Introduction My dad was born in 1924 in a small town in Iowa. He was just five years old when The Great Depression erupted throughout the world and Dad’s parent’s marriage blew apart that same year. Dad’s father was a drinker and a rough guy to live with. He ran a one-man barbershop and had no interest in caring for a child. His mother wasn’t a box of chocolates either and soon ran off with another man to build a new life together. Dad was suddenly just another homeless child among hundreds of thousands of children who were unable to be cared for by their parents during the brutal days of The Great Depression. To my grandfather’s credit, he had no way to care for my father so he passed him around from family to family, neighbor to neighbor until my Dad was old enough to survive on his own. From that point on Dad slept in people’s haybarns & chicken coops to survive the biting cold of Iowa winters, and bummed or stole enough food to survive. Alone, unwanted, and “in everyone’s way”, Dad longed for two things. A family and a home. He wanted to belong. Its hard for me to imagine a boy who didn’t have a home, didn’t have a bedroom to sleep in, never enjoyed a birthday party or friends to invite to one. He was truly an orphan. At age 18 Dad enlisted in the war effort and was stationed in the Pacific Theater of WW2, both because it was required but also because it provided a bed, clothing and three square meals a day, something he’d never had. As the war ended, Dad returned to Iowa, fell in love with the woman who would become my mother, and started a family. Out of the pain of being an orphan, he set his goals in life to marry and stay married, to be a father that was involved in the lives of his children, and to build a home in which his most prized possessions, his wife and his children, would be safe and rooted.
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