My Dad

This is one of my favorite images of my dad. A young man just entering middle age probably 40 or 39. He is pictured beside his service vehicle for Boise Heating and Equipment company a company he worked for more than 30 years. Among other things my dad was a card-carrying member of the sheet metal workers union. He was a union man, I don't really know how he felt about being in the union but I know he was a union guy. I remember only one labor strike my dad was involved in. It really did not seem a big deal of time, the strike but I guess it was. I don't know if his union got the demands they were striving for but he was out of work for a couple weeks it seemed.

As an old guy now I look back at these pictures altogether differently than I did decades ago. Knowing what I know now about work, individual, parental and personal responsibility this image tells me  much more now than it used to. The company trusted my dad to drive this truck, take the truck home and kind of care for it as his own. I remember two trucks my dad used and obviously a third exemplified in this photo. I wish this image was in color I'll bet the pickup is cherry red as was the panel truck and Ford Econoline van he drove in later years. Of course dad never used the service truck for personal convenience. My dad always worke " on call” meaning he could be called on any time day or night weekdays or weekends for service work. I often rode to work with my father dropping me off at school before he reported to shop for the days calls.

I look at this image and see a guy with a steady job, a good job, blue-collar but good honest work that brought home enough money to pay the bills, feed the kids and live a lower middle-class life. I once asked my dad what he had wanted most in his life and he said something like he would've liked to been a farmer or rancher. So he settled for 40 hours plus a week being a service worker plus the owner of a small 14 acre farm. The farm was half pasture and half crops usually corn or alfalfa. We did have a small 

( large if you had to weed the garden yourself) garden space attached to a small raspberry patch. We flood irrigated the farm once a week during the summer and milk cows every day of the year. We sold milk to the neighbors and to the dairy. We milked anywhere between five and six cows twice a day. We were nothing but industrious. We also maintained a fairly large woodpile made up of scrap lumber be harvested from knocking apart wood shipping crates that furnaces would arrive at my dad's shop We would knock the crates apart pull out the nails that separate the lumber into boards which could be used in building and pieces so damaged they were only good for burning in the furnace. I remember the woodpile being huge.The wood pile was large enough to have tunnels, spaces in the piled wood perfect for forts. My brother and I often played or hid the wood pile.

My dad looks confident in this image I envy him that, I don't think I've ever felt as confident as he looks in this one image.