The Party

Daddy looked the happiest I remember in a very long time.
Thanks to everyone who came. Seems to me there were about 100 over the time of the party, but I'm open to other estimates because I was busy greeting and meeting.
Wonderful to see so many of Daddy's own friends from his work life, his social life and all of the groups he attends. Much appreciation to those who spread the word to those I didn't know.
Family drove and flew many miles to be here on a Tuesday, not the most accessible day of the week for many of you, but it was his actual birthday and I know that meant a lot! And thanks for the spouses and family members who couldn't come but sent cards, presents and other momentos. It was a real family reunion.
And special thanks to my own friends, from childhood, high school and now, who came to celebrate with me and speak to my dad just because. That was extra fun for me to have you there and make it a special party for me as well.
Finally, a great big thanks to my kids, their significant others, and the Manatee Unitarian Universalist volunteers who worked so hard in the background to do the work it takes to make a big event like this go off smooth as the two delicious cakes we had! You all are great and I have the best family ever!
You all are the best!
It was a very happy birthday, indeed.

Meet the Press

Listening to the Vin Mannix of the Bradenton Herald gave me a new insight into the same stories, and the columnist even managed to get some stories from him that I hadn't heard. My childhood friends will remember the old flashing sign that welcomed people into Bradenton before the flashy PR firms came in. It was a billboard on what's now the Bradenton Herald property across the street (west) from Manatee Memorial Hospital as one enters Bradenton driving across the Manatee Bridge (US 41). On the sign was a man in a small boat reeling in an arching fishing pole with a fine catch at the end. The lights would flash off and on, animating the fishing line and the fish at the end, making what in those days was a memorable entrance to the "friendly city." What I never knew was that my father was president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce when that sign was conceived and installed.

That's the day when amateur radio operators held court like today's animators and filmmakers, I suppose. He and his buddies came up with the idea and sold it among the business community, but the had to raise the money to pay for the electricity because the city still wouldn't pay for the extra it cost to light up the sign. So today's commercial folks have little to complain about in comparison, all things considered.

They were also the same crowd who were responsible for getting the first holiday decorations put up downtown, adding a note of cheer to city streets. That's quite a surprise to me, as I kind of thought of Daddy as quite grumpy about the holidays. Guess that's what happened after he sold the Bradenton Credit Bureau that his father founded and went to work for the US Post Office as a clerk. Those kind of holiday hours are enough to discourage anybody. No wonder my parents never complained about my getting up early on Christmas morning -- one or the other of them were just getting home from the overnight shift at the Post Office.

Those were the days.

Football and the Depression: Some Things Were Never Uniform

In Florida the Great Depression really started in 1925. That's what Daddy (Lamar T. Graham) remembers. He was going to quit high school before his junior year, but the job he hoped to get never panned out. It didn't happen his senior year either, so he stayed in Bradenton High School (now Manatee) and graduated before he needed to go to work full time with his father, who founded the Bradenton Credit Bureau.

The high school had located to its current site on 32nd Street West, but the ball fields were still over on 9th Street West where the pros now play baseball, McKechnie Field. Nearby, just to the east, his grandfather Joseph Sheffield had harvested rice, and somewhere else in the same area was the city's first golf course where Daddy caddied for some of the city's most prominent businessmen, including Robert M. Beall, Sr., founder of the V (Five) Dollar Limit Store that later became Bealls Department Store.

A skinny kid from a merchant class family with four boys surviving the depression, Daddy and his brothers played baseball and football for BHS. One of the biggest annoyances happened when the boys arrived for games to find their shoes missing, quite an expense for players who had to provide their own uniforms and equipment. Once his baseball glove was even missing, but the coach did nothing except if it was the star player who had a problem. When Flint Gullett couldn't find his cleats, the football coach let the tackle sit on the bench until the adult came back with the shoes in hand. There were no helicopter parents back in the day. Parents of that Depression were growing vegetables or milking the cow that still lived in the back yard right in town, not volunteering or even very often showing up to watch a high school sports event.

When it came time for college, no scouts came looking for players to fill scholarship spots. My dad needed to go right to work helping with his father's business, even if there had been college scholarships for athletes of his caliber. Girls' sports weren't even though about, by the way, but Mother's (Edith Lucille Jones) family was more able to send her to teachers' college -- one of which included that Florida State College for Women (said the Gator grad) considering the fact her father was the mayor of Bradenton (Asaph R. Jones) and her uncle was State Sen. Lee S. Day.

But it was probably just as well. Because the uniform of the day for football was a leather helmet and shoulder pads, if you could afford it. And baseball, well, Daddy remembers the day he played in a pair of pants with one leg ripped off at the knee. Maybe that's when the fashion started, because I notice a lot of the teams wear those knee-length pants today.

Sept 8: Bluebird, Whirlybirds & 100 Years of Living

ONE of the most amazing things about spending your days with a 99.5-year-old man can be learning about what he hasn't done in his life.

Today, for example, as I was driving him from the hardware store (yes this town still has one) to pick up barbecue ribs for my Sept. 8 birthday supper, we passed the high school where still shock lingered in the air. Only two nights ago a senior cheerleader died when she was shot on the way home from their first football game of the season. Traffic moved, police cars made their presence obvious but quiet, and school buses loomed large as none of the students hurried toward this end of the school day. But the broadcast vans from news media told the story that was going on inside, football practice on the field looked somber from the road and still the long yellow busses moved slowly on those wheels that went round and round.

"I never rode on a school bus," said my father, who will turn 100 on Dec. 8.

My mind jumped into gear. Five-year-old kindergartener Anthony hadn't either. Maybe they could go together -- cinco and centurian!

"Don't want to either." Oh.

Well, what would you like to do? You should be having some fun this year, I told him. My dad is a new widower, since my mother died July 8.

"I'd like to ride a helicopter."

Now that sounds like fun. Maybe we can make that happen before he turns 100 on Dec. 8.

Remembering 9/11

Events of 911
Daddy and I are watcing the replay of the collapse of the twin towers on 9/11/2001. It was something I didn't get to see live, because I was working with the Saint Petersburg (FL) cergy association that day. Daddy just remembers watching TV at home, but neither of us saw it as cose as the History Channel now shows us.

He missed Pearl Harbor because he got out of the Navy the month before thanks to Congressman Peterson. He was supposed to join the reserves for 30 days, then they said a year, but he was 28 or 29 and wrote to Peterson. He was sent orders to report to Key West, or to request discharge, so he did request discharge and pushed for it. That was about 2 weeks before Pearl Harbor. He says in a way he'd like to have stayed, but he had a wife and a business. He thinks if he had gone, he would be at the bottom of the ocean.

"That was stupid," he says, though, about going to war on Iraq, in comparison. The US was trying to make peace with the Japanese. And the day after Pearl Harbor, Germany declared war onthe US. But the World Trade Center came from no one country. "There wasn't much you could do."

"That guy that directed all of this probably looks at it and laughs," he said. "The FBI man said they were working on this and had suspicions, and then they were ordered to go onto something else or quit or something."

The scenes on TV show desert-like sands that will later prove to be poisonous debris, people in masks and makeshift coverings, mobile phones that don't work, dust clouds, the voice of the then-President.

Living in s smaller town, a lesser populated part of the country, it doesn't seem possible that there can be that many people crowded into one city. Why would they want to be there in the first place? And yet Daddy never knew I was once in those buildings, once visited a friend who worked above the first set of elevators high in one of the buildings -- I couldn't tell you which one.

Another other major disaster time in my family life was when I came home from school to tell my mother tht President John F. Kennedy had been shot. She was off work that day. We turned on the TV and watched. Again, she was afraid we would go to war. We would be vulnerable.

Still, vulnerable is so relative. As a journalist, I, too, am documenting when I'm at the scene of a disaster. When I'm a chaplain, I'm reponding to people's needs, not focusing on my own. But when the little things happen, when the world of the ones I love and who love me becomes smaller, then I feel much more vulnerable. Then I feel very, very small.