Remembering Dad On Father’s Day

My dad passed away in September and this will be our first Father’s Day without him. But his example lives on as a worthwhile tribute to dads everywhere.

He wanted my younger brother and me to know how to work and he wanted us to earn a college degree. Dad believed that if we had both, we would be well-equipped to make it on our own in life.

My parents did a great job in helping us in those areas. It wasn’t always easy on my parents or on us.

In this space last week, I wrote about some of the work I got to do growing up.

Basically, from the time my brother and I were 7 or 8years old up until we reached junior high, our work experience included house cleaning, yard work, gardening and some farm work in the fields (thanks to my grandfather).

In the spring and early summer we weeded the cotton field and the watermelon field. In late summer, we got to harvest the melons. A pickup truck would hold about 120 melons and my grandfather’s “Bob truck” held almost 500. We learned to toss the melons from one person to another as we loaded the vehicles in the field. Incidentally, if you threw a few hundred melons up to someone in a truck, it was a pretty good workout.

At ages 15, 16, 17 and 18, both my brother and I worked at a grocery store during the school year.

Sometimes on Saturdays, and throughout each summer, we worked in my dad’s construction business, which he started in Corning in 1964. Dad’s company specialized in masonry restoration (tuck pointing) and we learned about the entire process. We also did stucco work, brick cleaning, sand blasting, waterproofing, caulking and painting.

The most physically demanding jobs with the construction crew were mixing “mud” in a cement mixer and getting it to the men on the scaffold on a stucco job, using a hand-held electric hammer to chip out mortar, using a trowel to apply stucco, and tuck pointing. A full day of any of those tasks makes the entire body sore, but it also makes for a very good night of sleep.

I’m not complaining about all of that work; I only mention it to say I’m grateful for the experience and for what it taught me.

Throughout high school, I always had a summer construction job and I learned the lesson about work that Dad wanted.

After that, getting the college degree was pretty easy by comparison. It was challenging to be sure, but it was never as physically demanding. I got some scholarships and earned my own spending money, and my parents worked hard to make up the difference. After I got to college, they entrusted the entire matter to my professors and me.

No one should get the impression that my parents were too hard on us. They were actually very loving and gracious. They had high expectations for us but they were also extremely sensitive to our development.

Dad worked us hard, but he paid my brother and me for every hour we worked in the construction business and encouraged us to save. And he always allowed us to be a part of playing sports or any other interests we had. He never said that we couldn’t be on the team because we had to work.

Dad and I always had an agreement in the summer: I was working for him until football practice started in August. And I continued working for my dad in the summers, from 1976 all the way up until 2001. My brother was even more dedicated; he runs the company now.

We learned a lot in getting college degrees but we learned much more about the real world of work. Dad felt we needed both. And he was right.