Tales from the Dad Side (10 page)

Jim Dandy

M
ost kids are, at some point in their childhood, embarrassed by their parents. My father was not an astronaut, the president of a bank, or an automobile dealer with his name memorialized in cursive chrome on the rear ends of legions of Buicks, and I felt that revealing that he was a traveling salesman would be too ordinary for my bloodline, so I invented a far better biography.

“What's your dad do, Steve?”

“We don't like to spread it around,” I'd whisper, before divulging a well-kept family secret: “but my dad is the guy who invented the artificial heart, which is also dishwasher safe.”

“Cool,” they'd respond, not asking the follow-up question: “Then why's he drive a Ford pickup with a feed-company name on it?”

Later I realized that such an outrageous exaggeration was problematic when I admitted to a really cute college girl from Florida, “My father invented Teflon.”

“Your dad is Dr. Roy Plunkett?” The chemistry major who'd just studied Teflon in class seemed positively giddy that she was in the presence of chemistry royalty.

“Did I say Teflon? I meant the Chia Pet,” I backtracked, because to the best of my knowledge nobody had taken credit for that.

In reality, I should have just told them the truth about my dad because it was a much better story. There was perhaps a reason why Jim Doocy would become the funniest guy I've ever known: he was
born on April Fools' Day 1933, smack-dab on his mother's kitchen table—what some people would do to avoid a copay. But on the kitchen table? Imagine that dinner conversation. “Mama, would you move your leg a little to the left, I can't get the peas and carrots.”

The second of seven children, my father was raised in north central Iowa at the end of the Great Depression, which meant that when I was growing up he'd roam room to room flipping off the light switches, reminding no one in particular, “Do you know how much that's costing me?” We did not, nor did we care. We were kids. My father's dad was 100 percent Irish, a large and bald dirt farmer who taught his farmhand children how everything worked, starting with how to correctly milk a cow.

“Hey, Phil, where'd you get that horn hole in your forehead?”

“Milked the bull…briefly.”

Grandpa Doocy started his family late in life when he married at fifty. He was nearing retirement age when my father was growing up, so my dad's mother was left to get things done. I remember Sundays after church when I was a little boy. She'd say, “Stephen, come help me with dinner,” and we'd walk around to the backyard, where she'd sneak up behind one of the two dozen penned-up chickens, grab one by the leg, and haul it clucking and flailing over to a weathered stump, where she'd nonchalantly pick up a little hatchet, and in a single movement that required precision every time, she'd whack the head off the chicken.

My eyes were always clamped closed at the moment, but as soon as I'd hear the thump on the stump I'd open them up because for the next ten to fifteen seconds the headless chicken body would run around the backyard willy-nilly.

“They're so dumb, they don't know they're dead yet,” she'd say as I'd watch until the chicken would run out of gas, keel over, and become an entrée.

“Stephen, grab me another,” she'd call out.

Come on, Grandma.
The entire flock just watched their cousin go to that big KFC in the sky. If I got too close they'd give me the Tippi
Hedren treatment. But because it was an order not a request, I'd walk up to within a yard of the hens, never closer, and announce in a loud voice, “Here, chicken…chick…chick…,” a pathetic attempt. I never closed the deal. Grandma'd always bring home the bacon, doing the Marie Antoinette number, and after another headless crazy chicken dance our Sunday dinner preparation was complete.

“Stephen, put the heads in the trash can” is something you don't hear much these days. I prayed back then that a neighborhood dog or a wandering band of hoboes would beat me to that chore.

My dad grew up a good student, a hard worker, and a terrific baseball player. He had a part-time job after school at the local pool hall, where he famously taught the nuns from his high school how to play pool. The other noteworthy thing he did before age twenty, he died.

His mother thought he'd come down with the flu, so he stayed home and they nursed him, not knowing that his appendix had burst and poison that would kill him was spreading through his body. When he was at death's door they took him to the hospital. “He won't make it through the night,” his parents were told, so a priest was called to give last rites to my unconscious father. Shortly after the last rites, he woke up, and then over a few days he completely recovered. Was it a miracle or just good timing? I believe in my heart it was a little of both—he wasn't supposed to make it through the night. Maybe the priest arrived at just the divine moment he rounded a corner, making an amazing coincidence. My own parish priest tells me that a coincidence is God's way of working anonymously.

He had to get better or I never would have been born, because twenty miles south of my father's hometown of Bancroft, Iowa, is Algona, where my mother, a pretty woman named JoAnne Sharp, lived in a tiny house on a huge lot that smelled of rhubarb and lilacs in the summer. Her mother, Lilly, a second-generation Swede, raised her and her sister, Linda, on a tiny income as a short-order cook at a highway greasy spoon called Frank and Em's. I honestly don't know what her father did; for most of my life, he lived a solitary life in an Airstream trailer parked in Wickenburg, Arizona, because the
weather was better. Their family name was Sharp, and I'm hoping that one day soon a lawyer with a Halliburton aluminum attaché case filled with unmarked bills will knock on my door to inform me that my little-known grandfather founded Sharp electronics, and I'm the sole heir. This theory is, however, highly unlikely, because I remember him asking me when I was five, “Do you know to change the channels?” as he sat in his easy chair and drank room-temperature Grain Belt beer he kept under the stove.

When my father's older brother Phil came back from serving in the marines in Korea, he was introduced to his future wife, Jane, by a pretty blonde who worked with her at the water department. That woman just happened to be her next-door neighbor and best friend, my mother. Something mysterious clicked on my parents' first date, because after a few short months my mother and father were engaged, and they married the next June. Less than a year after they got hitched my father was drafted into the United States Army and shipped out for basic training; when he left, he didn't know that his new wife was pregnant.

One generation later, when I was of age, I registered for military service but was told that because I had a heart murmur, I was disqualified. Wanting to continue the family tradition of service to our nation, I convinced the recruiter to classify me 7-F, which meant that in the event of conflict, I was to be immediately taken as a human shield.

My father had never traveled far from home, so the army was his chance to see the world. First stop Fort Carson, Colorado, then to White Sands Testing Grounds, and later a troop train transported him to Brooklyn, where he was placed on a troop transport, the SS
Geiger,
for a very rough passage across the North Atlantic, so while my mother was morning sick, my father was seasick. He volunteered to work in the mess hall, where he learned from a PFC named George that the fastest way to peel potatoes was to bake them, cut them, then put them on the floor and stomp on them with his combat boots to make the skins come off. George was eventually dismissed from
the kitchen, and my father stopped eating anything prepared by a man in camouflage.

Deployed to the Black Forest of Germany, Dad wound up working as a supply guy, making sure the men of the Twenty-third Anti-aircraft Artillery Battalion had plenty of sleeping bags, lanterns, and gas masks. He was not in charge of weapons, which was fine by him because nobody ever accidentally killed himself when he dropped a gas mask.

At that same time my mother was stateside and worked as an executive secretary at Snap On Tools, which sounds like a marital aid business but was in fact a tool company that sold tools that snapped on.

For his service, once a month Dad would get a twenty-eight-dollar check from the United States Treasury, and another was sent to my mom for about a hundred bucks. It was during his overseas duty that I was born, and my father remembers his commanding officer's exact words when the CO called him to the base headquarters: “Private Doocy, you're a father. Congratulations.” Being the family-friendly organization it was in the 1950s, the army promptly sent him home to see his wife and baby, eighteen months later.

“Look what I've missed!” he said when he first laid eyes on me. “Is he shaving yet?” The humor was probably lost on my mother, who'd spent a year and a half waiting for her husband to come home to kill a very large bug in the bathroom.

After his service, my mom and dad and I retired to our family compound, a thousand-square-foot shotgun house at the end of Wooster Street, in Algona. The good news was it was not on the wrong side of the tracks; the bad news was it was literally on the side of the tracks. Barely a hundred feet from my bedroom window, the vibration from the Soo Line freight trains woke me up in the middle of the night and made my Lassie lamp shake like a hula dancer.

My mother retired from work and became a stay-at-home mom as my sisters, Cathy and Lisa, were born. My dad started a string of jobs. The first was chicken doctor. Sent to Iowa State University to
learn how to diagnose chicken ailments for a huge poultry hatchery. Whenever a local farmer had a sick bird, he'd call my dad to make sure it wasn't something really bad. Luckily, my father never took his mother to work with him. “This one has a sore throat,” he'd say, milliseconds before Grandma'd get out her hatchet and chop the head off of one of her son's clients.
Case closed. Let's eat
.

Aside from the train tracks at the end of the street, it was not a normal neighborhood. One woman down the block had a Technicolor-tinted hairdo that seemed a hundred watts brighter than Lucille Ball's. One night when my mom was busy, the redhead invited my father and me over for dinner. I remember my father saying on the way there, “Don't talk, just listen.”

“Hello, Jim, Stevie, come on in,” she said as she escorted us into the dining room, where a huge banquet was being served. Ten place settings were already piled high with dinner. Our hostess sat at one end of the table, talking to guests on her left and right, encouraging them to eat more. The perfect hostess. But there was one problem—besides my father, me, and the redhead, the room was empty. Plates stayed filled with untouched food as the chatty woman spoke directly at empty chairs. I wanted to whisper to my dad for an explanation but radio silence had been imposed.

“Marvin, how's Thelma?” she asked, and then stared at her imaginary friend Marvin, nodding along to whatever the nonexistent diner was saying. It was my first experience with an obviously crazy person, but it prepared me for a career in talk television.

Around my fifth birthday, I drove with my mother, and heard a radio news story about how a couple of killers went into a Kansas farmhouse and murdered an entire family. Truman Capote wound up doing a book on it called
In Cold Blood
. As my mother listened to the stories about the killing on the radio, I remember her saying, “Strange things happen out there. I wouldn't move to Kansas for a million dollars.”

Within a week my father came home with exciting news: “We're moving to Kansas!”

My mom did not get a million reasons to move, just one: a friend of my father's had offered him a job in ad sales where the entire state would be his territory, and it seemed like a great career move. But to me it seemed like a gamble to trade our little house on the tracks for a little house on the prairie. Once in our new house I had trouble adjusting, probably because every time the doorbell rang after dark, I thought it was Dick and Perry there to string us up in the basement, demanding to know the whereabouts of our priceless antiquities.

With my dad covering eighty thousand square miles of sales territory, he was gone a lot, but he always found time to get home, as evidenced by the fact that it was during this time that my sisters Ann and Jennifer were born. On weekends he tried to make up for his absence by taking us on little trips. I remember walking the streets of an authentic frontier street called Old Abilene Town, with my cap gun drawn in case a bank robber or horse thief needed to get pumped full of lead, and my dad pointed to the stenciled name along the top of the stagecoach:
BUTTERFIELD OVERLAND STAGE COMPANY
.

“Kids, that's our family…I think.”

That sent shock waves through our family—we'd never known we might be related to anything close to a transit system. We listened as he explained that a family named Butterfield adopted his mother, the chicken whisperer. They were childless until the orphan train came to town. From the Civil War through the early twentieth century, a number of Eastern big-city orphanages organized and transported entire trains full of kids into the Midwest. The trains would pull up to a town and people would gather around to see if they had a child on board who would fit into their family tree.

“Do you have anything in a redhead with green eyes?”

If they did, papers were signed and the kid made that town his or her home. Frank Butterfield and his wife, Ida Blood Butterfield, picked my grandma off the train, which was like a Polar Express with people.

Ida was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, and it never occurred to me until just now typing this out that I have spent my life incorrectly
checking the box that identifies me as White/Caucasian, when in fact I could almost truthfully check the Sort of Native American box.