My First Day on the Home Team

My Dad wore a tie when he brought me home from the hospital. Makes me wonder if he had to work that day or whether the occasion called for dressing up. My Dad once wore a silver tuxedo to a state dinner at the White House, there's a framed picture of him in it with my mom in the Lincoln Bedroom. It was 1966 so a silver tux was probably pretty hipp at a black tie event.

This picture blew me away when I unearthed it. It was a kind of a Field of Dreams moment when Costner finally gets to see his dad as a young strapping ball player and have that game of catch he so foolishly denied himself toward the end of his father's life. This is the man I hardly knew. So young. So vital. Black hair. Lean. Father of four. Thin black tie. Clean shave. Proud smile. Not beaten down by life nor disease. …ready to take on and concur the third sector. My Dad was the Executive Director of the American Metal Stamping Association (AMSA) and soon to be Chairman of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) when this picture was taken. Carol must have been 9 and a half and Karen 6 or 7, a year before she would be diagnosed with leukemia.

My second child C was a terrible sleeper as a baby. For a year and a half she never slept past a couple of hours and she would scream like you would not believe possible. After doing everything medically possible we were finally comforted by a nurse at the fussy baby clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Denver. She said, “Your way past waiting half an hour or an hour before going in to pick her up. You need to let that baby cry it out! She will never remember it. She will cry herself to sleep!” And she did, eventually. Why do I bring this up? This picture proves to me I don’t remember a thing about those first five years or so except for what has been re-told in pictures. Man on the moon, road trips to California and Disney Land, trips from Ohio to Ocean City, Maryland, the opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridges, the Brown’s Games, trips to Alabama, Funerals. But this picture, what is on the wall? Who is this thin young, guy holding me? What is it to have just been born? I don’t know, can’t remember a thing.

So I went back to the letters of my Mom’s and skipped ahead to December 28, 1949. Sixty two years ago my Father wrote my Mother a letter from Jacksonville, FL five days before he was to play in the 1950 Gator Bowl. He writes of two long practices and a lot of scrimmaging. “I must be getting old or something because I am really stiff. Will probably be pretty sore in the morning.” I know that sore, intimately. He went to the Dog Races and has to go to a dance at the Bath Club, “It’s required’ yeh, right Dad. He wishes he knew he could have gotten her a room; she could have come like Patti did. Maybe that’s why there are no any other letters from bowl games like these. My Mom went to the rest of the bowl games in his career. I will scan and post this letter and hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have.

Big J holding me, so little was he at three.