Life Lessons from My Father
A 2015 Father's Day Tribute
by John Senall
As a kid, it took me many years to figure out what he actually did for a career. But his nightly dinner table stories eventually added up.
He was a production planner for General Motors’ main radiator supplier. Dad worked for GM and its subsidiary for almost 40 years and retired with a pension. It was not a job he loved, but he didn’t hate it. It had good pay and excellent benefits, and helped him provide a comfortable life for a family of six, including four children—all boys.
He had regular clients, though he probably didn’t call them that. He liked to tell us about his phone calls, and shared the people’s names and the conversations. At night he would relive the moments of the workday, and share some of the funny stories.
Sometimes he’d relive the not-so-fun times. My father once acted out a conversation he had experienced with a hot-headed supervisor. Dad spit out the insults that night as if he was that man. It bothered him a lot. It was a rare awkward moment, but revealed his character. He said that he didn’t yell back, or physically confront the guy. He had to just “take it” and go on with his day.
When I was older, I knew why. With four kids, a mortgage, bills, a life dependent upon keeping a job that many others would have loved to have, you needed to walk away from fights—both the verbal ones and of course any physical ones. He did it for his family. He knew he had more important things that depended on that job and on him. Onward.
Prior to getting that job, he had been a foreman in one of GM’s Buffalo plants. At one time he was up for a major promotion, but the new job brought with it tremendous pressure. So he chose to take a lateral move rather than moving up the ladder. It was a wise choice, but it bothered him for years. He could have earned more money in the other path for his family. But it likely would have killed him mentally.
Dad is a lover of people. He talks a lot, tells stories, and cracks jokes to make people happier. He would make funny faces or sounds to make his co-workers, friends and children laugh. He was and still is funny.
Although I was an extremely shy kid, I now talk way too much, tell stories, crack jokes to make people happier, and I make funny faces and sounds for friends, colleagues and especially for my children. I get those traits from him, and am glad for it. (My wife wishes I had fewer of them, especially the chatting and giving soliloquies or mini “sermons” about topics that interest me, but hey—it’s genetic.)
I remember once, way after retirement, Dad and I were shopping at a store and he saw a former co-worker he had not seen in many years. She was an African-American woman, also getting older in years, but attractive, energetic and very down-to-earth.
As soon as she saw him, she walked toward us with a big smile and hugged him. They shared a quick conversation, Dad made her smile with a joke, and they wished each other well.
I asked him who she was. He said it was Nettie. I knew the name. Nettie was one of the recurring stock characters in Dad’s work stories, and he always spoke highly of her. Not once, though, over 30 to 40 years, did he ever use an adjective to describe her race, or the color of her skin.
Dad had a lot of African-American colleagues he considered friends or just friendly co-working acquaintances. He had started his GM career on the assembly floor of a plant. Through his stories, I sensed that most of his colleagues liked him and enjoyed his company. This was the mid-1960s and 1970s, when race relations were even more complex and challenging than today for obvious reasons. As a child, I did not consider what this meant, but I get it now.
He treated everyone equally. He was most interested in people who would listen to him, work with him, or who would enjoy one of his jokes or stories. He could have cared less if they were green, purple, white or brown. In turn, I believe those co-workers appreciated him valuing them just as people, sharing his life, his stories and his respect for them in his own organic way.
One of his favorite memories he would share with my brothers and me was recounting the “Limburger parties” he and some plant employees would have for fun every year. He had already gone on to his office gig, but would get invited to come down at a certain hour each year for a unique lunch.
Apparently, they would buy tons of Limburger cheese once a year, sit around a table in the plant and make sandwiches together. It was an all-you-can-eat Limburger fest. (To this day, I still have not tried the famous smelly cheese, but Dad loved the tradition and the taste.)
My mother was a lifetime social worker. She worked in some of the poorest communities and neighborhoods in Western New York over her career, and with people of all colors. But it was different, and probably due to the nature of serving versus working alongside. Dad just seemed to think of race more as an after-thought.
He got his “likes to talk and be funny” and “enjoys being with all kinds of people” from his mother, who was of Irish-Welsh stock. Grandma Claire had friends of all types. She also would talk about her conversations with the butcher, baker, and everybody in between. She would reference blacks with just an informational aside after the first sentence, as in, “He’s a colored fella.” But it was the vocabulary of her time, and she didn’t use it for anything except as an adjective.
My father had put himself through college by joining the Navy after high school. His parents had few savings. Dad was fortunate that it was a “between the wars” period. His service to our country was nestled right between the Korean and Vietnam wars.
His ship had a good gig. It was a training vessel stateside. They would travel around American waters and train recruits in using various naval weapons, and in naval procedures, and heaven knows what else.
His stories were positive about that, too, and typically involved food. My brothers and I heard about the sailors having occasional feasts with “buckets and buckets of shrimp,” according to Dad.
Once, when he was on shore leave, he planned to surprise his parents by showing up at the house and spending some quality time with them. Apparently he and they didn’t communicate much by letters. He arrived at his Sayre, Pennsylvania home in the middle of the night, only to find that his parents were not there. They had sold the house and moved without telling him—to Buffalo, New York.
My grandfather was a railroad foreman for the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Turns out he had been transferred to Buffalo’s Lehigh branch, so he, Grandma Claire, and my Dad’s younger sister and brother just up and moved. They must have figured Dad was smart enough to eventually find them, which he did.
After the Navy, Dad worked summers between college semesters for his father on the Buffalo tracks. He worked heavy duty, dusty manual labor, same as everyone else, even though he was the boss’s son.
Many of the railroad laborers were Puerto Rican immigrants who had migrated to the North for the plentiful industrial jobs. While they had a natural disliking sometimes for my grandfather (one individual almost killed Grandpa once in a squabble), they liked Dad. They would share their lunches with him, and he would enjoy native Puerto Rican cooking and food with them. (Sensing a trend here with the food thing?)
Together, they would repair the rail lines mile by mile by mile—day after day in the hot summer sun—including laying new rail, and pounding in spikes with sledgehammers in a single stroke.
Another summer during his college years, Dad worked in a Bethlehem Steel mill. But apparently, this “college boy” worked too efficiently. One of the more senior workers came up to him one day and told him to slow down. They were being paid to work a shift, and the day’s work should last the whole shift, this guy explained to him. To do that, one has to keep to a certain pace. Dad’s was too fast, and too ambitious. So he took his cue, and slowed down, for his own health and safety. Smart guy, my dad.
My father isn’t perfect. He’s human.
Sometimes he would lose his patience and temper with us. Normal stuff. Some yelling, punishments, and the like. But he always made sure we went to bed on a good note. He would sit beside my bed and apologize if he hurt my feelings or yelled too much, say good night, and mean it.
He was consistent.
Despite his work schedule, he somehow managed to attend every single soccer game I played from age 10 through 17 except one. He did the same for my three brothers. Unfortunately of all the games, that one game was the only one in which I was ever injured. I was hit in the face by a ball kicked by an opposing player from five feet away. I was blind in my left eye for two weeks, but the sight returned eventually. That “not being there” bothered Dad for many years afterward.
Dad had coached little league and soccer in the early years. Plus, he and my mother would alternate turns driving me every Saturday to private drum and percussion lessons all through junior high and high school. Thirty minutes there, thirty minutes back, and they would kill time for thirty minutes to an hour in between during the lessons—all so that I could pursue my primary interest at the time and study with the best music instructors in both counties.
When Dad was around 52 years old, his father had a stroke. We would go visit Grandpa at the house. Dad would kneel beside his father, leaning in to hear him as he struggled to form words to say simple things he used to find so easy. Asking for a glass of root beer or some peanuts. Or expressing disgust over the Buffalo Bills’ poor performance in a game playing on the console TV that sat in their family room, directly under their front picture window.
Dad spoke to his father in a quiet, loving voice. He would repeat back his father’s words, to make sure he had them correct. Then he’d go get what he needed, or had asked for, bring it to him and sit by him to watch the rest of the game.
In the summer of 1994, my father had his own first major health issue. While sitting on his patio with my mom and some friends, he suffered a cardiac arrest. His longtime neighbor, Jim, was with them and started CPR until the paramedics arrived.
I was living in Buffalo, and remember getting the phone call. That night at the hospital, as he lie there unable to speak, with all the usual monitors blinking and beeping in a regular pattern, I went in to see him. I thought it was the last time I might see him.
I kissed him on the top of his head and left the room with my younger brother. As we walked down the hallway toward the exit, I began crying. It came unexpectedly—I had been strangely far too calm while driving there and upon arrival. It was catching up with me.
The next day the surgeons implanted a defibrillator and pacemaker. The defibrillator has only gone off once in the subsequent 21 years, and that was a false alarm. One of the lead wires became disconnected, so they replaced it. (Quite a treat, having such a false alarm, Dad shared. Get up to 360 watts in a single second directly to your heart, and well, you tend to remember it.)
Since those initial health episodes, he’s had several stents placed in his heart over the years. He also has endured treatments for two unrelated cancers. He was a trooper through both of those. Then six months ago, one came back after 10 years.
Microscopic cancer cells enjoy hiding out in the body for years, just to make you think you’re home free. Then they jump out from behind an organ and yell, “surprise!” at the least ideal times. So he’s getting through it now like he does with everything. But the prognosis isn’t that good.
On top of that, he forgets a lot these days. It is stressful for my mother and to a far lesser extent to me, as I am the only son still in town, so I am here to do whatever is needed. I also benefit from their company and help caring for my own kids a couple days each week.
When he forgets things I know he has experienced, I often get frustrated. I don’t like seeing him like that, and it comes out in anger occasionally. I’m trying to be better about that. He deserves better.
He has lived a good life, full of unique and varied experiences. He has watched his four sons go on to their own careers, get married and have children. He has watched his 11 grandchildren grow up, and has been a part of each of their lives. He has been a loyal and dedicated son, husband, father, brother, employee, neighbor, citizen and friend. And he has given joy to countless people throughout his life with his smile, humor and love.
I am proud to be his son. And when the day comes that I, too, will kneel by his side, listen to his whispers as he tries to find words that once came easy, comfort him and serve him in his final days, it will be more than a duty that guides me. It will be a privilege and an honor.
Father to child. Child to father. And life will continue, as I do my best to take those subtle lessons he taught by example, and apply them to my life as a father to two young daughters, who are growing up way too fast before me.
My father used to often tell us, his four sons, “You have to be better than your dad—have to be a lawyer, or a doctor or in business. Please be better than your father.”
As far as careers, his sons went on to become (in birth order) a successful optometrist; a respected orthopaedic surgeon; a healthcare communications/technology consultant and business owner; and the president of a business incubator and technology commercialization organization serving several upstate New York counties.
We did fine with our careers, thanks largely to my parents’ expectations of us, and them pushing or pulling us each along the way and being there for us. But none of us will ever be “better” than my father. That would be impossible.
Now that we are in our 40s and 50s, though, we each try, hard as it may be, to get a few feet closer to what our father stood for, and who he is. It’s a tall order. I guess all I can hope for is that I do half as well for my own kids, my friends, family members, co-workers and community. That would be a success.
And if I tell a few too many stories, jokes, make too many funny faces, or care a bit too much along the way, so be it. Neither Dad, nor I, would have it any other way.
Connect with John at https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsenall, at john@mobilefirstmedia.com, at @mobile1john or call 716-361-9124. But be prepared for a story or to talk for longer than five minutes. It's genetic, and that's a good thing.
