Dad - 50 Years Ago

50 years ago today Dad died from a ruptured brain aneurysm. It was a long day which started for me that morning when some friends at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center came by my barracks and said the base chaplain was looking for me. It’s never a good thing when the chaplain wants to see you. I went over to his office and he told me that my father was seriously ill and in the hospital. He handed me a phone to call home.

I called and knew immediately that something terrible had happened. I didn’t know who answered the phone because of all the screaming and crying. My Aunt Kate took the phone to talk to me and was trying to get people to quiet down. Apparently just a few moments before there was a call from the hospital with the word that Dad had just been pronounced dead. Mom was at the hospital and it was Uncle Ed or Uncle Jack who called the house with the tragic news. So Aunt Kate had to tell me the news that Dad had died. I was in shock. The chaplain helped me through the process of applying for an immediate two week emergency leave and then helped me get airline tickets from Chicago to Philadelphia that same day. I was numb on the flight that afternoon wearing my dress whites with a black armband the chaplain gave me. Everyone who saw me could tell I was going to a funeral. The next few days were a blur.

I don’t really remember much about those days after I got home. Everyone was shocked and grief stricken but we were surrounded by a comforting extended family. The funeral was somewhere in the Souderton area because the family could not take having another funeral back in Germantown where we had lived for decades. All of the recent family funerals had been at the Gillespie Funeral Home down the street from our old house and across the street from the parish church. My father’s family lived in that house through the 40’s and early 50’s until my grandmother sold it to the Gillespie family after our grandfather died. The family could not bear to go there again for the funeral of another family member. Now in 1970 things were different. People in the family were more spread out.

The wake was an awful experience and it too was mostly a blur. Everyone was happy to see me home but the circumstances were horrible. My brothers and sisters were devastated. Danny was only 8. Cathy and Rita seemed to be really taking it hard and Rita particularly was blaming herself because of some argument she had with him a day or so before. Mom was a mess.

Some of my friends from the old neighborhood came up to the wake in a couple of cars. We heard some people make some remarks about them not being dressed for a wake but they had come out that night not knowing about my father, not knowing they would be going to a wake. Some had gone down to the corner as usual and then heard about my father dying. They all knew him and liked him. My parents were welcoming and had always let us have our friends over to our house to hang out. We often had teenage parties in our basement rec room with loud music. So our friends piled into a couple of cars for the almost hour drive to the wake out of respect for my father.

Another group of people there were the men that Dad worked with at Brandywine. For the previous almost two years I had worked there with my Dad prior to going into the Navy. I was part time there for the first year and full time after graduating from high school. Dad was the foreman and plant supervisor. I really got to know a whole different side of my father. I saw him as one of the guys. As a boss who was respected and admired by the people who worked with him. I saw and heard that all the time while working there. All of his fellow workers were there at my father’s wake to pay their respects. They were there to see me too. I had worked with them. I was their helper kid who did the clean-up work and had left to join the Navy to see the world. They were excited and impressed to see me wearing my sailor uniform and they listened to my stories. But they were hurting too. And also shocked at their loss.

It was a hard funeral and most of it I’ve blocked out. I really don’t remember much except the crying. I walked into the church behind the pallbearers and the casket with Mom on my arm and in my uniform. My brother Tom was one of the pallbearers and I can still see the tears in his eyes as they walked past us with Dad. Mom sobbed. I didn’t cry at all during that two week leave. It would be years before I cried for my Dad but when I did it lasted hours.

It was a quick two weeks and then I returned to the base at Great Lakes and back to my studies at the Navy Ship Engineer A School. I didn’t do well after about a month I dropped out of the Navy Nuclear Power training program. I talked to a Navy counselor about taking a hardship discharge to come home to my family and help out but Mom would not hear of it. She wanted me to stay in the service and I did. Life went on for me but it was much harder for my brothers and sisters who stayed with Mom and the aftermath of our father’s death.