FATHERS (And Mothers)

Today is Father’s Day, a holiday in this country that goes back to a Sunday morning in May of 1909, when a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a Mother’s Day sermon. She thought of her father who had raised her and her siblings after her mother died in childbirth, and she thought that fathers should get recognition too.

So she asked the minister of the church if he would deliver a sermon honoring fathers on her father’s birthday, which was coming up in June, and the minister did. And the tradition of Father’s Day caught on, though rather slowly. Mother’s Day became an official holiday in 1914; Father’s Day, not until 1972.

Mother’s Day is still the busiest day of the year for florists, restaurants and long distance phone companies. Father’s Day is the day on which the most collect phone calls are made.

— The Writer’s Almanac

Sonora Smart Dodd was the mother-in-law of Helen Tellefero, who was the daughter of the couple who lived next to my in-laws in Browning. Helen married Jack Dodd, who became a superintendent of Glacier National Park, a job that put him under such pressure that at family holiday dinners, he always ended up ingesting for his angina about as much nitroglycerine as turkey. We used to make jokes about not bumping into him.

Fathers are an explosive topic anyway in Browning. Too many fathers derailed by a culture that dropped out from under the Blackfeet and is only now being reconstituted. But there were still some pretty good fathers around.

An excellent example is Benton Juneau, who is no spring chicken anymore. Raised in Heart Butte and then moved to Browning, he’s a big patient man who first married the unstable daughter of the Browning High School shop teacher, R.W. Harris, and his English teacher wife, Edith. They were white, super-intelligent (R.W. also had the most extensive mental collection of dirty jokes of any human being I ever knew), and able to stabilize themselves but not their daughter. Benton gave it as good a try as anyone could, but didn’t quite manage the job either.

In a second marriage, this time to an absolutely rock-solid school nurse, quite a bit younger, he hit a home-run, and continued to be an excellent father to all concerned.

Even me. In the year that I was the stand-in for the Methodist minister at the Browning and Babb Churches and lived in the parsonage just west of town, it was Benton who came out to set up a massive wood stove in the former garage so I’d have a source of heat in case the electricity went out. (The electricity always goes out and during this particular winter there was a lot of deep snow and cold.) In many other small ways he softened my life, but stood strong against destruction, unkindness or injustice. I think I’ve said before that this is what I understand to be what the typical Blackfeet man is really like: like Benton -- big, tough, and gentle.

My own father was a child of homesteading Scots. His grandfather, Archibald Strachan, was a carpenter in Scotland, doing well because he was highly skilled, who fell in love with the romance of agriculture, Thomas Jefferson and all that. He chucked everything and came to South Dakota with his wife, two daughters, and son. A second son was born in the US of A. These were educated people who worked hard, but life was pretty tough. Archibald ended up having to go back to work as a carpenter. One of his jobs has become locally famous, as it was the fine interior paneling of a wealthy man’s house.

When he was old and widowed, he tried to live with my grandfather’s family, but was so cantankerous that Sam asked him to leave. He died in a single-room-occupancy hotel in Minneapolis. By that time Sam’s family had moved to Manitoba, but Sam went on the train to collect the body and bury it in South Dakota by his wife.

Sam himself ended with his own wife in a small house in Portland which his children struggled to support while they started their own families. He lived according to the organic principles of Rodale and always kept a compost pile and a rock pile. He and Beulah had a big garden and he was constantly inventing some new kind of hoe that would make weeding easier. One day after lunch he lay down for a nap and never got back up.

My own father was a traveling man, working for a wholesale farmer’s co-op. A tribe of idealists I come from. In the Fifties his car was slammed head-on by a drunk at night on a winding, wet coastal road. He seemed all right, but he took a terrible blow to the forehead and some part of him was gone. He lined the house with books, hoping to find in one of them whatever it was he lost. They weren’t important books and he didn’t read most of them. By the end he was dependent on my mother, who taught school.

My mother’s father was Irish Presbyterian. I asked my mother what sort of Presybterian? Almost always a pillar of the church, except when the pledge season came around -- then he was a “contentious Presbyterian” and picked some kind of theological quarrel that justified his absence for a while. He had political ambitions but could never make them come true.

His own father, along with his twin brothers, had a construction company up in Washington where it was wet enough to make the grass grow thick and rich, supporting many dairies. The Pinkerton brothers built many of the huge old dairy barns. But the same climate that grew the grass brought the fever. One of the twins died, so they all moved to Roseburg where the climate supported timber mostly. My mother’s Pop never quite got back on his feet. He bought a prune orchard in a narrow valley without enough sun or water and often had to leave his wife to take construction jobs. She suffered from loneliness and died of cancer when not yet old. He married her cousin -- though the cousin had been divorced and he ought to have known better. He got into the safety deposit at the bank one day and saw that she’d cut him out of her will. So he cut her out of his. It was a major surprise to her when the will was read after his death.

He died from a heart attack brought on by the explosion of a load of fertilizer in Roseburg, Oregon, which blew a big crater in the downtown and sent John Pinkerton’s picture window showering over him where he lay napping under an afghan. He was not what you’d call an easy father, but he was so volatile, so colorful, so intense, that -- struggle as she might -- my mother never really quite separated from him.

“Lou,” which is what he called my mother (her name was Lucy), went to college for two years before the Depression made it impossible. The second year her father came home with a big mule tied on behind his Model T and a couple of sacks of seed corn in the back seat. “Lou, if you want to go to college this year, you’ll have to make your own tuition. I’ve leased this mule and you can have the forty acres over there and if you raise a decent corn crop, you ought to have enough money.” And she did.

There’s a photo of her sitting on that mule. She doesn’t look oppressed. She was born a week or so after Sonora Smart Dodd thought up Father’s Day in May, 1909. She was her father’s first child. He was very proud indeed, even though she was female. All his four children were female. He said they were just as tough and smart as any boys. I think that's true.