As I reflect on this year's Father’s Day, mine has been gone for more than 20
years. Still, it’s a day I want to remember him because of who he was, what he was,
when he was, and for all the times I forgot that. This column is for him.
My father
was a farmer and a truck-driving man. Not the kind of trucker who drives the
18-wheelers on the interstate highways today. His trucks had no
air-conditioning, sleeper cabs, cushion-ride seats, AM-FM or Sirius radios, GPS
systems or any other comfort modern technology provides.
No, he
drove a regular two-speed axle, two-ton straight truck. The only bigger truck
he ever owned was a 10-wheeler he took west a couple of years to follow the
wheat harvest from the panhandle of Texas to the Canadian line. And the trucks
were almost always Dodges. In a trucking career that spanned from 1939 to the
mid-‘80s, he had only two trucks of a different make that I can recall with as
many as five during World War II when he had a deferment from military service
to support the farming community.
With these
trucks he hauled livestock, hay, grain, coal, lime, fertilizer, furniture—anything
he could get in a truck. He and his drivers hauled through all kinds of weather.
I’ve seen him scoop coal in the driving rain, load livestock in the bitter cold
and haul hay in the blazing heat.
Probably
the only things that kept me from trying to follow in his footsteps was a trip
I made to the Indianapolis stockyards with him one hot July or August when I
was 10 or 11 years old.
He had several
stops to load a cow here, a calf there and a few hogs somewhere before being
full loaded. A couple of places with just a calf or two, he wouldn’t even set
up the loading chute. He just raised the end gate, tossed the animal in and
drove off.
The sweat dripped
from his face, stinging his eyes while a river of it poured in; his shirt was
completely soaked. As he wrote out the bill of lading for the woman at the last
stop and wiped his eyes with a red handkerchief, the sweat trickled through the
small hairs on the back of his hand, smudging the pencil lead on the paper as
he wrote.
”Would you
like a Pepsi, Harold,” the grizzled, white-haired woman asked.
“Be good,”
he said, still furiously scribbling and holding out his left hand for the
drink. One gulp, two gulps, a breath, another gulp. The Pepsi was gone.
“Thanks,”
he said, handing her the empty bottle. Almost before he had the copy of the
bill of lading ripped out and had given it to her, he was shutting the door,
switching the key on and grinding the engine to life.
As we turned
out on the road, and headed east toward Indianapolis, he said, “Don’t ever do
anything for a living that you have to work this hard.”
Except for
those trips, there were times I hardly ever saw him for days on end. He’d
sometimes put on his clothes on Monday morning, load for Indianapolis, sleep in
the truck at the coal mine in Brazil, Ind., while waiting for a load of coal for
the return trip. And he’d scoop the coal, load for Indianapolis and do it over
again.
Or he‘d get
home in the wee hours of the morning, sleep a little and be gone long before I
got up. Even when I did get to go with him, he didn’t talk much. And when he
did, it was about being honest or always paying his bills.
He slowed
down as the years passed, had only two trucks for a while, then only one after
he started farming. Then he’d work from six in the morning until nine at
night—sometimes earlier, sometimes later—day in and day out, unless it rained.
When I worked with him, I prayed for rain 24 hours a day. He never told me not
to farm, but I remembered his advice about hauling livestock. Farming didn’t seem
any easier.
Just before
he quit hauling livestock in the ‘60s, he took a straight load of cattle to
Indianapolis and put four lambs on the upper deck at the front of the truck.
Livestock hauling had dwindled and coal hauling was almost a thing of the past.
He unloaded the cattle and was home by midnight.
The next
morning he woke to the sound of lambs bleating. Jumping out of bed, he bellowed,
“What the devil is that?”
“Sounds
like sheep,” my mother answered.
“Thunder
and mud, I forgot to unload those lambs.”
Another
trucker going to Indianapolis stopped by for the lambs, and my father’s friends
razzed him for a while. He’d smile and shake his head, but he never forgot his
family or friends as he had those lambs. And it seems to me that a man who
worked hard all his life needs to be remembered on Father’s Day.
Thanks, Dad, I wish you were still here to share the day.
