Remembering my Daddy

Sunday is Father’s Day. I often share statements I heard my father say as I was growing up. My daddy was known for taking common sense advice and spinning it with down home humor making people laugh, but also having a serious message as the outcome. To say I miss my daddy would be an understatement. The lessons he taught me are endless. He was a hard working man. Loyalty to friends, family, and the Lord were hallmarks of his life. He was not blessed with much formal education, but he was brilliant beyond comparison when it came to understanding how to deal with people and to live a life of integrity. In the midst of any argument he could always find something humorous which allowed all the people involved a time to laugh and to be able to forget their differences. Daddy was a pushover. He had principles and standards he would not bend or break for anyone. His life had been marked by hard work. Growing up during the years of the Great Depression following the Stock Market crash in 1929, he often said it was the year the economy took a turn for the positive. By the time daddy was 15 (in 1929), farmers had known hard times as a result of the downturn in the economy since 1921. Many people reading this will remember those days while others will see this as a lesson in ancient history. My father was a strict but fair disciplinarian. Punishment was never prolonged or delayed. He would normally take care of the follow up needed quickly in order to make sure we could connect the correction with the punishment, without having to guess why we were being punished. He was not overbearing with expectation of his children, but expected that we would work and take responsibility for our work and actions at all times. I share often in speaking engagements about the year the mule died and the fact that as a sharecropper farmer it was necessary for daddy to leave the farm and move to the city to get a job to take care of his wife, (my mother) and my older sister. My entire life, daddy worked in the cotton mill just inside the Georgia line from Alabama. We lived in Phenix City, Alabama, and in those days, knew nothing of the corruption and vice supporting the infrastructure of that city. Daddy was never involved in that side of town. He was a leader in the rural church just outside of town, which emphasized hard work, family, friends, and faithfulness in all areas of life including worship. Looking back over the life we lived, I had no idea we were as poor as we were. We always had a clean home, lots of love and support, clean clothes, food to eat and friends with which to play and a great church to attend every time the doors opened. What more could anyone want? During my lifetime, daddy never drank alcohol, or allowed anyone to bring alcohol into our home. He did not gamble, and did not attend parties where the family would not be allowed to attend. We did everything as a family unit. The most memorable thing about my daddy was his hands. He was not a big man, but he could do anything he set his mind to do with his hands. Attending the chickens which we raised to provide eggs (and Sunday dinner), and digging in the garden (which he always had) to provide the few vegetables we needed for our meals, were just a few of the areas where daddy would use his hands. Being a loom fixer at the cotton mill, his hands were always stained with grease; the heavy motor oil black grease had worked its way into the deep wrinkles in my daddy’s hands. The best memory picture I have of daddy is on Sunday morning when he would have cleaned his hands as much as possible and he would open his big Bible to read from it as we gathered for family Bible study before we left to attend church. Seeing daddy turn the pages of the Bible with such loving care has always stuck with me as the best example a daddy can set for his children.