Fathers as depicted on tv fifty years were quite different than the ones in real life.
@goatprairie No kidding. Mine had a lot in common with yours. My first bicycle came from the dump,and my father wouldn't even let me use his pliers or wrenches to fix the flat tires or replace the chain,and even refused to show me how to do it. He told me I was "too stupid to learn,so he wasn't going to waste his time" trying to teach me.
I learned. It wasn't easy,but I borrowed some tools from a neighbor and just kept screwing with it until I got it right. IIRC,I was in the 1st grade at the time.
When I was in the 5th grade and about 5'2" tall a freakishly tall kid (about 6'2") in the 7th grade decided he was going to impress the girls by picking on me in the school yard after school by doing stuff like throwing a basketball in my face as hard as he could throw it. When I went home crying to my father about it,he told me it was none of his business and I needed to learn how to man-up and take care of these things on my own. So a few days later I laid his ass out with a baseball bat after school one day,and stood over him and dared him to bleed harder because if he did I was going to beat him to death with the bat.
For some odd reason I never had any more trouble from him,or any other school bullies after that.
My father even sold the first two cars I bought with my own money that I earned working in the summers between school. The first car was a 38 Chyrsler that ran and drove that I bought for 20 bucks I earned digging septic tanks with a shovel when I was 12,and the other was a 40 Ford tudor I had bought with money I earned working as a deckhand on a shrimp boat when I was 13. He sold them both while I was away from home at school or work,and even refused to give me the money he got. "My house,my yard,my money" was the excuse I got. I was told about the time I was in the 1st grade that I needed to learn something in school because when I turned 18 I was out of the house. When I came back home from basic training after joining the army on my 17th birthday,they had already given or thrown all my clothes and other possessions away.
Sounds harsh,but the reality is unlike a lot of children I grew up without illusions about how fair the world is and the understanding that if I wanted something,I was going to have to work for it and earn it.
To be fair to my father,he grew up in the early part of the 20th Century,and he was in the 3rd grade when his father died,and he had to quit school and go to work in a shipyard as a laborer to help his mother support his 5 brothers and sisters. Then when he did get married,it was to a woman who had an adopted daughter from a earlier marrige,and he also got stuck with raising a nephew about 5 years old after his parents were killed in a car accident. A nephew who came down with juvenile diabetes when he was 13 and kept him broke paying doctors bills. Then I had a reaction to the first Polio Vaccine when it first came out,and was bedridden with my own doctors bills for a couple of months,and even had to learn to walk again. Right after that my mother came down with type 1 diabetes,and that cost him,too.
Needless to say,as a carpenter working in the 50's he had no medical insurance. He worked from the time he was in the 3rd grade until he was 62 and could retire on SS,and the only time I ever remember him missing a day of work was when he fell of a roof he was shingling when he was in his late 50's. I remember when I was 6 years old watching him get on his knees in a bathtub one Sunday morning with a pair of slip-joint pliers and a nutpick,and pull 3 of his own teeth because he couldn't afford to go to a dentist,and he couldn't afford to lose a days work to go to one even if he had the money for the dentist.
Unlike everyone else in his family,he didn't drink,he didn't gamble,and he didn't run around with other women. If he wasn't working,he was at home. When he got paid on Friday afternoon,he gave the money to my mother and she put together the budget and paid all the bills. When she died in 1980 he was lost. He had no idea what anything cost,and he didn't even know grocery meats were dated. I had to teach him how to shop.
Working hard was all he ever knew how to do. He could write his name,but that was about it. To him it must have seemed like I had every opportunity in the world to take care of myself, and needed to learn to do just that.
