The Father I Knew

Clifford Ward Arnold was the adopted and only child of Sam and Stella.  He was born in January 14, 1912 and died August 29, 1994.  After he died I discovered that there were many unanswered questions as I tried to understand who he was as a person and why he was like he was.  Researching and writing the story of my parents was the most revealing exercise that I have ever doneTheir story is reconstructed as best I can through some genealogical research and memories of my parents.  It took me two years after they died to begin the process.  It took me another three years to complete the project.  In those five years I found that I had grown and changed and now feel that I know my parents, especially my father, better than I ever did while they were alive.  In many ways that is sad, but in the end I feel good about what I have learned about them and more importantly perhaps what I have learned about myself and about life itself.

Dad was of average height, about five-foot-ten, but shrank as he got older.  He was always on the thin side.  As a young man, he had a full head of somewhat wavy dark hair, which he parted in the middle and combed back.  His posture was rounded at the shoulders, and his ears were a little large for his head.  As his hair thinned and turned snow white his ears seemed to grow larger.

I never knew much about my father’s childhood, other than what I was able to glean and imagine from the pictures I found of him as a young boy.  In these pictures he and his faithful little rat terrier, Mickie, looked a little like runaways from an Our Gang comedy.  The pictures are of a typical American boy between 1915 and 1920; pictures with his father and a pet lamb probably taken shortly after his adoption; pictures with his mother; on a hobbyhorse; playing ball; fishing; hunting; swimming; milking a cow and just acting silly.  I cannot remember my father ever telling any stories or even small anecdotes of the childhood in these pictures.  I guess I never really thought much about this void until it was too late to ask.  I accepted his lack of interest in recounting stories of his past as being “just the way he was”.  In retrospect, I have found that many older people constantly tell stories about their lives -- why didn’t he?  This lack of personal sharing was part of my mystery of the man, and I have convinced myself, be it right or wrong, that his lack of recounting, even the little anecdotes of his childhood, involved some sort of scar tissue.

He had friends, but didn’t make friends easily.  Friend making was mostly Mom’s department, -- he went along for the ride.  He was an easy friend to have because he didn’t make many demands on the friendship.  He relied on himself and his wife when anything was needed.  He was most comfortable in the company of himself and his family. 

“Self-contained” is a short, but accurate description of my father.  He was quiet, simple, honest, hard-working, dependable, steady and unassuming man with a dry sense of humor that showed occasionally.  Beneath the surface, however, his self-contained quietness was as complex as the backlash of a fishing reel.  He was more of an observer than an outgoing participant.  He generally kept his opinions to himself unless asked and if asked, he stated his views clearly and constructively, and he didn’t seem to care much if you liked his answer or not.  You asked for it and here it is -- period, end of story.  My nephew, Jeff, says the same thing about me.  It’s in my genes I guess.

His avocation and lifetime hobby was attending local sports events, reading about sports in the newspaper or listening to sports on the radio or TV.  His biggest passion was the trials and tribulations of the Marion Giants, the local high school teams.  You would have to live in Indiana, or any small town in the Midwest for that matter, to understand the devotion and importance people place on their local high school sports teams.  In Indiana, Hoosiers are maniacal about basketball.  My father had season tickets for Marion Giants basketball games for nearly seventy years and my mother had them for sixty.  Until the day came when they could no longer attend the games, they supported both in person and financially every high school sport, both boys and girls, year around.  He was the Marion Giants biggest and most loyal booster.  This may seem to be a trivial piece of information, but to know my father you had to know that his love of the Marion Giants and sports in general was very much a part of who he was.

Big band music and the singers of the forties were always his music of choice.  He liked the big band music, as much as each of us loves the music of our era.  His was the music of Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Benny Goodman and other bands and entertainers of the forties.  Every Sunday, after church, he would ritually turn on the radio to a show featuring “his” music.  The sounds of the big bands on the radio were as much a part of an early Sunday afternoon as the smells of Sunday dinner floating from the kitchen.  When big band music gave way to rock and roll, it left a void in his early Sunday afternoons.

Sunday afternoons were also for freshly popped popcorn.  The first popper I remember was one that was must have been left over from “pioneer” days.  It was blackened by its many years of popping over an open flame.  It consisted of a pan with a sliding cover that was attached to a long handle that was shaken back and forth over the gas flame to keep the popcorn from burning as it popped.  When the popping sounds gave way to appetizing silence, the cover was pulled back by a little hand lever and the wonderful yellow popcorn was dumped, along with a few “old maids”, into a either a red or white enameled kitchen pan along with a juicy red apple and delivered to the living room.  He eventually graduated to a small first generation semi-automatic electric popper that didn’t require constant attention to the popping process.  He continued to use this type of popper the rest of his life.  We once bought him a modern rotating popper with a compartment on top to melt butter, but the box in which it came was never even opened.  His method of popping corn was as old-fashioned and comfortable as popcorn itself, and that suited him just fine.  There was no need to change.  Popcorn will always be my favorite comfort food, and whenever I sit with a bowl of warm freshly made popcorn on a winter Sunday afternoon, I think of those cozy comfortable popcorn Sundays when I was a boy.

He read the daily newspaper faithfully and completely, but seldom, if ever, read a book.  He was not very demanding when it came to his own personal needs beyond having supper on the table on time.  He was a meat and potatoes man.  He didn’t like fish or pasta.  He was the only person