Silver Tuxedo at the White House

Nancy and Jeff Keith

White House State Dinner 1980 (something)

 

This is my mom and dad at a White House State Dinner and yes that is a silver tuxedo. I think it was during Regan’s first term. I don’t remember much about this night, but I do remember that tux. I think I remember them being picked up at our house in Potomac by a chauffeured limousine. That would have been no big deal because whenever we would fly somewhere as a family we would always be chauffeured in a stretch-limo to the Presidential Suite in whatever hotel we were staying in, isn’t that how everybody traveled? Being an Executive Director of a major association did have its perks. Every year there would be several big trips. The family vacation and then there would always be the convention where he was in charge and then there would be the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) convention where he was a member. At one point he was the President and the Chairman of the Board for ASAE as well. He was the Executive Director for AMSA, NTDRA, NPSA and lastly ADTSEA while I was growing up.

He once confided in me his biggest regret. I was in my mid-twenties and was helping him with rehab and physical therapy after his second major stroke. As he was starting to come out of a major funk he started confiding in me a lot. We were doing our stretches in the hot tub at Sneakers and he said, “I always regretted leaving Cleveland. Leaving the Stamping Association was the dumbest thing I ever did. It was my big shot to bring your mother home to Maryland, but within a year of moving here we put your sister in the ground and I knew I had made a mistake.” I told him I thought moving here from Cleveland was the best thing that ever happen to me. And I meant it.

That was the summer of 1993 and I had moved in with my parents in Ocean Pines for two reasons. I was a broken hearted failure of a salesman with nowhere else to go and my mother asked me too. She was sobbing on the phone and she said she was sorry but had to ask. She said, “Since this last stroke your father has given up. He is just waiting to die and you are the only person on this earth who can raise his spirits.” So I went. And it was the best summer I had ever spent in Ocean City and that’s saying something.

It’s hard to write about those times. It has taken me over a hundred posts in dumbdumbdaddyo to finally get here, but what my father-in-law always says, “No matter where you go there you are!”  I guess this project never was about celebrating what a great man my father was when he was young but how hard it was to see him get so old. When you are one of the toughest men on earth it takes a lot to finally put you in the ground.