Dad with wings

July 15 marks 50 years since my dad passed. He was 56. I was 18.

Losing dad changed the course of my life. I’d have had a better path had he lived. Young women without fathers are targets.

But he was tired, sad and had lost the will to live. He lost his beloved job at Boeing in 1970 and it broke his heart. Life was like that in Seattle at the time. 100,000 people in the greater Seattle area lost their jobs. At that time a half-million people called Seattle home. The numbers include the bedroom communities of Bellevue, Renton, Issaquah, Mercer Island, Burien and Everett, that eventually got its own plant to build 747s. The effect was far and wide.

There was a sign on I-5 south of Seattle that poked fun at the “Boeing Bust” but there was nothing funny about the layoffs. I remember being confused when I came from school and my dad and mom were sitting at the kitchen table. He had a look on his face I’d never seen before and you could cut the tension in the air with a knife. Everything changed at that moment for our family.

But planes were his life. All things plane related such as wind, air, velocity, lift, drag, thrust. He kept finely tuned instruments on his coffee table. There was one gadget that could measure the width of a strand of hair.

On the weekends, dad would take me out the old, now-gone Bellevue airfield, a single strip of runway, a few hangars and a snack bar. I spent many hours sitting on one of the snack-bar stools eating bags of Mr. Peanut brand peanuts. My dad wanted to talk to the pilots who came into the snack bar. He wanted to talk about possible improvements those pilots could recommend. Dad would listen intently and discuss ideas with the pilots. He took those conversations back to the drawing board at Boeing in the hope his ideas would make planes safer, easier to fly and to finesse troubleshooting procedures.

In 1967 we were flying home from Munich to O’Hare in a prop airplane with tweed seats, with a cloth on the back of the headrest called a antimacassar, gourmet food served with sterling silver and engines that left you vibrating for days. A smart-dressed stewardess came to our seating row and asked my dad if he could go to the cockpit. Back then, passenger manifests included names and occupations of those on board. Dad was a Boeing engineer and we were on a Boeing plane. My dad obliged and walked up to the cockpit.

About a half hour later my dad comes back and leans toward my mother and tells her to prepare. The plane was possibly going to have to ditch in the north Atlantic because of a mechanical problem they couldn’t fix. I remember the color draining from my mother’s well made-up face. He told her about the floatation devices under the seat and to stick together if we went into the water possibly as cold as 35 degrees. My father went back to the cockpit and my mother ordered another cocktail.

Soon, my dad and one of the cockpit personnel opened the hatch that leads to the underbelly of the plane. Most people don’t notice that hatch on the floor as they board the plane. Avionics are in the cockpit but access the nerve center of the plane is through that hatch. An hour later, my dad emerged and the flight-deck person shook his hand, a smile on his face. They replaced the hatch. Dad came back to our row was met by my mother who’d consumed several cocktails. Ditch or no ditch, mom wasn’t going into the north Atlantic sober.

My mother never flew after that.

Ironically, Boeing reached out to my dad in 1978 to see if he’d be interested in being re-hired, two years after he passed. When I told the man on the other end of a long-distance call that my father had died, he said it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that about people laid off in 1970.

When he found out he was dying he decided I needed to know how to change the oil seals on my ’62 Volkswagon bug. So I sat on a tiny stool at the back on the car while he took the entire engine apart. I listened and was helpful. It was what you did with the Greatest Generation.

When the engine was all re-assembled he told me to go start it up. Three things happened: the engine didn’t start, there was the sound of liquid pouring out and then a growing pool of oil spreading out onto the pavement. Realizing he’d installed the seals upside down, he looked at me in his stoic way and said, “Oh, Barbie, it breaks the heart.”

My parents met here in Colorado in 1940. Mom told he she was standing on the corner of 15th & Larimer (dressed to the nines, no doubt. She was STUNNING) waiting for the light to change. She struck up a conversation with a woman standing next to her. They introduced themselves. My mother, Barbara and the other lady’s name, Stella. After a few moments, they realized they were dating the same man. My dad told me, “Of all the street corners in Denver, they met at the same one at the same time.” He was busted.

Mom won, Stella lost. I have a picture of Dad and Stella that mom found when we were cleaning out his house after he passed. She tossed it, I fished it out of the trash.

He both loved and hated my mother. The 1970s caused lots of divorces for a variety of reasons. My parents never had a clear reason other than mom wanted “freedom.” A year after their divorce he moved next door, one house away. They spent every day of the next 7 years together. Dinner every night, Mister Donut for coffee on Saturday and Sunday mornings, antiquing and getting lost on vaguely familiar back roads from their past. While driving, that car was like a time machine and transported them to the times, people and places they loved best. They couldn’t live with each other and couldn’t live without each other.

Dad was a photographer, horse lover, he finely crafted and built firearms, was a dead-eye shot, had a killer sense of humor. He was a bigot until he toured Dachau in 1966. He even purchased post cards in the village. I donated those postcards to the holocaust museum under his name. I didn’t want them around. After he toured the horror, he never spoke another word against anyone ever again.

I have many images of dad at Fort Lowry in the 1940s. He had a great time when stationed in London running bombing missions over Germany. Yes, a great time, drinking beer, chasing the local girls and embracing the spirit of “We Can Do It.”

When we lived in Germany in the 1960s, his main hobby was finding specific locations, his former targets. He wanted to see if the damage he inflicted had been repaired. It really worried him and he carried the guilt all his life. We lived in Augsburg and it was routinely bombed by American and Allied forces. Augsburg also contained a few lesser known concentration camps. There were many, many bomb craters in the woods behind our house. Somewhere there are pictures of me standing in those bomb craters.

A full-circle tidbit – my first story for the Canyon Courier was a feature package on Camp Fickes outside of Bailey. My dad received firearm/rifle training there during WWII.

Dad’s buried in a cemetery in Kingston, Washington. Before he died he asked me not to bury him in Colorado because the ground’s too cold. He’s buried next to his beloved mother and dear brother. His sister preferred a cemetery with an ocean view of the Strait of Juan De Fuca or as she called it, the “Strait of Juan de Fuck Who?”

My dear friends, Caleb and Sarah have been out to visit dad and clean up his plain, military headstone. I appreciate it more than can be expressed. I haven’t been there in 10 years. I don’t like to fly much these days, which is ironic considering he’d never pass up a chance to fly. Though he’d talk to every pilot about flying, he never encouraged me to learn. I’d have jumped at that chance. Me and my dad in the cockpit of a Cessna 140. Dad and daughter with wings.

He’s not forgotten, not by a long shot. I’m scanning lots of pictures from the start to of his life to the end. The earliest picture I have is 1920. He was one. I make sure the pics have captions. It’s my job, because after all, I’m only one of two people left who remembers him.