Today marks the 100th anniversary of my dad’s birthday. Harold Emerson Nichols Jr. was born 11/05/1914 in New Rochelle, NY, and died a short 57 years later in Garfield Hts., Ohio. In between, he became part of that Greatest Generation of Americans – the ones who fought during WWII. He was a Corporal in the US Marine Corps, joining up in 1941 and eventually serving aboard the USS (Battleship) Texas in the European theater of the war. I’m pretty sure that he never considered himself to be part of some great generation, as that label wasn’t created for them until well after his death. He was just a guy who did what a lot of guys did back then. He joined the military when the country needed him, got through it somehow, came back, got a job, got married and raised a family. The majority of his working life was spent as a “yard process man” - a laborer - at the Standard Oil refinery in downtown Cleveland. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, but not at all uncommon for the times. Most people who knew him generally remember him for his sense of humor as well as a certain degree of “sternness” towards children – his own and those of others. On the humor side, he’d do things like stealthily stringing kite string over the telephone wires and across the street to a neighbor’s house where he’d attach a metal object to it and drop it down one of the house’s downspouts. Then, when it got dark, he’d jiggle the string (while hiding in the shadows on his side of the street) until the neighbor turned on the lights and came out to see what was making all the noise which, of course, ceased as soon as he came out. Another time, I’m told that he dressed in a head to foot yellow rain slicker and went out and sat in a lawn chair in the front yard and waved to passing traffic…on a cloudless day. On the stern side, you’d better eat EVERYTHING that was placed in front of you if you ever wanted to leave the dinner table (my cousins can attest to THAT) and you had better not do anything to wake him up during the day when he was sleeping after working the graveyard shift (11 PM to 7 AM) at Standard Oil. Looking back now, through the perspective of experience, I’d have to give him no worse than a “B” as a grade for a father, maybe even B+. There were a lot of things he did, while I was living with him, that I thought were mistakes and that I would be sure not to make when I became a father. It turns out that many were not mistakes at all, others were simply unavoidable and still others I was doomed to repeat despite the best of intentions. Life, as well as S#!T, happens. It may sound strange, but I absolutely, positively believe in the whole time/space continuum thing that says if you alter one event in time that it will affect all events that follow. I fully believe that if my mom or dad would have lived longer (she also died at 57) that I might not have met Linda and – even if I did – the kids she and I produced might not be the exact same kids that I have now. And that’s something I don’t even want to contemplate. Still – and somewhat perversely - if I had to express my biggest regret about my dad it would be that he didn’t live long enough to meet these 3 people who are so central to me. Consequently, he doesn’t occupy the same place of honor or importance in their collective consciousness that other deceased relatives – that they knew in life – do. It just saddens me that, to them, he’ll never be anything other than a broken link – a tree that fell in the forest that they neither saw nor heard. I wanted to include a bunch of photos of my dad to accompany this little tribute but really didn’t find too many good ones beyond those taken of him when he was in the military. That’s actually kind of strange when you consider he was NOT a career soldier. He was only in the military for 4 years. There was a really nice one of him and my mom on their wedding day which, as a mischievous 5 year old, I took out of the frame made pinholes through their eyes. (I think that’s when my dad’s “sternness” began…) Sadly, I couldn’t find that exact one – but did find a few others. All of the photos I found of him in the years after he came out of the Marines were of terrible quality or he was just a very small part of the overall photo. The color photos taken in the last year of his life when he and mom took one last vacation together were photos of a man who was clearly dying, and I don’t want to show those. So I settled on the few you see here and temporarily changed my profile picture to one of him taken while he was in the Marines. Somehow, it just seemed appropriate to me that I should pay this small tribute to him today.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 12:15:04 +0000
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