The Wikiness

How would my father be doing if he were alive and well today, if he hadn’t died at 59 of bowel cancer?

I think Dad might have adapted pretty well to the current culture. Several times, I saw him accommodate powerful changes in mores that happened around him in the 1970s. 

A professional adaptation occurred in 1973, after he’d liquidated the advertising art firm he’d inherited from his father (and according to mom, “ran into the ground”). He became a traveling salesman for the Rochester Germicide Company, carrying with him a stiff company case holding samples of bathroom cleaners and insecticides.

This step down in employment was accompanied by two huge changes in his personal life, seismic alterations which, however unhealthily, he endured. One was his wife, my mother finding sobriety through a rehab program at Lutheran General Hospital.  Dad had supported mom as she began her 12 Step journey, even leading an Al-anon group for families dealing with alcoholics. Then a year or so after joining AA, mom decided to divorce dad and take up with Mike, a recovering addict whom she’d met in the program. 

Dad adjusted to these shocks and carried on for a couple more years, and when my sister Sarah was a high school sophomore and I a junior he sold our house on South Scoville and moved to a townhome in Oakbrook Terrace. 

In his new place, dad’s new persona came out–one very much of its time:  a divorced suburban man in wide polyester ties. He was polite to women and smelled of deodorant and aftershave. His choice of décor in his new bedroom showed how carefully he’d read the memo for cis-gendered single men of his time. The wallpaper surrounding his bed made my sisters blush:  lifesize black silhouettes of naked women from floor to ceiling. 

No, he wasn’t Hugh Hefner, but he did strike up relationships with secretaries at the various firms he sold. One named Lucille was a brash-talking Brooklyn woman. Another, an office manager in Minnesota, would eventually become his second wife, Sharon.

Also during this time. dad went from Al-anon leader to someone who should be in AA  Consuming alcohol was of course de rigeur for men of his time, and I imagine it worked for a while to settle his nerves–until it didn’t.

But even as he descended into addiction, he held large margins of tolerance for me, and the raucous punk, rock, and new wave music I blasted in my room when I began living with him in 1979. He never yelled, “turn that crap off!” like other parents of his generation. Sometimes, when they had jazz elements in them, he was even interested in my records. 

Finally, dad showed himself to be a father of his time when one day after checking my jeans before throwing them in the wash he found a small bag of cannabis and simply left the bag on my dresser, choosing not to mention it. 

“Must be the way things are now,” he may have surmised. “Better go with, than against the flow,” a very 70s way of thinking.

In those days he was politically conservative. He didn’t like Jimmy Carter, even if he wasn’t crazy about Reagan. I don’t think he took my advice and voted for John Anderson. 

If he were alive in 2025, would Dad still be a Republican? Since he was a prodigious reader and socially and fiscally conservative, I think he would have felt alienated by the MAGA takeover of the GOP.

But as someone who adapted well to cultural change, Dad might have found a way to accommodate the iconoclast-in-chief, his outrageous salesmanship, and his shameless chauvinism.