My Father

Compared to my mom, my dad was a pretty simple guy. He was born in the foothills of the Ozarks in Missouri, but they moved to California when he was quite young.

As he told it, he went one day as usual to the little one-room schoolhouse in Highlandville, Missouri. His folks and one brother came by during his lunch hour with the truck all loaded up.  They said, “We’re moving to California. Hop on if you want to go.” He hopped on. This was probably in the early 1930s. Highlandville was not far from Branson, which is now called the Redneck Riviera.

The main thing I wonder is would he have stayed married to my mom. I think he was the best looking of the original five O’Neal boys. My mom was a drag, so it’s not unthinkable to me that he would have had affairs. I have one memory of him being inappropriately physical with a gal. But, since he died in 1968, I guess we’ll never know.

I am definitely aware, though, that he didn’t approve of me and my sister. Peggy was not graceful enough for him. And I was certainly not the boy’s boy that he wanted. I remember he once wanted to play catch with me with a baseball. I think I was too effeminate for him. And that playing-of-catch was supposed to keep me from being gay. Obviously, it didn’t work. I am only getting right now that I was considered a problem in that I was mostly interested in girl stuff rather than guy stuff, and that I was not interested in girls the way all boys should be. In the working class of Central Valley, California, boys could only be interested in cars or sports. One could also be interested in girls, but I was a washout in that department too.

I was with him when he died. My uncle had a grape vineyard in Salida with a nice view of the Coast Range mountains beyond the grapes. We visited there a lot. On one visit this neighbor’s horse got loose, and the roped it. I, and we, saw that the neighbor’s foot got stuck in the rope. But there was no way to tell him about it. It happened too fast. The horse dragged him, breaking his leg. An ambulance came and took him off to the hospital. Peggy and Mom were gonna take our car home as expected. Dad and I were gonna take the wife’s car to the hospital (she’d ridden  with her husband in the ambulance) so she could have a way home.

We’d not gotten very far when my dad leaned over and groaned. My mom was just passing by in our car. She stopped, got out, and told Peggy and me to go back to the house. We ran back to it. It was the house that once stood on the campus of Downey High School. My uncle had bought it cheap, then moved it out to Salida where it went through several remodels before he built a brand new house next to it according to his specs, and then later moved to a house in the Ripon area next to Caswell State Park.

I think Bea (my grandfather’s second wife, Marily’s mother) was appointed to watch over us at the Salida house.  I suspect she already knew my father was gone (an ambulance had been sent for to the same spot). He had a heart attack. He was DOA on arrival at t”Memorial Hospital. They said that he’d had Scarlet Fever as a child, which inclined him to have a heart attack. When my mother got back from the hospital, she took my sister and me into my cousins’ bedroom and told us that our father had died. We stopped into my grandparents. I had never seen my grandmother cry before but now she did, and she was the center of everything. We stayed at another uncle’s that night. I heard this uncle call another brother that night. He cried when he told that brother that my dad was dead. It was a long time before we went home from my uncle’s. And it began a very dark period for my mom. By the time we moved back home, I was already going to the library a lot. Libraries saved my life in that period. I read about architecture and religion/philosophy.

I remember what my dad told me about his job. He applied at Pacific Telephone and Telegraph in his late teens. He continued to sit on their front steps until they hired him. Then he went in the army in the Signal Corps during the Korean War. But they sent him to Texas instead of Korea. My mother accompanied him. They lived in a trailer. I was conceived in Austin, Texas (there were two miscarriages before me) but they were home in time for me to be born.

He used to take me to work. That was in the days when phones involved a lot wires. I’m sure it’s much different now.

I also remember when he told me about death. He squatted over the main hot air register over the furnace in the living room. He said death happened when you got sick or went out and got hit by a car. He described a coffin great detail. And what the burial would be like.

I remember too when I was a boy scout. My dad became one of the men who hung out while the troop met. Several of the fathers did, without becoming scoutmasters. I think this was one of the things that would turn me into a real boy. It also didn’t work.

For years I had a recurring dream about him. He was in his coffin but not dead. He moved. I was the only one who knew he was still alive. I haven’t had such dream now for many years.