My Life Story

I was born on March 4, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio, in a little brick house on Huffman Avenue that my father bought for four thousand dollars after the war. I was the second of four children, and the only one who ever managed to fall out of the mulberry tree in the backyard twice in the same afternoon.

Money was tight, but I never once felt poor. My mother could stretch a Sunday chicken into meals clear through Thursday, and my father, who worked the line at the Frigidaire plant, taught me that a man's word was the only thing he truly owned. Summers were creek water and baseball cards. Winters were my mother reading to us by the radiator, one chapter a night, no matter how much we begged for two.

At Kiser High School I was an average student with an above-average curiosity about how things worked. I took apart my father's alarm clock in the tenth grade and had it back together before he woke, though it ran eleven minutes slow ever after. He never said a word about it. He just started leaving for work eleven minutes early.

Mr. Kowalski, my shop teacher, was the first person outside my family to tell me I was good at something. Forty years later I could still hear him saying, measure it twice, John. I have measured everything twice my whole life, wood and decisions alike.

I met Margaret Ann Doyle at the Rialto theater in the spring of 1967. She was in line for the picture with her girlfriends, I was behind her with mine, and when she laughed at something I could not even hear, I leaned over to my buddy Ray and said, I am going to marry that laugh.

It took me three weeks to work up the courage to ask her to a dance, and she says to this day that she had already decided to say yes two and a half weeks before I asked. We were married on June 14, 1969. Fifty-some years on, she still laughs at things I cannot hear, and I still lean in to find out what they are.

Our daughter Susan came along in 1972, our daughter Laura in 1974, and our son David in 1978. The house was loud in the way a house ought to be loud. If I could bottle one sound from my whole life, it would be the three of them thundering down the stairs on a Saturday morning like a herd of small elephants who smelled pancakes.

We did not have much extra, but we had a tent, a station wagon, and a map of Ohio. Every summer we picked a state park and made it ours for a week. The kids remember the campfires. Margaret remembers the mosquitoes. I remember watching her teach Susan to skip stones at Cowan Lake and thinking that no rich man had anything on me.

I spent thirty-one years at Delco, starting on the floor and finishing as a supervisor with forty men and women under me. I was proud of the work, but prouder of the people. I made it my business to know every name, every kid's name, and who needed a quiet word on a hard day.

When they offered me early retirement in 1998, Margaret said, take it, John, the garage has been waiting for you. She was right. The garage became my workshop, and half the porch rails in the neighborhood came out of it. I never charged a neighbor a dime. That was my father in me, I suppose.

If my grandchildren read nothing else of mine, I hope they read this part. Be on time, it is the cheapest way to show respect. Measure twice. Dance with your wife in the kitchen even when there is no music, especially when there is no music.

And tell your stories out loud while you can. My own father died with a thousand stories I never thought to ask for, and I have missed them my whole life. That is why I am telling you mine. Every word of it is yours to keep.