I woke up this morning thinking I'd write about our trip to the Curtiss Museum and wine-tasting in Hammondsport yesterday. I'll get there I guess, but today I find myself thinking of Dad on his 81st birthday.
Richard Dean Dickey was born on a farm in Water Valley, Mississippi in 1939, the youngest of seven siblings. Or maybe it was eight. Let me try to rattle them off in my memory: Alice, James, Billy Mac, Wayne, Hilda, Donald, Bobby Joe. Did I miss anyone? I guess Dad would've been the eighth.
His parents were old, both in their forties, and Dad was a good bit younger than his siblings. His parents apparently doted on him as Jacob doted on Joseph, and his brothers reacted in much the same way. One summer they assembled a car in the woods on their farm out of parts stolen off of other cars around town (isn't there a Johnny Cash song about this?). They hadn't quite mastered the brakes, however, and sent eight-year-old Dad down the hill at the wheel with no way to stop until he ran into a tree.
Dad was sort of an anomaly in his household in that he was a diligent student in school and, more importantly, burning with ambition. The day he graduated from high school he hitchhiked to Chicago to join his brothers who were all working at the Kaiser steel mill. They roomed together until Dad moved into a boarding house and, right around that time, found himself laid off in an economic downturn in the late '50s.
As we've all encountered repeatedly in life, that setback turned out to be the great blessing of his life. While standing in line to sign up for unemployment, Dean saw a flyer advertising a manager training program for Howard Johnson's Restaurants. He tore off the flyer, called the number, and the rest is history. He began stationed in front of a Hobart, washing dishes. By the time I was in the fifth grade, he was running every HoJo from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. He was 35 years old. I still have the clipping from the Restaurant News, announcing his promotion. His gift was making underperforming assets profitable, and everyone from Howard Jr. on down to his direct supervisors saw and rewarded his work.
Early on that ride, while managing the restaurant in Topeka, Kansas, he met my mom, who was taking time off from college to earn a little money waitressing. They got married and, as was the norm back in those days, I arrived as their firstborn not long thereafter.
But all of this isn't telling you anything about Dad. I have a bad habit of treating life as an extended exercise in resume building, which I've finally figured out it is not (well, not entirely anyway).
Dad was a manly man of the Mad Men era. He drank scotch, smoked cigarettes, and paid cash for his first Cadillac in 1976 because he'd made it in the world (it was a '76 Seville, two-tone tan with spoked wheels and curb feelers, if you were curious). I never saw him leave the house without a collared shirt, and his suits were impeccable. He was a troglodyte when it came to women's issues, which drove my liberal, grad school attending mother a little batty.
He always worked, and considered it a badge of honor to use every bit of available time making money. He was gone maybe four days a week when I was growing up, schlepping through airports to drop in on his restaurants. In the pre-internet world, he could show up anonymously, sit in the corner sipping coffee in a very expensive suit, and watch his managers in action, or inaction.
Once when I was in high school he took me on one of these business trips. We were living in Dallas then, and we took a road trip that began with a visit to Sam Rayburn's boyhood home (a hero of Dad's--he loved politics before the modern nastiness). From there we drove past Hugo where his mother lived just after they opened up Oklahoma to settlement, and then up the Indian Nations Turnpike to Tulsa, where I got to swim in my first indoor pool. The next morning we dropped in for Sunday breakfast at the local HoJo. It was chaos, with orders backed up and often wrong, and unhappy customers all around. Dad walked back into the office and found the manager at his desk, pecking at an adding machine. I watched Dad unceremoniously fire the man (The Donald has nothing on The Dean), drop his jacket across the office chair and don an apron. He handed another to me.
"You ever work a dish rack?" I shook my head.
"Well, you'll learn. There's not much to it." He proceeded to demonstrate, having forgotten nothing from his beginnings two decades before. Dad then sidled up next to the cook, pulled down an order clipped at eye level in front of him, and started cooking breakfast, talking up the cook and giving pointers as he went.
That was one thing about Dad--the employees all seemed to love him, if his immediate subordinates often did not. They'd come out and hug his neck when he walked in the door. He remembered their stories, let them know they mattered and let me know how important all that was if you wanted to keep good people.
One of his staff was my stepmother, Johnnie. She was Dad's secretary 33 years ago, and they were married three years after that. Johnnie's the only woman I've ever met who could stand up to Dad, and give as good as she got. "Oh Dickey, you are so full of it." Dad needs that sometimes. They are a perfect match, those two, and Katie and I got two great stepsisters out of the deal.
Dad never exactly approved of my trajectory in life. He thought going into the military was a waste of a good education, and about worried himself sick when I was at war. He disapproved of the first marriage (some insight on his part there), and about fell out of his chair when I had the chance after law school to stay in Atlanta and make big money, but instead chose to move back to the Gulf Coast to defend slip-and-falls. He found my brief courtship with organized religion eye-rollingly absurd, being a fallen Baptist himself. I think he approves of Peg, maybe because he sees a little of Johnnie in her--a very strong work ethic, a desire to make money, and never shy about telling me when I'm out in left field, which is often.
Dad retired the first time in the mid-90s, after leaving Howard Johnson's and building the Sbarro's Pizza brand into the ubiquitous presence it was in our malls and airports thirty years ago. He and Johnnie moved back to Dallas when Johnnie' mom fell ill, and it wasn't long before my restless father found himself a job as a sort of "gopher" for a local Ford dealer. He started out driving the courtesy van and doing odd jobs, but Dad-being-Dad soon was applying his phenomenal head for numbers by managing their books and figuring out ways to make them more money.
He only retired from that gig two or three years ago after his balance started to fail him and he couldn't drive or climb stairs, leading to the hardest thing he's ever had to do--be a retired guy. His interest in SEC football (Hotty Toddy) sustained him for a while, but this year of the pandemic and games played in empty stadiums has hit him hard. Men of action don't do well stuck in a wingback chair in front of the TV. That's never been him, and it's pretty obvious he finds the situation extremely disagreeable.
But today is a happy day, a celebration of 81 years of piss and vinegar, and giving the world hell. Who knew a little guy from Yalobusha County would go on such an amazing ride?
Happy birthday, Dad. Love you.
Comentarios