A Father’s Day ode to ‘my own special hero’

In 1972, 58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day a national holiday, fathers finally caught up and received their own special day. This year, on June 19, our beaches, lakes and backyards will feature family picnics with traditional hamburgers and hot dogs. Sack races and ball games will add to the merriment. It is also a day to remember the fathers who are no longer with us — those who fell in military battles, succumbed to illness or simply reached the end of their lives.

My father died of a heart attack at age 65. I like to think of the time I was a little girl when he built a big birdhouse in our Dutch garden and raised pigeons. On Sunday mornings we would get up very early, put a few of the birds in a basket and ride our bikes to an open meadow where we set them free. They would fly in a little circle over our heads. Then one would select a direction, with the others following its lead. They invariably got home and back into their house before we returned.

Dad loved to work with his hands. He was an expert with a fret saw and I fondly recall his masterpiece — a lampshade of thin plywood lined with white mica and a red silk ball fringe. We lost it during the Nazi occupation of Holland when it was traded on the black market for a few eggs.

Money was always scarce in our working-class family but my brother and I had wonderful toys, all made by our father. I remember Arie’s fabulous racetrack with fleet of model cars and his miniature 17th century warehouse with a pulley to hoist teeny sacks of grain. I had a superb dollhouse fully furnished with little tables, chairs and beds, and curtains in the mica windows. Farmers took them all in exchange for some grains or potatoes. By then in our mid-teens, Arie and I pretended that we were too old for toys, anyway.

Dad was working for a chemical company that was allowed to stay open by the Germans because some of its production was useful to them. His commute was long and made harder because there no longer was any public transportation and bikes no longer had proper tires. To protect himself from the elements, my father wore a prewar full-length leather coat. One night he came home without it and silently handed my mother a small carton of margarine. It was one of the rare times I saw her cry.

Another indelible memory relates to the infamous 1944/ 45 Hunger Winter in occupied Holland. Soup kitchens were closed and official rations, if available, amounted to 400 calories a day. One day, breakfast consisted of some sort of gruel that looked and smelled like wallpaper paste. No matter how hard I tried to eat it I kept gagging on the foul stuff while tears were running down my cheeks. My father was just about to leave for work and, after waiting until my mother had gone into the kitchen, grabbed my bowl and in a few swallows emptied it. Then he handed me his lunch — one slice of stale bread — and told me “Eat up quickly and don’t tell your mother.” A pat on my head and he was off for a long day’s work without anything to eat.

Why, when I had the opportunity, did I not sit down with him and thank him for our outings with the pigeons, my beautiful toys and, above everything else, for the countless times he placed the interest of his family above his own safety and comfort?

Why did I not realize it before? I have my own special hero — Dad — to celebrate on Father’s Day.