My Dad was born April 18, 1919 at Tennessee Ridge,
Tennessee. His parents were John Berlin
Whitten and Tennessee Porter McGee Whitten.
He was their second child, the first died as an infant, leaving Dad to
be the first born, practically speaking.
By the time he was 9 months old the family was living in Alabama, just
down the road from his paternal grandfather.
Sometime soon after that the family was back in Tennessee making a
living farming on rented farmland. Dad
worked hard as a boy and learned many skills, but getting along with his Dad
was the most difficult and unsuccessful effort he experienced. After a conflict with his father in 1939, Dad
left home and joined the U.S. Army. He
trained first as a mechanic in a motor transport unit, but when Pearl Harbor
was attacked, he volunteered for the 101st Airborne and according to
what he told me, made nine combat jumps and was wounded twice. After the war, he was discharged at Fort
Custer in Michigan and moved to Pontiac, Michigan where his parents had moved
during the war for a job. There he met
and married a young Michigan girl who became my mother, Phyllis Deloris
Haskill. He was twenty-seven and she was
seventeen when they married. Together
they produced six children that lived to maturity and one son that died at
birth along with several miscarriages.
He died February 26, 1998 in Pontiac, Michigan.
The above information is the kind of knowledge one
gathers doing genealogy research, but that doesn’t enable me to really know
Dad. To share with you who he was, I
will share some memories from my childhood.
These are my memories, I think each of my siblings will have a different
set because we were growing and Dad was growing also and we each touched his
life at different times.
My first memory of Dad is from my fifth year, just
before starting school. He had just purchased
the house the family grew up in. The
address was 83 N. Eastway Drive, Pontiac, Michigan. The one acre property sat on the north side
of a hill. The house was an unfinished
shell, framed, roofed, sided and nothing else, a real project. Dad, myself and our dog Zip had gone to the
new house to look it over. We sat on a
stump that was in front of the house.
He, I’m sure was considering the work before him or dreaming of what he
could make of it. I was watching Zip
hunt and kill garter snakes when I noticed a war going on between a hill of red
ants against a hill of black ants. I
told Dad about it. I don’t remember what
he said, but I do remember that he talked to me as a person and not on a
parent/child level.
My second memory was a couple of years later, we had
moved into the house and the family went for a walk in the woods, over the
Clinton River. We had to cross the Grand
Trunk Railroad trestle to get to our destination. I can’t say what the other kids thought but I
was afraid that I would fall between the ties or off the edge. Dad carried two of us over at a time, two
trips and then he had to go back for Mom for she wasn’t overly brave about it
either. Guess I came by it naturally.
My third memory is a little different. One of his co-workers at Pontiac Motors
Division was building a house and many of his friends were going to help him
frame it. Dad took me, my brothers Tom
(Wayne) and Terry. We played while the
men worked. I remember there being a lot
of beer and a lot of foul language. But
what stood out to me was that Dad was different, he didn’t use the foul
language that the others did. Somehow
that caught my attention.
Somewhere about the same time comes another
memory. This one is where I learned a
valuable lesson, one that I wouldn’t realize until many years later. To provide a place of shelter from the
tornado threats that occurred each year, Dad began to dig a basement hole in
the crawl space under the house. He
would throw the dirt to the north end of the space and when there was no longer
room to put more, my brothers and I were given the job of raking it back,
throwing it out an opening in the foundation and haul it away in our
wheelbarrow. I hated doing it, I hated
him for making me do it, I complained at every opportunity. At times I was so angry, I would have done
him great bodily harm if I were big enough.
But, in that hole is where I learned how to work, regardless of
conditions and circumstances. This is
probably the greatest gift he gave me.
When I was in fifth grade, I made the mistake of
quoting my teacher to Dad. She was wrong
and I was wrong for saying it, but I was already ignorant of many things. Dad was very proud of his southern
heritage. I said, (quoting) “People in
the south respect the CSA battle flag more than the American flag”. Dad didn’t say anything, he just got up and
left the room. I knew that I had hurt
him and disregarded his patriotism. I
didn’t know at that time how easy it is to have conflicting loyalties, I do
now. I disrespected his service as an
airborne warrior and his loyalty to our country. I hope he forgave me later or now in Heaven,
it was ignorance and lack of respect on my part.
When I was fourteen and a paper carrier, I was at the
soda fountain in the lower level of the S.S. Kresge store spending my
hard-earned money on a hot fudge sundae.
To my complete surprise, Dad came in and sat down next to me and ordered
a Vernor’s ginger ale. We chatted just a
little and he finished his drink. As he
was leaving he said, “Next time try getting a milkshake, it will be better for
you”. He was being a friend, not a
parent in that encounter.
The evening of high school graduation, Dad let me use
the first new car he ever had to go out with my friends. Showing off, I revved the engine in neutral
and dropped the shifter into drive to lay a patch of rubber. I broke the drive shaft and had to call
him. He was cool and calm, not what I
expected. His only comment was that it
shouldn’t have broken and must have been a defective shaft.
These are the memories that stand out to me. There are many more that float around in my
brain. Meals that he would fix when Mom
was working, him sitting and educating himself by reading through the Colliers
Encyclopedia and later the Britannica.
There were also spankings (deserved), working in the large garden,
arguments between the parents (frequent), drinking instant coffee that he
poured in a saucer first. But the one
that seems to be the most poignant for me was what he did on a very cold winter
day when we had run out of fuel oil for the stove in the living room. Dad put on his cap and light denim jacket (he
called it a jumper) and picked up a five-gallon fuel can and walked the mile
and a half up to the service station and back carrying the can full of
oil. No complaining, just doing what was
necessary. I still find myself standing
at the back porch, watching him disappear into the heavily falling snow. This really impacted me in ways I still can’t
explain except by comparing it to some of the sacrificial tasks that I have
done as a husband and father.
In sharing these memories, I want to do what his
pastor, Eddie Jones said at Dad’s funeral.
The one thing I remember him saying, “keep the grain and lose the
chaff”. Dad wasn’t perfect, none of us
are. He like us, was a product of his
time, environment and faith. His
childhood wasn’t easy and the horrors of war haunted him. He had dreams of returning to Tennessee and
having a small farm, but the dreams faded with the passing years. Resignation to staying in Michigan may have
made him a little cranky and touchy, but he would still break out in a smile
when something funny struck him.
I guess what I want to say here is that my Dad had
marks of greatness about him that went un-noticed by his family, at least by
me. Some of his attributes of greatness
that occurred before I came on the scene involved guns, knives and jumping out
of planes, surviving the winter in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium surrounded by
enemy troops. But I think the more
significant marks of greatness came after the war. One of those mysterious things occurred in
1946. Somehow a girlfriend became
pregnant and a southern man and a northern girl did the right thing (according
to their lights) and got married. Dad
loved Mom, but I’m not sure the love was reciprocated, but they made the best
of it and we all came through childhood relatively ok.
Dad was faithful.
I witnessed a couple scenes as an eight-year-old of Dad with a
baby-sitter and reported it to Mom. In
retrospect what I saw may have been perfectly innocent or at the time a
momentary lapse of judgement. I never knew what transpired between my parents
in private. It was never mentioned in my
hearing again. He was home every
night. He worked hard every day at the
factory and then at home, in the basement, in the garden or working on the
house. If one has never done it, the
heroism of going to the same job, day after day and year after year seems
passé. But it does take courage,
resilience, determination and a purpose greater than the pain to keep going
back day after day and year after year.
Dad was:
1. Courageous.
2. Honest.
3. Faithful.
4. Dedicated.
5. Visionary.
6. Determined (stubborn too).
7. Gentle.
8. Loving.
9. Talented.
10.Inquisitive.
11.Strong.
12.Good looking.
13.Unselfish.
14.Loyal.
15.Forgiving.
16.Resilient.
As I write this list, many more stories come to mind illustrating
his good qualities, too many to share here.
I didn’t realize that he had these qualities as a boy
or young man and there is a reason that I didn’t know about them. That reason
is that he couldn’t and wouldn’t tell us his strengths and value because that
wasn’t his job. It was Mom’s job to
elevate and build up the father in the children’s eyes. That didn’t happen because she didn’t know
that it was her job. On many occasions,
I remember, maternal grandparents coming over and ridiculing and criticizing
what Dad did to the house, how he provided for the family or the kind of car he
drove. They did it with laughing scorn,
but it was serious and increasingly destructive as it was repeated over the
years. After all their sons, were all
doing quite well and were successful business men. Those sons, my uncles and Mom’s big brothers
were adored in her eyes. They were her
rock when their Dad deserted the family during the depression. The brothers all served during the war also
and were really nice guys, in Mom’s eyes they were the standard to measure
everyone else, including her husband.
When the grandparents made light of Dad, it undercut any admiration and
respect she may have had for Dad. She
was unable to build him up the eyes of us children because he did not have that
status in her own view. The diminishing
of fathers by mothers is quickly absorbed as normal behavior and attitude by
the children. That’s the way it was for
me as a child and youth. I didn’t know
that I should have been proud of him and want to pattern myself after him. Instead, I developed a low view of Dad and a
sort of competitive spirit. Now, I only
hope to measure up. He never owned much, but he was proud of what
he did have and was proud of his family.
He struggled financially with a blue-collar job, a large family and a
wife that had many physical problems in the early years of their marriage, but
I never felt we were poor or less than anyone else in importance. Somewhere in all this story is a place where
the commandment to Honor father and mother fits perfectly. I wish we had been taught to do so.
Dad has been gone for almost twenty years and he looms
larger in my sight now than ever before.
Like many kids, I wish I had known him for who he really was when I
could have shown my respect and admiration.
I know there was a good amount of chaff to him, but somehow that is
getting harder to recall each year. I
hope that everyone who reads this can overlook the chaff in their own parental
history and with each other and start again storing up the good grain. Isn’t that what we want others to do for us? That is what God does for us all, He leaves
the chaff behind when we pass through the Blood of Christ to salvation and the
New Birth. I am thankful to honestly say
that I believe that both my parents we believers and on their way to Heaven,
sorting out baggage along the way.
I conclude by saying that I am happy to be getting to
know Dad.
John Larence Whitten June 18, 2017
