FATHERS’ DAY SERVICE 2010

 

FATHERS’ DAY

[In June 2010, most of the KUF Fathers’ Day service was shared by women recounting memories of their fathers. The following excerpt is taken  (with permission) from that service, with other writeups to follow.]

 

Ruth Wehlau: My father:

 

My father grew up in San Francisco, the child of a Salvadorean mother and an American father.  He had one brother, four years his senior.  My grandfather was a ship’s engineer, but lost his job during the depression, forcing the family into poverty; my father and his brother used to seek food in the garbage at the farmers’ market.  Around the same time, my grandmother became schizophrenic.  She was institutionalized for the rest of her life when my father was a young boy and she did not recognize her children when they came to visit.  My grandmother’s family had been wealthy, but all the money left in trust to her and her family was appropriated by the state to pay for her hospital bills.  My father’s shame over his mother’s mental illness was such that he told his children that she was dead and it was not until I was an adult that he informed me that she was in fact still alive.

 

When he graduated high school at age 18, my father won a scholarship to Harvard but he was drafted into the army and was not allowed to take up the scholarship.  In the army, he was offered the chance to train to be an officer, but had such a dislike of the officers he had encountered at that time that he chose to remain a private, and was sent to the Philippines to fight.  The war ended three months later.  He spent two years in Japan and when he returned to the States, went to Berkeley on the GI bill, where he met my mother, who convinced him to do a Ph.D. in Astronomy along with her.  In 1955 they moved to London, Ontario where he took up a position as astronomer in UWO’s department of Physics and Mathematics.  He eventually became head of the department of Astronomy and lived in London with his family for the rest of his life.  He died of a stroke at age 67 while on a trip to South Africa with my mother.

 

My father’s life experiences influenced his attitudes and thus the attitudes of my family.  All his life my father maintained a healthy dislike and distrust of the wealthy classes and their political power.  A good deal of animosity was also directed toward the Catholic church in which he was raised; he never forgot being humiliated at his first communion by the nuns because he was improperly dressed, a result of his poverty.  He lost his faith early; having been taught that faith could move mountains, he used to pray for his mother’s recovery, to no avail.   Because my father rejected his Catholicism and my mother was Jewish, they chose to become Unitarians early in their marriage.  

 

My father was also a kind gentle man, an excellent father.  Perhaps partly because he grew up in an all-male household, there were several ways he did not play traditional gender roles.  He always made us breakfast and he, rather than my mother, was the one who tended to soothe and comfort us when we were upset.  For many years he was the person I loved most in the world.  

 

My father’s marriage was by no means perfect.  Nevertheless, by making my family my top priority in life I am aware that I am trying to re-create the experience of living in a close-knit family like the one I grew up in.  When John and I chose to adopt a Central American child, I sometimes found myself thinking of my father’s mother, whom I never met.  She was the great-granddaughter of a Central American hero, Francisco Morazan, who tried to unite Central America as a liberal republic and who failed.  Although Franny never met my father, in my mind he is connected to him through this one common strand of heritage.  In adopting Abel, I was also reminded of my father.  Abel last saw his birth mother at age four; his vulnerability as a motherless and impoverished boy in some ways mirrors that of my Dad’s early life.