Father’s Day, Redux

I wrote the original Father’s Day blog entry back in 2011 to celebrate what would have been my father’s 81st birthday. It was a soft, adulatory piece that overlooked many of the rougher edges of family life with this man, but while it is the harshest truths that bring the most perspective, there is limited virtue in total disclosure. The seed and focus of the piece was not that he was a flawless or even sympathetic character, but more my growing awareness of habits and behaviors I mockingly attributed to him that I myself was beginning to manifest, and the more subtle ways in which my own contemporary actions appeared to be at least in part the result of his presence in my early life.

On this, my twentieth Father’s Day holiday since his death, this burgeoning awareness still continues. My father was a glazier by trade, and in addition to working for several Sacramento-area firms (Basco, Combustion Engineering, and Western Shower Door are the ones I remember) he also owned his own business. As children, we often spent time in his shop on weekends, though in retrospect I think this was to get us out of my mother’s hair. We would “work” at tasks like sorting screws (separating the various fasteners used in assembling shower door frames from a large pile that had become inexplicably combined) and sweeping the shop floor. In addition to being paid some actual money, there was compensation by way of forklift rides and lunch at McDonalds.

In addition to household chores, these were unknowingly my first lessons in business: being paid an hourly rate for a specific job with a specific definition of completion and success. Both my parents were believers in the nobility of hard work and self-esteem through accomplishment, and my father’s approach to parenting was one of hands-on demonstration accompanied by clichés: “Measure twice, cut once”, “A job worth doing is a job worth doing well”, “Every job has three parts – the preparation, the doing and the clean-up”, etc. To my adult ears these still sound hopelessly simplistic and trite, but words were not my father’s forte. I think he used them to simply fill the air around his hands showing us what needed doing and how it was to be done, whether he was teaching us chess or racquetball or how to line up a bevel cut on the chop saw.

What I am only now beginning to realize is that there were also larger lessons in play. My siblings and I continued to work in his shop on and off for years, including full-time during a few summers all the way into our college years. This was actual work, and not only introduced us to the broader economic reality of taxes and withholding, but also gave us a front-row seat from which to observe the dedication and sacrifice required to run a successful business. My father was the owner, but he was also the primary sales person, did all the invoicing and accounting, and still did much of the actual installation work. I can still see him sitting at his messy office desk, poring over the details of inventory and payroll.

We also got to see the toll this job took on his body. Moving both the materials required to construct mirrors and shower doors into and around the shop as well as lifting the finished products onto and off of his truck rack was seriously physically demanding. Even with employees who eventually took over most of the lifting duties, he developed back issues and severe bursitis in both elbows, which required ongoing cortisone injections to manage the pain and inflammation. His own vices, chief among them drinking, smoking and a penchant for large quantities of red meat, cannot have helped his condition. Although he stopped both drinking and smoking in his later years and remained very physically active, the corrosive course of heart disease that would later claim his life was established early in his working years.

After nearly 30 years of working for other companies, I am approaching the midway point in my first year as a business owner. While I am fortunate both to be in a services industry that doesn’t require inventory (let alone inventory that requires forklifts or other heavy lifting) and I have a business partner that shares responsibility for day-to-day operations, I now sit at my own messy desk and tussle with questions of sales, revenue, margin, staffing, payroll, taxes, insurance, and a thousand other details. I have a new and profound respect for this aspect of my father’s life, and am once again surprised by the ever-evolving parallels to my own.

I don’t know if my father was actually the best businessman or not. I was only really just getting to know him as an adult when he passed away. He died at a relatively young age of sixty-seven, barely fifteen years older than I find myself now. By comparison, his identical twin brother is alive and nearing ninety. What I do know is that he worked hard, provided jobs for other people, and kept his business going for several decades. Whether this atones for any other shortcomings is not for me to say. Another fatherly aphorism comes to mind: ”There are only two kinds of jobs – shower before and shower after”.  I’ve done my share of both, and like to think I’ve done each with the same thoughtfulness and integrity. I can confidently say that this approach did not come wholly from the tutelage of my father (my mother was clearly a strong role model as well in this regard), but there is no question that he was a major influence. For this reason I hold him among the better coaches and mentors I’ve had, and on this holiday above most his absence is keenly felt.

My father and I at my wedding in September 1993. This would
turn out to be the last picture taken of just the two of us.