Homage to My Father

My father died a dozen years ago.

He was in good health until he got lymphoma cancer. Chemotherapy cured the cancer, but it disabled his mind. He started to hallucinate. He withdrew from the world. One day he fell and broke his hip. Surgeons replaced his hip, but the end followed quickly.

Those are not my favorite memories of my father.

He was a career Air Force officer. He joined the Army Air Corps in World War II, and he served in Europe. He was lucky: he didn’t draw high-fatality bomber duty. At one point, he was assigned to a night-fighter squadron, doing search and destroy missions behind enemy lines. His moniker was "Intruder Schlueter".

There are good pilots, and there are pilots for whom an aircraft is like a second skin. I‘ve heard that my father was one of the latter.

He could land his Bristol Beaufighter on the runway, touch the wheels to the tarmac, lift up, do a loop, and touch down again. I’m not a pilot, but even I know that there’s no room for error in such a maneuver.

Others in his squadron weren’t worried when he flew like that. They knew his abilities. But one day he did a touch-and-loop maneuver and a high officer happened to see it. That officer ordered Dad’s commander to write up Dad for recklessness. That was a career killer.

Dad’s commander did what he was ordered to do. Then he called Dad to his office. He told Dad that he had done the writeup, and that the only copy of it was in the satchel that he then handed to Dad. The commander ordered Dad to deliver it to where it was supposed to go.

Somehow, nothing came of that writeup.

Dad’s Air Force career led directly to his marriage. After the war, he was sent on a tour of European capitals – a victory lap, as it were. He attended a royal ball hosted by the king of Denmark. One of the young, unmarried women at that ball was the daughter of the Auditor General of Denmark. That was my mother.

Mother was vivacious and outgoing. Dad was the quiet type. They hit it off. After Dad flew out of Denmark, they kept in touch through letters. They were married in Wisconsin, at a ceremony presided over by my grandfather, a Lutheran minister.

When I was nine, Dad was flying four-engine jets. We were stationed in Oklahoma. In those times, the armed forces called "alerts". They put the military on war footing – and they didn’t necessarily tell their personnel whether the exercise was a drill or whether it was war. The Air Force wanted to know what its personnel would do in a crisis. In those times, everyone thought that a nuclear catastrophe might really happen.

We lived on-base, minutes from the runways. One night, Dad was called out: an alert. He left. But later he came back, dressed in his flight suit. He came into our house, solemn, and he looked at us, and then he left again. For his country, he was willing to die; but I don’t think he was ready for his children to die. I think he came back that night, briefly, because he thought that he might not see us again.

Dad retired while he was stationed at Norton. The Air Force had an up-or-out policy. You promoted within a set time, or you retired. Dad was forced to retire when he didn’t promote to full colonel. But he had stayed in long enough to have a decent pension, and he was young enough for a second career.

Dad chose to become a probation officer in San Bernardino. It was a job that he was unsuited to. He had no empathy toward his probationers, and he had no interest in them. Also, I think that he wasn’t savvy with them. So far as I can tell, he more-or-less did his job in an un-inspired way until the county offered him a financial incentive to retire early. He took the early retirement.

Of the things that he did in retirement, the best thing was his artwork. He was a genius with clay. He inspired into his pieces a liveliness and a character that ordinary artists cannot. Dad’s art left his children with artifacts of his talent. I wish he had made more art in his retirement, and watched less television.

His wife died before him. He loved her and depended on her, and he missed her when she was gone.

Toward the end, talking with Dad was hard. This was because of his hearing loss and his addled mind. But before his steep decline, we sometimes had good conversations. One day we were talking about the Book of Ezekiel. I said that, like Dad, Ezekiel grieved the death of his wife. I also said that Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones and the reassembly of those bones into flesh-and-blood living beings was usually interpreted as a prophecy of the resurrection of Israel. But I told Dad that when Ezekiel saw those dry bones become persons again, he must have thought of his wife, and he must have thought about the possibility of reunion with her. This idea made an impression on Dad. In my lifetime, he was not overtly religious.

Dad’s ashes are in Wisconsin, in a family plot, near his wife, near his mother. He was born in Wisconsin, and his remains repose there.