A Personal Reflection

Facebook "Memories" function reminded me today that we lost Dad about six years ago. I posted the following thoughts a couple weeks after he passed. Some of this still moves me, so I share it with readers today. Regular writing, history, and book posting will resume tomorrow:

New suburban home circa 1970, Moon township, Pennsylvania. Pictured are your author with his younger sister, Rachel; Dad; Mom; and Dad's mother, Katie.

​I wrote Dad’s obituary the other day. It’s an indecent act, the way of all writing, and more so as the writing gets better, since the writer always has the last word. No doubt that’s why my sister and I became writers (she far superior to me): getting the last word must have been a way out of the forever-arguments we had with our father. Now that he’s gone, the words I write now feel a cheat.

Our arguments were, if not always skillful, never trivial. There was no reason to fight over the car or curfew, the former always delivered home with a full tank, the latter never broken. Our conflict was ideological, politics and religion our specialty. As such they were also deeply personal, I having renounced the family ways – “the faith of your fathers,” as he once referred to it. Much was at stake in these fights, the peace of our eternal souls or the fate of a nation teetering on the edge of the straight and narrow the least of it. At issue, I believe, was his ongoing existential burden (and mine), the deeply personal insult of the son who had renounced his father’s wisdom. These were deep and permanent struggles, and though we come to a kind of détente as he mellowed with age, the cracks were always apparent. The last really big fight was about twenty years ago, Dad chastising me, upon announcement of my engagement, that I had not properly requested of the lady’s father her hand in marriage. Since then the conversations and the visits would be much more pleasant. Reminiscences predominated, and stories of the good old days. Those I enjoyed very much, and he could tell stories. And I never doubted – and I don’t think he ever doubted either – our abiding love for each other. There would remain love, and a shared history, and a common appreciation for old movies. But we never recaptured the intimacy of my childhood years, and I have for more than forty years felt grievously the loss of that. Our later moments together were always performed to a knowing caution, as if there were trip wires all around that might be triggered if the conversation ever ventured too far afield from pleasant memories. Losing him now has been sad, but I don’t really grieve. I’ve been mourning a lost relationship for decades now.

He wasn’t always such a zealot. His would be the conviction of the converted. He was once young and carefree. He had been voted both “Most Funny” and “Best Looking” in successive years in high school; lesser men have built careers on thinner stuff. I see the photos of him, and his first wife, my mother, Gail. There they are, with baby Rachel, and Dad’s mom, Katie, on the front lawn, shortly after moving into the house on Shippen Drive. He met the Bostonian Gail in Kansas City in 1964. She had somehow or another become a trainer for IBM, and he would be sent there for his training at his first post-college job. They used to pass mash notes to each other via old computer punch-cards, a secret code. She was beautiful and smart, a worldly Boston Jew, who must have appeared vaguely exotic to him. He was handsome, charming, and funny, certainly not working-class, but undoubtedly just a bit rough around the edges for her high-achieving family. Heady stuff. Within two years a new wife was added to the new job, and less than three years after that two children and a new house in the suburbs.

That house always seemed normal to me, like home¸ of course. But reflecting on it now, surely it wasn’t that to them. It wasn’t a large house by today’s standards, but in 1969 when they moved in it was new, a three-bedroom split-level with a big backyard, and respectable neighbors. It was certainly a cut above what he had grown up in, and without question represented moving up in the world, compared to the working-class row-houses that predominated the Pittsburgh of those years. His father was not a steel-worker. He had been a printer, and so far as I know Dick was one of the first in the family to go to college, following his older sister Janet who had gone to teacher’s college only a few years before. Pittsburgh holds many more interesting upward-mobility stories than this one. Still, here was a new house, in the suburbs (nearly out at the airport!), a house which has father hadn’t lived to see. Family progress, moving up in the world, improvement. That is a photo of things right in the world, and the promise of a bright future.

I see him in that picture now, through my historian’s lenses, and I see archetypal American confidence, optimism, the certainty that things would forever get better. Dad was made for America’s confident mid-century. A suit, a smile, a dash of charm. This world was his oyster. And he would be defined by it, even as things didn’t get better, and the future unfolded in ways that he didn’t anticipate and for which he was not prepared.

With optimism as his guide he left IBM and worked for a brief time with a tech start-up, Caelus Memories. Caelus made disks and hard-drives, eventually getting bought out. After a couple years with Caelus, he went out on his own, with a small loan from Gail’s uncle, Robert. Every man deserved a chance to make it on his own, she would tell Robert. The company had a better name than business plan, and Gateway Systems would not survive the early 70s. But Dad had people skills and he landed on his feet with a business-to-business computing company, Reynolds & Reynolds. Dad could always talk, loved to talk. He had a gift for it. His gift for conversation derived from his fascination for people. He was always open to people, all people, and genuinely interested in them. He collected friends throughout his life without regard to station, completely open and non-discriminatory. That openness was his greatest asset, and his fatal flaw. He had no mechanism for separating the wheat from the chaff.

Reynolds & Reynolds was a solid company and Dad did well there. But he was not ready for what was on the horizon, a double-team of personal and regional tragedy that left him reeling. By 1972 Gail would be diagnosed with the breast cancer that would take her five years later. She outlived Elvis, but only by two months. I’m not sure either of them recognized it at the time, but she was the rudder that guided his hail-fellow-well-met persona. All of the women in her family are like that: strong, take no prisoners, drawn to affable men to whom guidance is provided. Dick and Gail would have been a great team if they had survived. But she did not, and he was cast adrift.

The complementing tragedy was less distinctly rendered in his life, but may have been more disastrous over the long-term. In 1979 we would leave Pittsburgh for Chicago and a new step-family. We were not really part of the great Pittsburgh diaspora of the 1970s, driven by deindustrialization and the horrors of the new global economy. But we were caught up in its riptides. Thanks to the economic collapse of western Pennsylvania, and Volcker-era interest rates, that bright three-bedroom split-level would not sell for four excruciating years. His family obligations had doubled overnight, not including the Pittsburgh mortgage and Chicagoland rental he was obligated to carry, and while Reynolds & Reynolds effected a transfer for him, the pickings were not as fruitful, the competition more fierce. He would soon find himself jumping from company to company for the rest of the 1980s and 90s. Most of these moves were just a bit below the previous one, and so perhaps he never even realized that the foundations were slipping away. The toll that these later years would extract is nowhere evident in these photos from the early 1970s. If only I could have warned him.

It didn’t help that by that point thousands upon many thousands of dollars were being funneled into the purple coffers of one or another televangelist, faith healer, and Christian huckster. I blanche to relate this part of the story, but it’s necessary to the tale. Though he had been raised in a god-fearing household there was nothing in Dad’s adolescence to predict the level of zealotry with which he turned to his new brand of Christianity after Gail passed away. Looking back, I understand the need for answers, the desperation to find a new anchor. Her illness was protracted and horrible. After she passed, he had two young children to look after and, though he had always been a good father, I understand now that he was unprepared for what her absence meant for our lives. Hence the quick turn around on mother #2. And hence the new cultish devotion to a faith that promised answers and deliverance if you merely surrendered to it. The certainty that God would not only, but indeed actively was, charting a way out of the current troubles – the old optimism again! – grew as financial distress mounted. A miracle – literally, a miracle – was certainly on its way. How many fortunes, I am left to wonder, did my father hand over to the unscrupulous charlatans who promised a “hundred-fold return” and to whom he paid his most slavish devotion? Too much belief. Too much optimism. No capacity for discerning the false prophets. A little realism, a little hedge-your-bets, would have made all the difference.

But despair and uncertainty don’t quite exhaust the explanations of why the turn to religion. After all, he didn’t just turn to religion. He turned to a particular expression of religion. There was no period of searching, of wandering, or of consulting the great texts, so far as I remember. He was never a reader. The sicker Mom got, the more he turned to fundamentalism. Here too, like his mid-century optimism, I think part of the answer is cultural. After all, lots of men and women turn to American fundamentalism to help chart the way out of one or another personal conundrum. Evangelical Christianity talks a big game of surrender: surrender to Christ, surrender to God’s plan, and so forth. But American Evangelicalism is not primarily an ideology of passive acceptance. Most of its key battle cries are, in fact, battle cries: don the armor of Christ, take up the sword, onward Christian soldiers, and all that. When we men take our cues about how to be a man in this world of ours from Shane or Ralph Kiner, we’re not exactly prepared for a struggle against the kind of forces Dad was up against, malignant and material. But elevating, or transmuting, those struggles against disease and economic collapse into spiritual warfare could change the rules of the game. This, in part, is the appeal of evangelicalism to many Americans: it allows us to imagine ourselves frontier heroes of yore, wielding spiritual weapons on an ethereal plane. But Shane, you’ll recall, was no father, no matter how much young Billy entreated him. Dad was devoted to his family, but that devotion required a bitter irony, one for which I still have a hard time forgiving him. The more his fortunes, and the cobbled-together family fortunes degenerated, the more compelled he felt to turn toward the pulpit and the offering plate as his only answers to the tragedies that swirled round. The more he wanted to serve us as a father, the less of a father he became. Family life deteriorated, and deteriorated further still. And he doubled down. Just a bit more faith, a bit more religion, one more offering, and everything would be alright. A vicious circle. Just like living in South Carolina, 49th in the country for everything.

Dad remained an eternal optimist. He was forever, eternally, and unswervingly optimistic. Things would always get better, and I know he clung to that conviction even as he watched his family crumble around him. For when things looked bleakest, it only meant that the better days were just that much closer. I still think Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is just about the best thing ever written about American culture, but perhaps that’s only because it got me closer to Dad. Willy Loman is my father, an optimist of the kind you have to be in order to be successful in the brutally punishing career of sales. And like Willy Loman, Dad always presumed that his best year was not an aberration, but his permanent status quo. Anything less than his best year was the aberration. That kind of optimism makes for a pleasing personality for the rest of the world, but you can’t live with it. Optimism is not suited for this fallen world of ours, or the families that inhabit it.

There’s a scene in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner I’ve always loved too much. Poiter really lets his father have it. I owe you nothing, you owe me everything. You remember it. If you had to carry that mailbag a million miles you were only doing what you were “supposed” to do, Poiter lectures, his voice infused with every part of the actor’s prodigious nobility. Then the coup de grace: only when the dead weight of you is gone will I be free, he tells his father. Harsh, a death wish. It’s a classic American denial of history, the belief that we can leave the past behind. I love it for that reason – so characteristically American, so optimistic, so individualistic. But it’s false, of course. We can’t leave the past behind because the past is what’s made us.

Forever I’ve tried really hard to distance myself from the old man, to make myself into something different than he wanted or would have preferred. On some level he understood this, and though he was polite enough to not really take it head on, he knew that the choices I was making in my life were a repudiation of the choices he had made. I’m ok with that, less ok with knowing that I’ve never quite succeeded. I am more like him than I want to acknowledge. Growing up in American evangelicalism leaves a mark. It has been a life’s work to beat into submission the old ideological convictions, the easy binaries, the unquestioning acceptance on shoddy evidence, the expectation of the deus ex machina. And the capacity for self-delusion is there, the certainty that with the dawn the situation can be made right, that the world can be made to see. Academic life has given me a practiced critical pessimism, but it’s a mask. I have a hard time believing that things might work out poorly, that I should be as prepared for a negative as a positive outcome. It gives me no real comfort to acknowledge the fact. I can’t escape his legacy no matter how hard I try.

My attempt to become his opposite has only partially succeeded. I’ve not been so cultish as to want to reject his generosity, his humor, and his undeniable basic decency. But I have tried to replace his faith with evidence, his credulity with reason, his frontier individuality with community. But in the way of these things, the more I tried to define myself against his example, the larger he loomed. Even now I am faced with the paradox that the only way I will ever know if I’ve succeeded in becoming his opposite is to truly know who he is and was. And that task is made harder the further I’ve tried to move away from him.
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But this I know too: as imperfect as he was – as wildly imperfect – he was a good man. A really good man. He cheated no one of whom I am aware. He was faithful to his God, to his wives, and to his family, as best he could be. He WAS a faithful friend to man and beast alike. No matter the tragedy that came his way, the difficulties, even the ones he created and ultimately failed to navigate, he was not deterred. He kept faith with what he believed, and I am awed and humbled by that fact. Even today I wish that he had developed some sort of mechanism to better navigate the tragedies and the charlatans. But then I think about the hustlers and the hypocrites and the careerists that have had far better success than he, and I’m grateful he wasn’t one of them. For all the failures, he went out on his own terms – until the last he was convinced that his ship was just about to come in – and for that I sing the man’s praises. And I will try to retain that piece of him, and let it speak to me.
--David J. Snyder