.
My father used to work as a hired hand way over on the other side of the Wabash River. When he was courting my mother, every Sunday he would drive a horse six miles to the river, row a boat across, and then ride a bicycle nine miles to my mother’s house. At midnight he started the same process going home. Mother figured he either loved her, or else was foolish and needed somebody to look after him, so she married him.
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My father is now getting a little deaf. Mother says he can always hear what he isn’t supposed to hear.
If my father doesn’t like people, he never says anything about it. If he does like people, he never says much about that either. He is very even tempered. If he has an enemy in this whole country, I have yet to hear about it.
He bought me a Ford roadster when I was about 16 and when I wrecked it a couple of weeks later, he never said a word.
My father doesn’t swear or drink or smoke. He is honest, in letter and in spirit. He is a good man, without being at all repulsive about it. He used to smoke cigars, but he quit the Fourth of July that Johnson fought Jeffries in Reno. I think it was 1908. The event didn’t have anything to do with it. His holiday cigar simply made him sicker than usual that day, so he quit.
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When my father was in Washington, he kept butting his head against those big glass cases that hold exhibits in the Smithsonian Institution. The glass was polished so clean he couldn’t see it. We all thought it was awfully funny. He got a splitting headache from it.
We got our first auto in 1914. We kept it up in the north end of the wagon shed, right behind the wagon. At the south end of the wagon shed there was a big gravel pit.
One day we came home from town, my mother and I got out at the house, and father went to put the car away. We saw him make the circle in the barn lot, and then drive into the north end of the shed. The next instant, the south end of the shed simply burst open, a wagon came leaping out, and with one great bound was over the cliff and down in the gravel pit.
My father said he never did know exactly what happened.
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