This is my father back in 1918 at age 2, an age he completely adored. If any child between the ages of, say, 1 and 9 was anywhere in the vicinity, he commanded my father’s full attention. Needless to say, as children, my brother and I basked in the light. We adored our fun loving father. And few things we said or did failed to inspire his delight, leaving my mother to complain that she had been unfairly relegated to the disciplinarian role. I think he enjoyed teasing her and definitely the number of things he took seriously was exponentially smaller than those she took seriously. I actually believed until around age 30 or so that my mother had no sense of humor, though that turned out to be utterly false. She just had no patience for jokes.
As a teenager, of course, I sorely missed the could-do-no-wrong status, though the strongest reprimand I got from him at that age was once when he informed me mildly that “there is no call for that” after I had been unspeakably rude to my mother. I still remember that moment because it was so rare. Generally, his strategy regarding anything perceived as unpleasant was to ignore it. Hmmm. Perhaps he drifted off to think about other things than us kids because teenagers can be unpleasant and he preferred to play.
In his office downtown, you never knew what odds and ends he might have collected. Once he found an empty wooden frame that swiveled around on a wooden base and he told the children (grandchildren had appeared at that time) that it was a device for clairvoyance. Complicated swiveling and maneuvering followed. Then he would perfectly describe things he couldn’t see. I’m not sure how I figured out he was using the reflections in a neighboring building, but I do know the kids never did.
My father was a delightful, an old-school gentleman. His perfect manners never deserted him, even in the senility that took him over in his mid-nineties. He came from a very wealthy New England family of the sort that had summer houses and took up silver-smithing as a hobby. I think he may have wanted to become a painter or some sort of artist, but he ended up studying languages (yes, the GI bill paid for masters’ degrees in Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Greek) and earned a living as a translator. I don’t think his stories were completely reliable. The way he told it, moving to Chicago had been an impulse inspired by a wall map he noticed while waiting in the army discharge line. At the front of the line you asked for a ticket and he said “Chicago.” My aunt had a different version. He liked saying outrageous things, such as “I do my best translating when I’m completely drunk.” He didn’t bother to mention that he had no particular interest in alcohol and probably hadn’t had a drop in previous 40 years.
He was the same age as my husband. Sorry you through numbers out and I start doing the math, it's my nature as an accountant. You going through some old photos?
A child of another age and yet it wasn't that long ago - how our world changes so quickly. Thanks for sharing this charming photo and your lovely memories.
