Dad

He’d tell you the best day ever on the farm was the Christmas morning when we woke up, and it had snowed so much we couldn’t walk out our front door. We’d have to wait for our neighbors, the Wilsons, to come with their tractor to dig us out. We couldn’t go to Christmas dinner at my aunt’s house. We had to stay home, and he loved it. It gave him time to put together all those “some assembly required” toys that Santa gave us. We played and lounged around all day in our pajamas and robes.

My dad’s business, Ray’s Café, had failed and my dad had started a new job managing the Country Cheese Corner, a local dairy story. One of the “perks” about the job is that you got to rent a farmhouse and the rent was just taken out of your paycheck each month. So we moved from Marshalltown, Iowa to Blair, Nebraska. I was too young to remember the move. Dad worked all the time. It was fun to go visit him at the dairy store and sit at the lunch counter and eat the pink, bubble gum ice cream he’d give us. Sometimes we got to ride with him on milk runs in the refrigerated truck with the sliding, metal door between the cab and the cooler part.

After some years, the owner decided to close the store and my dad couldn’t find another job. Every day he dressed in a suit and headed out in search of a new job to support our family. He found a job working for Woolworth’s Department Store. He had to travel a lot and didn’t like being so far away, so he quit Woolworth’s for a new job at Wendy’s in Omaha. Dad worked many late nights and long hours. He worked split shifts, but couldn’t come home in between because Omaha was so far away. Lots of overtime hours. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to so we had enough money to pay the bills. He seemed to always be working and hardly ever at home.