A TRIBUTE TO DADS

Today -- Fathers' Day -- I find myself thinking about my daddy. My daddy slipped away from my world in 1987. Doesn't seem possible that he's been gone 25 years. In his last years, he tried to master the operation of a VCR.That puts some perspective on the changes we've seen since he left.

I was sitting at supper with my parents one evening -- I guess it was about the time I was finishing high school -- when my dad said, "Say, Kathy, you should put away your Little Golden Books."

I expected my mother to object. The things from my childhood -- toys and books -- were shared with the grandchildren, and I thought she would want that to continue. Instead, she said, "Yes, Kathy, you should do that."

At the time, it seemed silly to me. The books were well-used and the stories outgrown. Still, I packed a number of them away.

I think my parents saw then what I see now -- that those little books were a reflection of life as it was in my childhood (the '50s) and in some cases even before. The subjects reinforced the values of that time. Many of the books were already outdated, and we were sitting on the edge of big social and cultural changes.Everything would change -- even the book industry.

Here's a book from my collection that is an illustrated attempt to explain to a young child what daddies do all day. Daddies leave the house in the morning and come back at night. The book assumes, perhaps correctly, that the child has no concept of what his/her dad is doing during those hours away from home. Well, I'm not writing a thesis on family life in the '50s. It's just that, as I read through this little book the other day, I realized that it would be mostly meaningless to my grandchildren whose mothers and fathers both work outside the home.

Frankly, I'm not sure how meaningful it was to me now that I think about it. My dad didn't leave the house in the morning. He gave piano lessons in his studio, which was a converted bedroom on the back of our house, and I knew what that was all about. I remember looking at this book when I was a very little girl and knowing that my daddy was an exception. The daddy that looked most like my daddy was a salesman, but I couldn't imagine my daddy behind the counter at a store.


And then my daddy would change out of his dress shirt and tie, put on gray work pants and a chambray shirt and head to the farm, but he didn't look like the farmer daddy either. He grew excellent corn-on-the-cob but as a gardener, not as a farmer. I was pretty sure the book didn't do a good job of depicting a farmer daddy. When my daddy farmed, he did it on a tractor and came back from the field with a dust-covered face.Now that was what real farming was about! That's what my real daddy did. It didn't have to be explained to me.

Happy Fathers' Day to daddies everywhere, old and young. KW