why life is not fair
Father's day 2023 for me
Tomorrow evening, Monday, 19 June we have our Timely Topics webinar with the Kamphausens giving us a view of ‘Life in the Attaché Lane’ between 5.00 and 6.30 eastern. I hope you can catch this fascinating opportunity to hear how those representing us officially experience China. Yes, we intend to allow you to ask questions. The link is at the bottom of this message. Please feel free to invite any concerned friends as this is about helping generate more measured thought in our civic interactions!
Yes, I will reflect on my father this afternoon, almost thirty-five years after we lost him. I took some of our relationship for granted but now that I have surpassed (sadly) the years he had, I am so aware of what an impact he had on the type of life I lead and the one I still aspire to lead.
I come from an old line of stubborn Scots who had children much later in life than most people, especially for prior generations. My father’s father was born during Ulysses Grant’s first term. Now having done a bit of genealogy, I know his father was born while James Madison was president of the United States but men on my father’s side do not marry early.
I know I sound like I’m describing Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin as I am not, but my dad’s family were definitely what today is the working poor. The hamlet where my grandfather and his much younger wife married, then rapidly had my father followed by three sisters, only had ten people so Watsons made of 60%. My grandfather lost his blacksmith business in the Depression so in his late fifties, he picked up this young family to move across several states in the Midwest as a tenant farmer. My dad learned about moving rather young.
He also learned, as so many of us do, about loss with his mother and father dying within three years of each other before my dad graduated from high school at 16. In the Dustbowl years, options were few but the four siblings begged relatives to allow them to stay together with an uncle and his wife rather than separate them into slightly more comfortable financial settings. The sole time I ever heard my dad discuss his mother was in conjunction with a cast iron skillet that somehow remained in his possession. He could not discuss her. (It hurt me so much when a fire in my condo in 2009 destroyed it.) He spoke a bit more often of his father but usually in quiet tones as my grandfather had a temper.
Through all of this, my dad picked up two habits he never lost. He read constantly. I mean constantly. It was a family joke that he never moved from his spot at the kitchen table because that was where the books were. He would read anything, retain it, and look hungrily for more. He also had the ability to hear things in the background so he would correct some misstatement someone quoted from television but I can probably count the number of times I ever saw him sit in front of the television to watch it. He was the reading champion.
And he could talk about anything with reasonable facility. His profession was math so he was involved in computers from the early 1950s through the rest of his life. But he knew about so many other things that he could always talk with any and everyone. This intrigued me so we two would sit in my childhood at the table every night talking about politics, history, science, and geography. He loved geography perhaps best of all. All through our years in Colombia and in Thailand, when he was visiting, we ended every single dinner with the geography game. We could not leave the table until we had satisfied whatever convoluted geography questions he though up. No wonder I am so comfortable with maps and geography today.
He also learned from his wartime experience the value of letters to keep in touch with people. That tactile experience of writing things down probably contributed to his incredible memory but it was, I suspect, the connection that mattered from those letters. One of his sisters never married so he wrote to her almost every single day from when he was stationed in the Pacific beginning in 1942 until his death. Some days he wrote multiple times but he felt that absolute need to communicate, to share, the criticise in a way he would never do verbally, with someone who understood his experiences. He wrote to lots of other people, too, so it was the act of writing, along with reading, that made him so effective in his work.
My dad skipped a year of school so he won a small scholarship to Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, to enroll in 1941 but that was no where near what the tuition, fees, and etc. and there was no G.I. Bill. He was working to save for school when Pearl Harbor occurred. He did what so many in his generation rushed to do: he quit school to enlist. One of his proudest memories was being on a troop transport with Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio en route to the war.
He never wore his patriotism on his sleeve and he was almost completely silent about what he saw as an Army Signal Corps enlisted soldier but one of those experiences included being part of a handful of Army guys who went ashore with the Marines at Iwo Jima. He never discussed it but he harboured a deep anger about war from then on. I once repeated something a professor had said about the Russian front in one of my history courses, and my dad cut me off mid-sentence. ‘He wasn’t in the Pacific, was the son-of-a-bitch?’
He returned, after preparing to invade Japan, in 1945 but stayed in the Reserves, ultimately moving to the Air Force Reserves after 1947. In that capacity, he was en route to the west coast to deploy to Korea in 1951 when he met my mother only twice, then married her rather than the woman he had been seeing. He wanted to keep serving until my mother threw a hissy fit in November 1956 that he might get killed if we went to war again as if he did not know that.
My dad did an undergraduate degree with the benefits of the GI Bill, then a master’s in math education, fully intending to teach. He so valued education and feared the limits of not having it. Yet he instead embraced computers and the options that field provided in the 1960s. When the chance to go into the U.S. Agency for International Development arose, he leapt at it in the face of my mother’s absolute opposition to go to a country so far. He wanted to show us the world. I recall when he sat me down to tell me we were moving, he literally plunked our old blue globe on the table and spun it around. ‘If you could live anywhere overseas, where would it be?’ Being 9, I said ‘England’ as I thought all young girls wanted to go to England to meet the Queen.
He stopped the globe by pointing to Colombia, which I had never heard of, saying we were going there. SERIOUSLY? ‘Oh, and we can’t drink the water if it hasn’t been boiled and iodined for 8 hours. And we have to get shots to go but you will learn to like it’. He did not brook debate about what he saw as learning.
We returned after a normal two year tour. My mother pushed him to go back into the private sector because it appeared our next tour would be in the Philippines which, in 1968, she thought was too close to the war. He ran a small computing company in Texas but he was uncomfortable with some of the ethical issues he saw. In 1970, he rejoined AID (we did not call it USAID back then) only to be assigned to Saigon while we went to safe haven in Bangkok. He and my mother got the war after all.
The isolation of living apart from the family pushed him further in the letter writing and reading but it was also extraordinarily important in further developing his sense of public service. He never voted after the 1960 election because he went to work for the US Government that year as a contractor. He believed, as he had as a soldier, that he was a non-partisan civil servant. He also believed that partisanship was dangerous for where the country was going. Seems rather quaint thinking back now.
He was last posted to Saigon as late as December 1974 which seems insane today but true. I had a friend at the Agency see if he was actually CIA but my dad was what he had always claimed to be: a U.S. Agency for International Development advisor on computers and what those machines could do for countries trying to collect taxes to develop and execute budgets. We were still trying to show The Republic of Vietnam how to collect taxes four months before the collapse.
His final years were largely stateside, though he did serve in Cairo. He was so happy when I visited them because I was thrilled to go see any and everything we could. It was much more interesting than the increasing ugliness of the late 1970s in Washington, D.C. I cannot imagine what he would think today.
My dad was the generation who read and learned broadly, as I have noted. He saw the value of education so profoundly. He also was a four pack-a-day smoker for my entire life, drank coffee from dawn to dusk, and did not take care of his health. When the phone rang late on another day after a tense Notre Dame-Michigan football game, I knew before answering. I did not know it was a stroke but I knew it was the end. At least he saw one of his grandchildren born a few months earlier, if not all four.
So, why have I told you all of this in such personal detail? I truly never realised how much I picked up his unstated values until he passed.
His commitment to doing his job was absolute because he thought it important and because he knew that, like it or not, life is much easier with money. If you don’t do your job well, you may lose it. And if others don’t value it, tough. Do what you know is right.
His bedrock view of public service was renowned. He wasn’t everyone’s favourite guy but he was always the one they called in a crunch. He believed public service is a shared responsibility among all of us.
He valued links to old friends, continued by letters of course. Sharing their experiences was as important as his own.
He cherished education. He would never be able to see it purely as theoretical but an application that made a difference in people’s lives daily. Few things got a sharper rebuke than someone using slopping logic in a conversation with him. (my brother the litigator and my daughter got that that from him)
He recognised we were one country in a big world. He never hesitated to meet people enthusiastically to hear about their countries and to share anecdotes about our own. He could discuss Oregon, Missouri, or North Carolina with some nuggets he had read that might intrigue the individual. He tried personalising where he could but was still pretty reserved all along.
He did not believe we were above anyone nor below anyone else. He was rock solid on entitlement being a bad thing. When i was 9, I said something was unfair. He immediately pulled the car over, took me to the curb, told me the world is not fair so get used to it. It’s as real to me now as it was more than 50 years ago. Life happened. He had seen it and expected us to understand that. Occasionally that showed in anger but generally it was understated leading by example.
He was a quiet man but one I was lucky to call my dad. FIN
Cynthia Watson is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Life in the Attaché Lane with Mindy & Roy Kamphausen
Time: Jun 19, 2023 05:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
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