Dad's Last White Christmas

We grew up with the story of Holiday Inn, the 1942 movie starring Dad's two favorite performers, Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. The legend was that Dad and his friend Wayne, who had been living in California, grew homesick after hearing the song and hitchhiked back to Sioux City in time to celebrate Christmas in the north. "You just knew when you saw his pipe on top of the piano that they were going to get back together."

Whatever that meant. (We found out years later when the magic of cable television brought Holiday Inn right to our living room.)

There's so much more to the story, but that's for another post.

I want to fast-forward to the Dad's last Christmas in 1983. My daughter Libby's third-grade class performed White Christmas for their school Christmas program. They not only sang but also learned sign language for the lyrics. Mom, Dad and I sat there on short chairs in the auditorium.

In honor of fM's holiday carol blog, and in Dad's memory:



The sun is shining, the grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway.

There's never been such a day
in Beverly Hills, L.A.
But it's December the twenty-fourth,—
And I am longing to be up North—

I'm dreaming of a White Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten
and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white.

Irving Berlin

Christmas with the "Good" Santa at Younkers

I'm still trying to figure out what I was wearing.

A Festival of Postcards

Here's my submission for the Blog Carnival: A Festival of Postcards.




This is one of my favorite post cards. This is a "Happy New Year" card from Denmark. The coins are embossed with gold.

We found this in a trunk in my grandmother, Bessie Mabel Mathena Johnson's, basement when she died 12 Aug 1976. The trunk held the belongings of Alfred Amfield Johnson's first wife, Minnie (Wilhelmina Christina) Rose. Alfred and Minnie were married on 2 Feb 1912 and Minnie died 3 June 1912.

This post card, and the translation from Danish, led me to identify Minnie's family and filled in some of the questions about Minnie. Until we found the trunk, we did not know that Grandpa Johnson had been married before.

Why?

It just never came up.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Trading Card

Randy Seaver posts a weekly Saturday Night Genealogy Fun activity. Here is my effort for tonight ... a genealogy trading card. What a great idea from that oh-so-creative Genie, Sheri Benfort.

I couldn't make up my mind which one I liked better. You pick your favorite.

July 4th: When Dad Turned to Crime

Independence Day was my dad's favorite holiday. He LOVED his fireworks. We grew up on the stories he'd tell of legendary trips with his best friend, Wayne, to buy fireworks "When $100 would really buy something," back in the late 40's and 50's. His gaze would turn a bit wistful when he related antics with Cherry Bombs and tin cans.

We lived in Sioux City, Iowa, which is located in that little sticky-out part of northwestern Iowa that borders South Dakota and Nebraska. We could jump in the car and drive about 10 minutes into South Dakota, where firework sales were legal. My brother Steve and I would spend time shooting off Black Cats in the field behind the fireworks stand while dad carefully chose the elements for the neighborhood display.

While purchasing fireworks in South Dakota was legal, transporting them across state lines into Iowa definitely was not. The old blanket that lived in the trunk of Dad's car was used to cover the box of contraband, and we always warned that "Dad could get into a lot of trouble if he gets stopped." I think that meant we were not supposed to hold up signs that read "Help we're being kidnapped" if we saw someone in uniform.

We were always closely supervised when it came to the fireworks. We were allowed to play with those awful smelly snakes that left black marks on the sidewalk; they were legal in Iowa. Sparklers became a family activity when the sun went down. We'd get tiny stings when a stray sparkle would hit our arm. We were taught to be careful with the hot metal wire and never, ever, dropped a wire on the ground. Dad would get a variety of sparkle colors--silver, gold, red, green, blue, and it was fun to see how the wire would bend when we would do whoop-de-dos and circles with the sparklers.

The area fireworks show was at Atokad Park, a greyhound racetrack just over the river into South Dakota. Mom's duty would be to pop a paper grocery sack full of popcorn and pack the mosquito repellent. Dad had a favorite spot bordering a cornfield just outside of the park, and that was our vantage point every year. He'd park the car, take the blanket out of the trunk and put it on the hood of the car. We'd take off our shoes and climb up to claim our spot on the blanket, feeling naughty because car-climbing was on the verboten list any other day of the year. We would lean back against the windshield, munch popcorn and wait impatiently for the first big BOOM that marked the start of the fireworks display.

One....
by....
one....
by....
one....
Each display would be propelled into the night sky. Ooohs and Ahhhs would bubble forth at all the appropriate times. After 20 or 25 minutes, the big finale of multiple displays would fill the sky overhead and a volley of booms would mark the end of the legal fireworks display.

The neighborhood fireworks display was another matter. We lived on a corner that saw very little traffic, so the intersection became Fireworks Central. Beer-wielding adults would pull up lawn chairs to watch the spectacle and thereby became co-conspirators in the crime. Fortunately, we had a friendly group of neighbors and there was little risk of some grouch calling the police.

The bottle rockets, firecrackers, Roman candles, aerial displays would be planned in detail. Spinners were nailed to the telephone pole and showered sparks in the darkness.

The display didn't last long, because in the Sixties, $100 didn't go as far as it used to. Plus Dad wanted to move quickly just in case the police drove by.

Dad's neighborhood fireworks display was something he gave to his friends and family every year but I think he enjoyed it even more than we did. It's a cherished part of growing up and I'll be thinking of him tonight when I hear the first BOOM to mark the 2009 fireworks display.

Father's Day

I had long suspected that Father’s Day was something of an afterthought, created in response to Mother’s Day. A quick check of Wikipedia supports that. Sonora Smart Dodd, a young mother from Washington, formed the idea for the celebration in 1909 while listening to a Mother’s Day sermon at the Central Methodist Church in Spokane. She felt her father, a widower, deserved recognition for the sacrifices he had made in raising the family of six following her mother’s death.

The idea did not gain instant approval. Whereas Mother’s Day was easily adopted, it took several years – over two decades - for Father’s Day to gain wide acceptance as a celebration. Articles ridiculed and satirized the idea of commemorating Father’s Day. After all, fathers didn’t need flowers, and they certainly didn’t need mushy greeting cards.

Spurred on by support from retailers, the idea eventually caught on and grew to be celebrated in countries around the world. Many countries observe Father’s Day on the third Sunday of June, while others celebrate on other days of the year.

As a native Iowan, I have always been partial to the Kevin Costner movie, “A Field of Dreams.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s the story of Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer by marriage who hears a voice murmuring through the darkness among the corn stalks, urging “If you build it, he will come.” He bulldozes his corn field to make a baseball diamond where old-time ballplayer ghosts appear to relive their past glory. Final moments reveal that one of the baseball players is Ray Kinsella’s father. Ray, who was estranged from his father, has the opportunity to meet his father as just another man. That part always makes me cry.

My father passed away in 1985. I’d like to have an opportunity to sit down with my dad and talk to him as just another person. It’s one of the recurring themes as I work on my family history and discover those things that just never came up. I learned too late that due to his 4-F draft status, my father spent World War II as a dance instructor. (Tough job but someone had to do it.) I never danced with him. And when I think of that, it always makes me cry, too.

As I learn more about the influences on the lives of my parents and grandparents, I have gained insight into the motives and reasons behind the actions they took, the beliefs they held, and the things they said.

Talk to your father this weekend. If you are lucky enough to be able to sit with him in the same room, or listen to his words over the telephone, celebrate and rejoice in that. If you can’t reach out and touch him, or can’t hear his words, you can still feel him in your heart.

Happy Father’s Day


---------------

The photo? Taken at my wedding in 1972.

Just Like the Christmas Diary...

...every year I would start with the best of intentions, to faithfully record my most innermost thoughts and dreams on the pages of a carefully selected diary. The pages were white and crisp, smooth, creaseless, unsmudged. I couldn't wait to carefully date the first page and always started with "What I Got for Christmas."

And every year, beginning about January 5, the entries would start to dwindle, getting shorter, less insightful, less neatly written.

And eventually the pages on the diary remained pristine, untouched by pen or pencil.

So goes this blog.

I will do better.

So I promise, my faithful followers.