St. Patrick's Day was my father's birthday. He'd have been 105. He graduated from Waukesha High School, also the alma mater of Judy, Jack, and me. We even had some of the same teachers.
He started at Carroll College but had to drop out after a semester for economic reasons. Carroll was a natural choice because it not only was in Waukesha but where his mother, Ethel Marsh Eckert, was a house mother at one of the women's dorms after Emil, Dad's father, died
He started as letter boy at Waukesha Motor Company. He worked his way up to Traffic Manager where he had memorized the schedules of the trucking and train firms who brought in parts and materials and took out completed engines.
A lefty, he was an excellent bowler. Not quite professional class but consistently in the 500s during his participation in bowling leagues. He enjoyed listening to Packer football and Cub baseball games on the radio. He got me hooked on the Packers but I switched to the Braves and later the Brewers when Milwaukee got its own pro teams. He was "ecumenical" in that he stayed up with both the Cubs and the Milwaukee teams.
In his younger days, he loved ping pong and entered tournaments at the YMCA, starting at the bottom of each tournament and working his way up and usually winning. Being lefty may have helped him but it was his "eye-hand coordination," he always said. I played him when I was in high school, years after he had left ping pong behind. I was pretty good myself but he still could play great defense and wait out my anxiousness to make a score and, in that anxiety, miss. Yes, I won finally but he was always in the game.
He was funny about words. He used them correctly but he pronounced many of them funny. Then I realized his vocabulary depended more on cross-word puzzles than ever hearing the words used. He was excellent at cross-words. I bet he would have done the very hard sudoku puzzles if they had existed when he was alive.
He was also funny with puns. At meal times as we ate together, he frequently played with the words of the conversation. The classic was one day when Judy said we'd been playing outside until the next door neighbor boy messed up what we doing. She said, "We had fun until Dwayne came." Pop immediately threw in, "That's odd. There wasn't a cwoud in the sky." (You may have to read that out loud to get it.)
All his memorabilia from years of working with transport companies and household goods he'd had after Mom died disappeared during his second marriage. One thing did come into my possession, a hand gripped "stapler." Looking sort of like a pliers, it has a mechanism in the "head" that punches a "v" shaped cut and then pushes it back through a slit in the paper. No staples, just paper held together by an ingenious means. I think of Dad every time I use it. Still works great.
There are many memories that come back now, mowing the lawn for his second wife but never for Mom, wanting to wear a hard hat to church in case the roof fell in because he finally got there, picking us up on the corner of College and Waverly on his way home from work at noon or at supper time. I, and sometimes Judy too, would run the block to that corner just to ride with him. And now Ann saying I'm a lot like him. I guess that's not too bad a compliment.
