Bittersweet at 91

Tomorrow is my dad's ninety-first birthday. He was born in Musselshell, Montana, the third oldest child of William and Clara Van Dyke. His older brother John and older sister Mattie are both dead now. Dad's parents died a long time ago. His father died in 1949, the year my oldest sister Janet was born. Dad's mom died in 1986, a year after I got married.

I'm not sure just how soon, but after he was born, dad's family moved to Wisconsin before moving back to Montana to settle on a farm south of Roundup where dad and his nine sisters and brothers were raised. The farm was called Strawberry Acres. Across the highway from the Van Dyke's farm was another one owned by the Crosmer family. That's where my dad met my mother. She was the granddaughter of Frank and Nancy Crosmer.

I think the grade school they attended was on Horse Thief Creek. The teacher was a Lindstrand, who lived on a neighboring farm. Anyway, the story goes that dad was in fourth grade and my mom was in first grade when an important incident occurred. Dad was teasing mom so to get back at him, she picked up a cow pie and threw it at him. As one of my favorite comedians, Don Knotts, used to say, "Mom had spunk."

The story must be true because I heard it lots of times when I was growing up and I never heard anyone contradict it.

The only good story I know about them courting was told to me by my mom's sister Millie. She said that dad liked to sing to my mother. This isn't hard to believe because dad still sings to this day, if the mood strikes him. Millie told me that one of his favorite songs was "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain." Yes, it was popular long before Willie Nelson recorded it in the 1970s.

I remember driving to Billings when I was a teenager with my dad to see my Grandma Van Dyke, who was in one of the Billings hospitals. It was on the return trip home to Roundup when I first heard Willie Nelson sing that song. I was amazed that dad knew the words. Generally us kids would learn a song long before dad did, but since the song was a classic, dad had known the words for a long time.

When I was a little boy some of my dad's favorite songs were: "Jimmy Brown, the newsboy"; and "Skylark, won't you tell me where my love can be"; and the Sam Cooke hit, "She was only sixteen." He also had one that he sang when he got a hair cut: "Hey, Mister Zip, Zip, Zip, with your hair cut just like mine."

When I was born, dad was 39. As a young boy, I hated cold weather but my dad seemed to live in it without much suffering. He would walk outside on the coldest day of the year and chop wood wearing nothing but a white T-shirt.

At 91, his thermometer has changed some. Now he likes to wear long johns from September through May. He also prefers wearing a long sleeve flannel shirt to wandering around in a T-shirt.

But some things haven't changed. He still likes music, and if it's a song he knows, he'll sing right along with it. And dad is one of the most helpful men that God ever put on this earth. He helps Belinda with the laundry by folding clothes. He also likes to empty the garbage cans in every room and take a sack of garbage out to the alley at least once a day. Also, our birds will never go hungry nor will his cat ever have to worry about a dirty cat box. Dad also likes to vacuum the carpets and wash the dishes. If anything, he's as busy as he wants to be. He walks several times a day from our house to the highway and back. It's only a two block hike, but if you do it enough times, it must be a mile he's walking during the day.

No, he's not 21 anymore, or even 71, but he's doing pretty well for being ninety-one.

Dad's oldest brother John was born in 1917 and died in 1967 when he was 50 years old. Dad's sister Mattie was born in 1919 and died in 2006. That means that John was the oldest in the family for 50 years and Mattie was the oldest for 39 years. Dad has only been the oldest five years.

My guess is that he might like to be the oldest for a few more years. My Grandma Van Dyke lived well into her 90s and dad's father lived to be well into his 80s. So it's hard to tell how much longer dad will sing, walk and do our household chores. Maybe he's destined to be the oldest surviving World War II vet.

Anyway, happy birthday dad. You've been a part of my life for 51 years, and for that, I'm deeply blessed.

September 11th memories

Ten years ago, I was the manager of corporate communications for MDU Resources and working in the Schuchart Building north of the North Dakota capitol. I was in my office when I got a call from George McDonald, a videographer with MDU, who was in the TV studio watching the first World Trade Center Tower burning.

He called me to the basement and we were watching a replay on a TV monitor when a second jet hit the second tower and another ball of fire erupted from the explosion. I had been to the World Trade Center in 1976 and had eaten in one of the large ballrooms near the top floor….about where the jet hit.

As the fire and smoke rolled out of the buildings, the announcers were speculating about the start of World War III, the whereabouts of President Bush and any number of things. It would be later that the towers would fall and the huge clouds of dust would mushroom up from lower Manhattan. The fire trucks and the police cars were rushing to the scene; however, most of the video was being shot blocks away from the Twin Towers. You couldn’t see people jumping from the buildings like we did later on.

For me, I had some immediate concerns. The president of MDU Resources and a number of other company employees were in New York City at the time meeting with credit agencies and financial houses. There were a series of meetings that had been scheduled – some months in advance – and our department had worked on writing speeches, preparing powerpoints and printing complementary materials for the meetings.

I didn’t know exactly where the MDU officials were staying but my guess was that they weren’t staying next to the World Trade Center but more in the center of Manhattan. It wasn’t long before I got called to a meeting where I found that the company officials in New York City were safe, but they had been close to the World Trade Center earlier in the morning.

Then there was a new wrinkle that we had to deal with. My boss, the vice president of corporate communications, was in Washington, D.C., and staying near the Pentagon building where another jet had rammed into it.

It was a strange day because while I felt safe in Bismarck, I had lots of people I knew in places that weren’t very safe. I could feel for them because I was sure they were doing things that weren’t part of any travel plans. For instance, with these two cities being attacked, would there be any public transportation running or restaurants open? It’s one thing to be home and eating out of a crowded refrigerator, but it’s quite another to be on the road and find yourself isolated from the rest of the world because everyone is hunkered down waiting for the next plane to hit. Just think of living out of a suitcase in New York City with no running water, no toilet, no electricity and no food.

Eventually, all the people from MDU returned back to Bismarck. The group that was in New York City had to wait a couple of days before taking a taxi cab from New York to Cleveland, Ohio, before the company plane could fly out and get them. I can’t remember how my boss got home, but I remember, there was a no fly moratorium in place right after September 11, 2001.

I also remember the markets were tanking after September 11^th and that our local churches were never so full as they were on the next Sunday. A little more than a month later, I was about to be jarred even harder when I found out my position at MDU had been eliminated. It was a strange time, but now 10 years later, we can see with 20/20 hindsight. Still, at the time, it was difficult to navigate because everything had changed.

If there is a lesson from September 11^th, it might be this….above all, persevere. Life goes on.