Thanks, Dad.

There are three quite notable events in my life for which I owe a debt of gratitude to my father. The first one is that, with his help and guidance, I made it up the Boy Scout ranks to Eagle. It was my first big achievement and I never would have gotten there without his help. He did the same favor for my brother.

I liked being a Boy Scout. I got to go camping, hiking, canoeing, and shooting. I learned to tie knots, build bridges, made campfires, handle a knife and axe, cook over an open fire, pitch a tent, lead a group of my peers, and safely handle and accurately shoot a rifle. I also learned about local, state and federal government, first aide, lifesaving and water safety, citizenship, woodcraft and all sorts of outdoorsman type activities. I took to it immediately and easily advanced up through the lower ranks, acquiring and demonstrating the skills necessary to achieve each level. I had no trouble with most of the badges needed for the upper ranks until it came time to call up a merit badge counselor who I had never met. I discovered then that I had a completely irrational and nearly unconquerable fear of calling strangers on the telephone. Up until that time, I’d been working with people that I knew, my dad and other adult leaders of our troop, plus some counselors at summer camp. There were some required badges for which I needed to meet with a complete stranger in order to earn that particular award. Of course, these people I was supposed to call were simply volunteers who had knowledge in the area that the badge requirements addressed. All I needed to do was pick up the phone, introduce myself and set up an appointment to meet with the man. I couldn’t do it. Pull out my fingernails with pliers, set me on fire, do anything but make me place a phone call to a stranger. It was the hardest thing I had to do. I don’t know why I was afraid of make that call. I never have discovered the reason. I still have that fear, but I’ve learned to conquer it. I can actually make a phone call now and I can do it almost without that little adrenaline spike, almost. It’s strange, but the fear is still there to a very slight degree.

My dad helped me make those phone calls. It wasn’t easy for either of us, but we got it done. My dad helped me sell cookies, too. During the East Peoria years, there was this summer camp that I was supposed to go to one year. For some reason, I was required to sell cookies to earn part of my camping fees or something. I never did get an explanation as to the necessity of the cookie selling, I just got the job of selling cookies door-to-door. My mom or dad would load me up in the car, drive me to a nearby neighborhood and send me up to total stranger’s houses with this box of cookies and an order form in my hand. I was supposed to tell the person who answered the door that I was selling these cookies to earn my way to camp and they were supposed to give me money. Knocking on stranger’s doors was even more frightening to me than making phone calls. I hated it. I was scared. Again, I don’t know why, but I was. My parents made me do it anyway. My dad is the quintessential salesman so he had no idea what I was afraid of, and my mom thought it was stupid to be afraid of knocking on doors. Of course, she wasn’t the one who had to do it. No, I had to do it. I whimpered and cowered and quivered and shuffled my way up to door after door, hesitantly repeating the same spiel to each new stranger and, more often than not, having my sales pitch answered with a “No, Thank You,” or just a simple “Not Interested.” Eventually we ran out of nearby strangers and my cookie sales career came to an end. It ruined me for sales, though. My fear of “cold calls” (talking to strangers) in sales and my fear of telephone calls (talking to strangers), no doubt, stems from a fear of rejection. As every good salesman knows, sales is a numbers game; you have to get through a lot of rejections to make that sale. The secret is to not take the rejection personally. I haven’t ever been able to do that very well. I almost always take it as a rejection of myself and not of whatever I might be selling.

When we moved to Colorado, after my first-and-only-year of college, my dad got me a job working in the factory where he was national sales manager. That was one of the reasons we moved to Colorado, so that my dad could take that job. I don’t feel like I owe my dad for getting me that job at the factory, but I suppose I do. It was my first real job. Back in Peoria I spent one summer getting paid to wash dishes at the same Boy Scout camp I had gone to when I was younger. The two summers after that, while I was still in school, I worked as a life guard at the local country club. Washing dishes was a job. Sitting in the sun watching girls and keeping the little kids from downing was not what I consider job. It was more being paid to do what I would have done for free if someone had asked. The factory job was a real job.

I spent six years working in factories in Denver. I never got to like it very much. The job that my dad got me was in the factory that made the fluorescent lighting fixtures for which he managed the national sales. I started work on the paint line with a crew whose job was hanging the bare, stamped metal parts of the fixtures on a continuously running overhead chain. The chain took the metal parts on a journey through the washer, the dryer, the paint booth and the paint dryer. When they came out of the paint dryer, another crew took them off the line and stacked them up on pallets so that the parts could be taken to the assembly line. If that sounds tedious and boring to you, you would be correct. It was painfully boring and intolerably tedious, and I was miserable most of the time. It wasn’t so much the tedium that made me miserable as it was that my mind didn’t need to be engaged to any great degree upon the task at hand, which left me free to think about how much I missed the girl I had left behind in Peoria. I got myself off of the paint line and wound up driving a forklift. That was slightly more interesting and not nearly as boring, but still not very engaging. I was not very well motivated to make it to work on time each morning, and after about three years was fired so as to set an example for all the other chronically tardy employees of the consequences of that sort of behavior.

Since I didn’t feel qualified to do very much else at that point, I got another factory job. I went to work for a paper box company. I clawed my way up through the ranks of paper box making employees and got back to forklift driving and order fulfillment in the warehouse. It wasn’t a bad job, as factory jobs go, but I failed to find any motivation at this factory, either, and was tardy and chronically absent to as great a degree as was possible to be while not getting fired again.

Meanwhile, my dad had been let go from the lighting fixture company and had taken up selling used cars in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. He and my mom had gotten a divorce as during that time as well. I wasn’t at home when the breakup happened, so I don’t really know the whole story. I do know that it’s not my story to tell, so I’ll just leave it alone. I do know that my dad was not pining for my mother and wasn’t having any trouble finding other women willing to spend time with him.

I was still living in Denver, working my uninteresting, unexciting factory job and dating women who were very bad for me. Not that they were bad people, it’s just that they weren’t quite what I needed at the time. My dad had me come up to Steamboat Springs for the weekend and showed me around town. He offered to get me a job at the auto dealership where he was working. I thought it was a great idea. It would get me out of the factory, but, more importantly, it would let me kindly and gently end the bad relationship I was trapped in. Moving out of Denver and starting over again in Steamboat Springs was the best thing I could have done at that time. I gave my notice to my landlords, and a couple of weeks later, packed up my stuff, said goodbye to the girlfriend and moved up into the mountains. Thanks to my dad looking out for my best interests, I was free to start a new life. I called my former employers on the Monday after I moved out of Denver and let them know that I wasn’t coming back. This was the second thing my dad had done for me, but it wasn’t the best thing. The best thing was yet to come, and the only person that it didn’t surprise was my dad. He knew me, better than I knew myself at the time, and he saw it coming.

I started work at the Chevy dealership in the parts department. There I learned to read a parts book, learned how to place orders with the GM parts depot, and learned how to deal with customers and mechanics. I knew something about cars and their inner workings from having to repair my own vehicles when they broke down. For a variety of reasons, lack of funds being the primary one, I’ve never been one to take my car to a mechanic when it breaks down. Instead, I go out and buy a repair manual and figure out how to do the work myself. Most of the time I have been successful in getting the whatever-it-is I’m driving at the time back on the road. I mostly liked selling Chevy parts and I got to know some of the local ranchers and mechanics who were repeat customers at my counter. I liked living in the mountains, too. The air was clean, the people were friendly and I was feeling rather good about myself.

My dad, salesman that he is, already knew lots ofpeople around Steamboat Springs and he would introduce me to one or another of them from time to time. One of the people he introduced me to was a woman that he’d dated a time or two, or more, her name was Carol. It was at the home of a mutual friend where I first met Carol. As we were leaving, we stopped on their lawn and talked for a while. Carol told me about her recent divorce and explained to me at length that she considered all men to be beneath contempt and untrustworthy. She stated emphatically that she was not interested in any long-term relationship with anyone. I listened and made what I hoped were sympathetic responses at what I also hoped were the appropriate moments. I must have done it right since when we said goodnight that evening, she agreed that it might be interesting to get together again and continue the conversation.

At that time, Carol had a job driving a nine-passenger Mercedes bus with which she shuttled tourists and locals back and forth to the ski area east of town and destinations in between. One day she called a meeting between me, herself and my father. She came to pick us up at the Chevy dealership in the bus and drove us to her house in town. When we got there she served us a nice lunch which she had bought at KFC for the occasion. As we sat on her porch and ate our lunch, we discussed the situation and what the future held for each of us. After lunch, she drove us back to the dealership and dropped us off. After that, Carol had decided that I had somehow won the bid for her affection and my father was no longer in contention for that prize, though he was still to be considered a friend. So, really, when you think about it, I stole Carol away from my father. Thanks, Dad.

The initial courtship took place in the early spring of that year. Carol and I had fun together, hiking in the surrounding mountains and getting to know each other. I got to know her two children, too, one of whom was five and the other seven years old. I even got to meet Carol’s ex-husband who turned out to be a nice guy. We all got along fairly well, so well, in fact, that in July when Carol set off to clear hiking trails for two weeks with the Volunteer Conservation Corps (VCC), she asked me if I wanted to move into her place. I immediately accepted and while she was gone I moved my stuff into her house. Okay, well, it wasn’t really a house, it was a double-wide trailer, but it was set up on a city lot in town just a few blocks from downtown Steamboat Springs. It had three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, a kitchen and a deck that wrapped around one end of the trailer. There was a creek running through the front yard, a strawberry patch on the east side of the lot and a nearly vertical hillside on the south side. It was a beautiful location and I spent the two weeks trying to find places to stash all my stuff. One day, during those two weeks I drove up into the mountains to where the VCC had their base camp. I took with me a few supplies and my Coleman stove and cooked breakfast for Carol on the tailgate of my pickup truck. I opened a can of corned beef hash and dumped in into a frying pan. I then made little hollows in the hash and broke some eggs into them and cooked the whole breakfast in one pan. It was delicious and Carol thought I was pretty clever to even think of doing it that way.

Things between Carol and I just got better and better, and soon we decided that for the kids’ and our parents’ sake we ought to get married. We bought some nice handmade stationery from a local shop, made a guest list, and hand-wrote our own invitations. We bought our rings from a local silversmith. In October of that year, we were married in the front yard of the trailer with Carol’s sister presiding, my father as best man, and one of Carol’s friends as maid of honor. In attendance were my mother and her new boyfriend, Carol’s parents, Carol’s ex-husband’s parents, a bunch of our friends and, of course, Carol’s two boys. We had a pot luck reception and everyone had a great time eating and drinking. It was the beginning of a new life for me, one that has gotten better every year, and it was all thanks to my Dad. Yep, I’d say I owe him for that.