Scott: What about your mother?

Dad: My mother was tough. She had to be. My Dad was a dreamer. He was always stating that some day, his ship would come in. And he really believed that. He really believed that some day, he would strike it rich, somewhere, some way, something would fall in his lap. That was what kept him going. My mother, on the other hand, was a pragmatist. She was tough; at times, she was a little bit on the mean side. I remember that she used to beat the devil out of me when I was a little kid. My Dad never touched me. But my mother used to whack the hell out of me. I probably had it coming. She was quick with the whip.

Scott: You mentioned in another conversation, though, that your Dad did strike you once.

Dad: He hit me one time, when I insulted my mother at the dinner table. He just reached over and belted me, almost knocked me out of my chair. That's the only time he ever struck me in anger.

Scott: So how did your parents influence you?

Dad: They were solid, honest, hard-working, predictable people. They were what we would call moral, upstanding, honest people. They would no more lie than jump over the moon. They were people who would suffer before they would do anything dishonest. They were people who gave me a sense of myself that I value. I have never envied any other human being. I have never wanted to be anybody but who I am, and I think that's a gift from my folks.

But I have always been contented with myself, and I believe that that's a sense of pride that my mother and father instilled in me. They always told me that with my eyes and my ears and the books in the libraries, I could learn all the knowledge of humanity if I wanted to. And I felt that was quite an opportunity.

Scott: That's quite a principle. Did they have any other favorite sayings?

D: My Dad was the master of the cliche. [laughs] He knew every cliche that was ever uttered, I think. He used them all. But he was bright. He was not a fool. He was a dreamer. That's the best way to describe him. He always felt that just around the corner, good fortune would be there. He never got depressed, he never gave up, he never felt ill-used, he never complained -- about anything. He always felt that his day would come.

But he had some deep ideas, too. One of the things that he used to say frequently was that people get what they want, and cry for what they need. And that's true. That's true not only of goods, it's true of time to do things. It's true of how they use their lives. If you want to know what a person believes, watch what he does with his life. That's what he believes, no matter what he professes.

 

My Dad was a thinker. He used to tell us things like, "no matter how ignorant a person is, he knows something that you don't know. Even if he only knows one thing, it's likely something you don't know." So he always felt that we could learn more by listening than by talking. He was a good listener. And he read avidly. I have a picture of myself when I was three years old, sitting in my father's lap, and he was reading to me. And that was taken in Lind, Minnesota, on a Sunday afternoon, and the sun was shining into the living room, and I was sitting in my Dad's lap, and he was reading to me. He read to me before I learned to read, he read to me a lot.

My mother did, too. But she was the one who held the family together. She did the work, she did the thinking, she made the decisions. My father's decisions were always whatever my mother said they should be. No one questioned her authority. It was strictly a matriarchal home.

Scott: It seems as if you are just the opposite, in the sense that -- I believe you are aware of the fact that we sometimes call you a "beneficent dictator." Is that a reaction against .. ?

Dad: Probably. I am a lot more adventurous than my folks. I am a lot more positive. They tended to be timid, for fear that the world would deal them a harsh blow. They were not adventurous, they would not take a chance. I'm sure that neither one of them ever gambled on anything, other than the fact that life is a gamble. But they were timid people in terms of the world that we live in now.

For example, if my father were alive now, he would just not fit in this world. He thought it was kind to refer to black people as "darkies." He didn't like the word "Negro" because he thought it was harsh. And he never called anyone "black" -- when I was a kid, that was an insult. He would refer to them as "darkies." Can you imagine my father talking to a bunch of high school kids on a corner, saying "How are you darkies, today?" They'd cut him up! [laughs] Poor guy, he would be an anachronism in this world. He was just a kind, gentle soul -- not a simpleton, but a kind and gentle soul. He just felt that if he lived a good life, and was kind to other people, that it would be reciprocated. Sometimes it was, but more often than not, it was the opposite. He lived to be almost eighty-five, and I am quite confident that when he died, he had no enemies. And I guess if you're measuring human success, that's a success story.

Scott: What did he think about his life? Did you ever have any inkling?

Dad: Not really. My folks didn't talk to us about themselves. We never spoke about certain subjects. We never spoke about sex, or pregnancy, or your innermost thoughts, or other people's business; gossip was just forbidden. Gossip was considered a sinful thing to do. They talked to us about us. My folks didn't talk to us about themselves. In fact, that's one of the reasons I don't know more about them. It was too late to find out when I got interested. And a lot of things my sisters told me, particularly my sister Kate, who had a fantastic imagination -- a lot of things they told me when I was a little kid, I have since found out weren't true at all.

Scott: Did your parents have any eccentricities? Did your Dad smoke a pipe, or have a favorite suit, that kind of thing?

Dad: Yes, he smoked a pipe, and my mother just thought that was the dirtiest, nastiest thing that anybody ever invented, that pipe. He enjoyed his pipe. He smoked the cheapest tobacco he could get, and it was awful. My mother had the attitude that if anybody drank any alcohol whatsoever, they would go straight to Hell, with no stops in between. One gulp, and you were doomed.

Scott: Did you ever sneak into the living room in the middle of the night and try your Dad's pipe?

Dad: No, I never was interested in the pipe. When I was a little kid, we used to smoke corn silk, and all those silly things that most kids do. But I never tried that pipe. It was too gross. It smelled like the dickens, and I wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Scott: So, apart from your parents, when you were a kid, what was your childhood like? You worked, but you went to school, had friends ...

Dad: I had a good childhood. I had a lot of fun. We were all poor as hell. Everybody was poor. We didn't feel particularly singled out. Everybody else I knew was just about as poor as I was. This was in the height of the Depression, when if you had a job, you probably made four dollars a week, or two dollars a week -- if you had a job, which most people didn't. So we didn't feel particularly ill-used, because we were just part of a group of people who were all struggling to survive.

We had a big garden, we saved our food as much as we could, we were willing to accept the largesse of the various farmers around, who would give us squash and pumpkins and things like that -- we all pretended that we didn't need them. Most of the houses I lived in when I was a kid, we didn't have any indoor plumbing or electricity. We would sit out in the yard in the evening, pretending that we didn't want the lights on. [laughs] We didn't have any lights.

But we had a good time. My brothers and sisters were a lot of fun. We used to do all the things kids do, fight, and laugh. Lots of times, we'd get up in the morning and say, "Hey, if we had any eggs, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had any bacon." And then we'd all laugh, and if we were lucky, we'd have some cornmeal mush. [chuckles]

Scott: Easily amused.

Dad: All of my brothers and sisters had a sense of humor except Russ, who tended to be more somber. He had a sense of humor, but he didn't bring it out very often. He usually felt as though things were pretty tough. Russ seemed to feel the pressure of our poverty a lot more than the rest of us. But my brothers and sisters ...

Wayne, in particular, the oldest one, was a laugher. He'd laugh at the Devil if he arrived at the door. And he was a lot of fun. He died suddenly at the age of 72, doing the things that he loved to do, smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer, getting ready to go fishing. Fell over dead. I loved him, but I won't cry for him, because he lived his whole life, right up to the last second, he just fell over dead right in his tracks and never knew what hit him. He smoked two packs a day for fifty-five years, at least, maybe sixty years. When I was a little kid, I'd find cigarettes hidden all over the barn, and all over the place, that Wayne was smoking. In fact, my Dad was dismissed from one of the Methodist pulpits that he served because Wayne was seen smoking.

Scott: Wow.

Dad: This was in the 1920s. Wayne was probably 14 or 15 years old. He was seen smoking, and Dad was canned right on the spot. Those small town Methodists didn't tolerate much.

Scott: What about boyhood friends, and heroes, and school chums, that kind of thing?
Dad: I had a normal childhood, despite our difficult economic circumstances. I had a lot of friends. I played all the sports that the kids played, in fact, I was a pretty good athlete. My heroes, when I was a little kid, were Charles Lindbergh [who made the first solo flight across the Atlantic on May 31, 1927], Jack Dempsey [world heavyweight boxing champion for most of the 1920s], Jack Armstrong on the radio --

Scott: ... "the All-American boy," right ...

Dad: Every evening, at 5:30. We had a Philco radio, in the 1930s .. back in the 1920s, we had a crystal set, and then in about 1928, we got an Atwater-Kent battery radio, with a 12-volt battery and a big tulip-shaped speaker. And it would fade out and come back .. the only program I remember on that radio was "Amos 'n Andy." But then, we got a Philco table set in about 1931 or 1932. I don't remember where we got it, but that was our source of entertainment. That's all the entertainment we had. In those days, you could go to the movie for a dime, but we didn't have a dime, usually.

But "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy" came on at 5:30 in the evening, every evening except Sunday, and we listened faithfully. He was one of my heroes. Jack Dempsey was one of my heroes, as I said, and Charles Lindbergh, who flew the Atlantic in 1927.

I had many other heroes. One of them was Theodore Roosevelt. You know, it hadn't been that long since he had been president -- it had only been 15 years, when I was born. And some of the people in history that you think of as being "way back there" -- some of my family knew some of those people. My father's and mother's people, some of them were involved in the Civil War, they met Lincoln and Sherman. The Civil War was only 55 years before I was born.

Scott: It's interesting that you looked up to Jack Dempsey and Charles Lindbergh, and later on, you became a Golden Gloves boxer and then a pilot.

Dad: Oh, I wouldn't say that I became "a Golden Gloves boxer." I got into the Golden Gloves, and almost got killed. [laughs] I entered, and that was a mistake. I just about got my head knocked off. But when I was a kid, fighting was one of the things we did for amusement. I knew which kids could whip me, and which kids I could whip, and you knew exactly where you stood in the school. You knew exactly who you could tell to go to the Devil, and who you'd better be nice to. Because we had a pecking order that was very discrete. I was not much of a fighter, but I was strong, and I wasn't afraid of anybody.

But Jack Dempsey was everybody's hero in those days -- as was Babe Ruth. They were national heroes because they overcame what normal people would feel were insurmountable obstacles. Jack Dempsey was only a 180-pounder, and he whipped these 250-pounders like they were a wisp of smoke. He just pounded them right into the ground. He was so quick and powerful that everyone admired him because he was a powerful figure.

Scott: Babe Ruth was short and fat, or ... ?

Dad: Babe Ruth was a womanizer, and a drinker, and pot-bellied, but boy, could he hit that baseball. He made baseball. Until Babe Ruth came along, baseball was sort of a minor occurrence. People weren't terribly interested in it. He really put baseball on the map. There were a lot of heroes in those days. They were heroes who did specific things. They were not heroes like [disdain] Bruce Springsteen. What the hell does he do? He just stands up there and shouts. Van Halen? What does he do? He has huge amplifier. What kind of heroes are those? I'm talking about people who did things that took power, brains, imagination, adventure, or courage.