Memories of my father

Father's Day, 2012

Although I don't need a reason, Father's Day provided an opportunity for some reflections on my father, Tom Blaine.

I can remember that as a very young kid and I'd ask him what he was doing, his answer was "Flying a Kite".


My youth impression of dad was he was a humorless man; maybe that's why I can remember the first time I heard him tell a "joke'.  We were at a church potluck and I heard dad say to someone  "Pass the Moo juice".


As a young kid, I was never really aware of family finances; now I realize that raising three children on a postal worker's salary was probably a challenge, which is why he had different part time jobs.   For a while he worked at a postal sub-station that was located at Brady's pharmacy on the corner of Cherry St. and Simmons St.  He mainly worked in the evenings.  He was working the night the Galesburg Post Office burned down (1958), and he called home shortly after the first started. Even though it was night,  Mom took the three of us kids downtown, and we watched the library building consumed by fire while sitting on the front steps of the Central Congregational Church.

A summer job that dad always worked during one of his vacation weeks was at the the Knox County Fair.  One summer when I was maybe 12,  he took me to the fair for the whole day that he worked selling parking lot tickets.  While he worked, I had free reign to wander the fair grounds and the displays.  I just had to stop in and see him periodically.  At night we went to the stock car races.  It was certainly took  a lot of glitter out of going to any fair in the future.

Another part time job that he had was that he would go up to Chicago and drive back new cars for a dealership in town.  This again provided me a special experience when I accompanied on one trip.  We rode the train up, took a cab over to the downtown car dealership  and drove the car back.  The train trip up was special, and I had never ridden in a cab before and then the drive back to Galesburg.

Dad was a reader.  But his favorite read was the Condensed Books put out by Reader's Digest.  He subscribed to the Reader's Digest magazine, and we also got the monthly condensed books.  He was the speller in the family; if any of us kids needed to know how to spell anything, we'd ask dad.  Clearly the spelling gene was one that I didn't inherit.

He's been gone 10 plus years now, but a parent's influence never dies.