A real-life hero who somehow beat the odds

We all have our heroes. We both revere and extoll those heroes. In my reality, my personal heroes are on two levels: intimate, and deeply involved.

Intimately, my greatest hero is my late father. My father was a good man, and that alone qualifies him as a hero. The fact that he lived his entire life trying to overcome incredible odds simply adds an exclamation mark to his life story.

My father was an alcoholic born to an abusive alcoholic. My father was estranged from his father, a man whom I never met. By his early teens, my father was a heavy drinker. His drinking seriously impacted his life for the next 20 years. With few options, he entered the Army as a young man and ended up stationed in upper New York state.

There, he met my mother, the oldest of twelve children. As the eldest, my mother was challenged with the task of helping raise the rest of the children. After eighth grade, my mother never attended school again.

In her early twenties, she met my father. My father represented an option to her current situation, and with time, she became pregnant. No two people could have been more opposite than my parents, but opposites do attract. In the early 1930s, unwed pregnancies were not acceptable, and my father did the right thing by marrying my mother. The timing could have not been worse: we were still in the throes of The Great Depression.

I don’t really know that much about those early days; neither of my parents ever talked about that period. I know that times were tough. My father left the Army and eventually they ended up in his hometown, Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, my two brothers were born. My father was close to his mother and that gave the new family a bit of stability.

With time, they drifted into Southern California, hopefully in seek of stable work. It was a challenge. My father was both skilled with his hands and very intelligent. He was also an alcoholic. Jobs came and went for many years.

I do not recall ever seeing my father drunk. I was born in 1942, and some time in those early years, my father was given an ultimatum by my mother: quit drinking or lose his family. He made the right call; with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, he maintained sobriety for the rest of his life.

Ours was, and still is, a very dysfunctional family. By my count, we represent at least six generations of alcoholics, all on my father’s side of the family. My older brother died at age 60 of complications from alcoholism, an inevitable conclusion. He passed the genes for addiction on to his children.

Addictive behavior is seldom limited to just alcohol. My father and my brother were addicted to tobacco, and both died of lung cancer and emphysema. Their greatest contribution to my life was in discouraging me from ever smoking tobacco.

My father was a bit fatalistic. His path of choice was always straight ahead, taking on life even as life tried to knock him back. He had weaknesses and he had strengths. His greatest weakness was a tendency to both accept and tolerate other alcoholics. Toward that end, he often showed favoritism both within his family and within his workplace.

His greatest strength was his single-minded pursuit of that most elusive species: the rainbow trout.

My father was a Master of Trout Fishing, a skill developed early in his youth. It was a very productive and rewarding skill as well. During our times of limited income in a household of five, our freezer was never empty of frozen trout. In those days, the daily limit was 15 trout per day per fishing rod. At the end of each day, our creels would total 75 fresh caught trout. Half of that catch would be immediately packed in ice.

Sadly, in his late 60s and after retirement, the emphysema caught up with him and he could no longer camp and fish in the high country. He took up rock collecting in the desert.

My hero.