Four years into the Twelve Days of Christmas blog series, which focuses mostly on my late father, I was beginning to worry that I might run out of material. That changed when I opened my MacBook for the first time in more than a year (my preference for PCs is a blog for another day) and went back to the well: my files on the old man.
I immediately rediscovered two pieces written early in 2019 in the weeks after Dad told us he had terminal cancer and six months to live. Writing was my therapy that year. I wrote often about my father’s declining health and his heartbreaking struggle with the mental devastation of cancer.
Until that night, I thought I’d published everything, but one of those blogs is part of this year’s Twelve Days.
I found more hidden gems in another folder devoted to several interviews I conducted with the old man. Shortly after we got the horrible news, I asked if I could interview Dad for a book I wanted to write about him someday. I’m forever grateful for those conversations, not only because we spent time together, but also because I learned a ton about my father.
I learned that his early life of crime truly began when he was really young. At age 10, he stole BBs from a hardware store in Baldwin City, Kansas, because he didn’t have any to reload his gun. It was during the fourth or fifth grade that he developed an addiction to pinball machines. Ironically, he repeatedly asked his sons years later why they loved video games so much.
The pinball addiction fed those early transgressions. He began breaking into people’s houses on his paper route in the early 1950s, recalling that his biggest score was “eight or nine bucks and a small glass bank.”
“I would tell my mom the bread cost 15 cents when it cost 5 cents, then I’d spend the other 10 cents on pinball,” he said. “It wasn’t bad blood. Nobody taught me how to steal. I just liked it, and I loved pinball. It was dumb.”
The family was in Baldwin for only two years, but Dad talked about it often. It was the only time he didn’t mind going to school, and he had his first girlfriend.
“Laurel Hunt. We were in the same grade. She was dark-headed, beautiful brown eyes,” I never did kiss her. I was too shy. I took her to a movie and bought her an Ice cream cone. Before you guys came long, Baldwin was the happiest two years of my life.”
That might explain why the old man enjoyed the Maple Leaf Festival in Baldwin. It was one of our biggest craft shows for more than a decade, and he talked about living there as a child during every trip.
By the time I was in college, Dad had two booths at the festival, including a prime spot downtown in front of an Italian restaurant. My brother and I or my friend Steve and I worked the other space, which was several blocks away in front of the middle school my father attended 40 years earlier. Talk about your circles of life.
My grandparents moved the family to Coffeyville in the mid-1950s, a change that seemed to trigger Dad’s 20-year stretch of trouble.
“Things went to hell when we moved there,” he said. “I got in fights all the time, and my parents didn’t let me do anything other than work, school and church. I must have run away eight to 10 times after that.”
All that from the first 10 minutes of the interview, which ran nearly two hours. And I thought I was running out of material.
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS SERIES 2022