Father's Day

When Jeff wrote My Fun Dad in 2005, I thought it was absolutely fantastic, and it made me think that at some point I should do something similar…but it has always seemed a very difficult task because when telling stories about my dad there’s such a big physical component (lots of facial expressions and gestures), and they’re just not the same if you don’t do “the voice”.

Whenever anyone, and I mean anyone – my brothers, my mom, even my grandmothers – tells a story about my dad, they have no choice but to say his lines in sort of a mock raspy yell, because that’s essentially how he talked…loudly and purposefully – even when he was saying the most mundane things. I think the voice is half the story…but well, use your imagination.

My dad, William J. Starke (“Bill”), grew up in North Massapequa on Long Island NY. Professionally he was a home improvement contractor and a teacher; he taught “shop class” and later worked with emotionally disturbed kids. He met my mom in the early 70’s, a few years after she moved east from Queens. Not long after that, my 25 years with him began.

Building Stuff - You know how the story goes – in the early days, things were a bit tight. My dad was usually working a minimum of two full-time jobs as he struggled to augment his appallingly meager salary as a new teacher. While this meant that I didn’t see him a whole lot, it also meant that when I did, I was usually accompanying him to or from the lumber yard and he was good for a secret candy bar that I was under no circumstances to tell my mom about (Clark bars were his personal kryptonite). Anyway, he was chiefly a woodworker, so whatever he couldn’t afford to buy, he would build…out of wood. This means that I have some furniture he made that I count among my prized possessions - other bits of his handiwork didn’t fare so well.

The Ark - Before he had his first “work van” (a steady army of Ford Econolines for which my mom would sew curtains and at which he would hurl delightfully intricate combinations of expletives as he worked on them in the driveway), he needed some way to get all of the tools and supplies to job sites after school. To meet this need, he bought an old trailer frame and built a giant wooden ark on top of it; it was literally constructed like a shoebox – a giant rectangle with wells built on the sides to serve as fenders for the tires, and an enormous one-piece lid that was tied in place with ropes. The icing on the cake was that he would then hitch it up to our AMC Gremlin and hit the road.

One time he had the trailer filled with a bunch of junk and we were “going to the dumps” to unload it. He was talking to me about something as we drove over the train tracks at a high rate of speed – suddenly dad got quiet and his eyes got as big as saucers. I turned to see what he was looking at and saw the ark, defying all laws of physics, maintaining a perfect wheelie and keeping up pace with us a few feet to my right. Luckily this was early in the morning and we were in an industrial part of town…my dad slowed down and we watched in silence as it blew past us, finally hit a curb about 100 yards away, and then – with the trailer hitch straight up in the air – spun around for what had to be a full 15 seconds. He drove to where it came to rest, inspected it in a state of quiet shock, hitched it back up (the lid hadn’t even come off), and we continued to the dumps. Bill didn’t build no crap.

The Excavation - There were the toolboxes he built – enormous wooden crates with industrial hardware that weighed 40 pounds EMPTY (I still have one or two of these), the wooden Christmas ornaments cut from 2” thick maple that were so big and heavy that they had to be pushed far inside the tree to prevent them from falling off or snapping the branches…but nothing will ever top the project that even he had to admit , in hindsight, was insane…when one day my mom, brother, and I came home from a few days with the grandparents and he had decided in the interim to dig out and construct a basement under our house – which previously had no basement. By himself. He ended up eventually needing his brother’s help and a backhoe for that one, but wouldn’t you know it, he actually built the damn thing without the house collapsing on him?

Frankenbike - But nothing he built will ever beat the time he built me a bicycle. This was around the time that all of my friends had either a Huffy or a Mongoose, and all I really wanted was to have one too. I don’t remember what the going price was for one of those but my dad thought it was ridiculous, so he went down to a local junkyard and came back with enough bike parts to build three new bikes from the ground up. I’m talking about total reconstructions here, made from bike parts from the 50’s and 60’s, with tire tubes that he patched by hand and the whole nine yards. Luckily he didn’t give me the one with the basket that he spray-painted gold (kiddie seat for my little brother? Pfft – one leg in each basket, a towel on the back fender, and hold on tight!).

Mine was more of a Pee-Wee Herman type deal, but blue. When I expressed some concern that it might not be as cool as the other kids’ bikes, he told me I could make it a lot cooler if I got these little dangly reflectors to hang inside the wheels that would make clicking noises when they banged against the spokes. So as my friends created makeshift ramps and jumps for their dirt bikes, and rode through what little patches of woods were left in my neighborhood, I was the awkward goofball trailing behind who kept falling off the old-man bike that sounded like Fat Albert’s band. But I was mainly a goofball because I didn’t realize how cool it was at the time to have something that my dad built for me, and put a lot of heart into, instead of something my friends’ dads bought at the store.

Don’t Mess Around With Bill - My dad was a bit of a paradox – he had a giant heart, and that’s really what you saw 95% of the time, but you also didn’t want to screw with him. The guy was well over 6 feet tall and had hands like baseball mitts. Although he was someone that really didn’t have any acquaintances, only friends (after meeting him once you considered him so, and vice versa) – you got the sense that even though there were probably few people on his shit list, you didn’t want to be one of them. He also had that weird kind of construction-guy strength that just comes across as super-human.

I remember messing around in the gym with him a few times when I was older and being surprised that the amount of weight that he could bench wasn’t as much as I would have expected…but being able to bench weight isn’t a practical kind of strength. This is a guy who I incredulously witnessed carry the better part of a hulking cast iron furnace out of a basement, and pick up a full 10-gallon fishtank (fish, gravel, water, and all…) and carry it out to the back deck when my little brother cracked it with a folding chair and it was moments away from erupting in my second floor bedroom. The things he could do, I’m not convinced that your average nad-shrinking model on the cover of a muscle mag could tackle.

Injuries - This was a guy who once dropped a running chainsaw on this leg and turned his thigh into hamburger (and amazingly healed completely), kept an x-ray of his hand with a nail through it in his office like a trophy, used to regularly perform “self-surgeries” on his hands, and once, early in his career, punctured his eye with a nail and put a piece of duct tape over it so he could finish the day because he didn’t feel he could afford to stop working. Luckily for him, a dorky buddy of his from childhood grew up to be one of the most respected eye surgeons in the country, and after telling him he was a lunatic, managed to make the repairs.

One time when I was about 5 he was dirt motorcycling in the woods of West Virginia with one of his best friends and apparently the locals weren’t too happy about it, so they strung razor wire across the trail. My dad and my “uncle” were expert riders, and when my dad saw Steve inexplicably drop his bike a few yards in front of him, he thought it was a little odd. Steve managed to scramble up quickly enough to point out the wire to my dad, who saw it at the last minute, and by then had no choice but to drop his bike too. In the process, he crashed into Steve and essentially ripped Steve’s nose off his face. He then proceeded to slide off the embankment and down off some sort of cliff. When he came to, he tried to prop himself up and came to the realization that he had shattered his right arm.

However, they were miles into the woods, it was getting dark, and the only way out was going to be to ride out – but he wasn’t going to be able to manipulate the throttle with his arm like that. So, according to one of his credos (“duct tape can, and will, fix anything”), they taped Steve’s nose back on, and my dad used half a roll of the stuff to bind his hand to the throttle so that when he pulled his shoulder back, it would, coupled with an excruciating burst of pain, give it gas.

Knowing what he was capable of was at times a powerful incentive to just shut up and follow his lead.

C.R.E.W.C.U.T. - Needless to say, the few times that my brothers and I really sent him over the edge…well, you pretty much learned to respond to his bark because you didn’t want to find out what the bite was going to be like otherwise. That said, in another nod to my dad, I’m proud to say that he never laid a hand on us – even when, after seeing home videos of myself as a teen, I wouldn’t have blamed him had he beat me with a tire iron. In lieu of that, his punishments were either of the embarrassing sort (yelling “knock it off, ladies!” to my brothers and I in earshot of giggling girls in public places) or of the hilarious (but no less effective). One summer he devised a point system for us – he knew that when the school year kicked back in it was all about showing how you had grown up and gotten tan at the beach and how “cool” you looked on that first day back. He also knew that what we thought was the antithesis of cool was the dreaded crew cut. So, every time we did something bad he’d assign us another letter – C. R. E. W. C. U…that’s actually where I was by the time Labor Day rolled around. I was an angel that weekend. I wasn’t taking any chances… I’m quite certain he would have shaved my head himself had I scored that final “T”.

I realize that all of this sounds like a lot of “manly man” stuff…and I guess in some ways he was like that…but never in that sort of stereotypical, aloof way. He was always really gregarious and friendly and talkative even when doing those kinds of things. Especially when I was older, we kinda made peace about the fact that I was more into artsy movies, listened to noisy music, and would dare try something like sushi while he unapologetically wanted to watch movies that had “helicopters and explosions”, listen to Kenny Rogers, and eat handfuls of peanuts and chips with cheese dip.

Leading Edge – My mom used to call him “Peter Pan” because he refused to grow up. She said that someday old age would force him to… but he disagreed, and wouldn’t you know it, he was right – so for most people I think he’ll always remain a big kid. For instance, he was big on surprises. He was almost impossible to surprise because he was so perceptive, although he’d play along, like he did at his “surprise” 40th birthday party when he just happened to show up clean shaven and wearing a sport coat to what was supposed to have been a roofing estimate. He swore he was surprised as he worked the room like a congressman.

He surprised me on my 17th birthday by asking me to go out to the garage for something, and I found a $900 1983 Dodge Aries in there, which may as well have been a 1965 Stringray in my eyes. As kids he would tell us he needed help picking up some stuff at the store and we’d go along grudgingly and then erupt with delight as he pulled into the traveling carnival where we’d eat hot sausage and “zeppoles” for dinner. But he was really the master of the big, unexpected Christmas gift. He did it multiple times for all of us, my mom, me and my brothers… and at times you were almost like “dad…this is too much…you shouldn’t have done this”, which is really saying something for a kid to feel that way.

But anyway, one year we really REALLY wanted a computer. Our cousins had an IBM PCjr, and I dreamed of the day when I’d have all the time in the world to hammer away at my own copy of King’s Quest. When we opened the box and figured out it was a computer, we almost passed out – this came at the tail end of a Christmas morning that was already pretty killer. But my dad insisted we wait until after company came and went to start working on putting it together. Good thing. When my dad went to wherever he went (I think it may have been Radio Shack) to get our computer, I’m not sure he had a clear idea of what he needed to fulfill our Kings-Questy dreams. What the salesperson ended up convincing him he needed was a “powerful” machine (a Leading Edge, to be exact)…one that would outperform any measly PCjr and one that, to our dismay, was all DOS prompts, spreadsheets, and word processing…with a ONE GIG hard drive (my dad didn’t really know what that meant but he told it to me with such gravity that I was sufficiently impressed), and a four color palette.

There would be no questing on that machine, and it would take many frustrating days and calls to my uncle for advice just to get it up and running. It was essentially a glorified typewriter for most of its life even though I tried desperately to get games to play on it. But the best part was that he had sprung for some cutting edge technology called a “modem” (we’re talking like, 1986 here)…and we could, if we wanted, dial up our cousins in Ohio using this wonder, and type sentences back and forth to each other! We did think this was pretty cool, but the rub was that you actually had to type in a command to make it hang up after the session – otherwise it would keep charging you long distance rates indefinitely, which were pretty hefty at the time. We used it once. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my dad so nervous; he was so out of his element…you would have thought we were defusing a bomb from the amount of tension that was in the air…a few milquetoast sentences back and forth, a confirmed hang-up command, some deep breaths, and then a vow to not ever use it again because “who knows what could happen.”

The Wrap-Up – Any of my friends who read this will definitely tell me that it is absolutely criminal for me to not write down the story about the time that my dad made my brother and I try out for the U.S. Olympic Bobsled Team. But there’s just no way that text alone would do it justice. It’s just not possible, and I’m not going to maim it by trying – the brilliance of the story is my dad’s impassioned pleading and insisting, and you simply must have “the voice” to do it right. There are a hundred other stories that I could tell and I don’t feel like what I’ve written has even shed the tiniest bit of light onto what kind of a character he was. I would sit and talk about him all night if anyone wanted to hear it. But I think there’s one more story that might round out this meager portrait…and this one can only be told in the context of when we lost him – suddenly and unexpectedly, just like Jeff’s dad, in May of 2000 when he was just 50 years old.

My cousin Alex is like a brother to me, but he actually joined our family when my aunt remarried in the early 80’s. He wasn’t able to make the services for my dad but we were able to catch up with him around the holidays when everyone was back in town and we all went out to celebrate my brother’s engagement. He decided to crash at our place, and later in the evening he and I were in the basement talking, and he admitted that he was having a tough time being in our house and hadn’t been really looking forward to it – which I completely understood.

Anyway, he seemed more busted up than a lot of people as we got to talking and he said “listen, you have to understand something – that first family getaway when I met you guys, I didn’t know anyone and I was just a little kid…there was a huge group of people and kids and it was one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever experienced. And in the midst of that terror, when a lot of people didn’t quite seem to know what to make of me, out of this crowd of strangers came this even more terrifying stranger – a giant…and he came right up to me and talked with me, and for that whole weekend kept checking in on me and took obvious pains to include me…and by the end of the weekend I felt like one of the family…” and while the two of us sat there fighting back the tears like idiots he said “I never forgot that and I never will – that’s the kind of guy your dad was”.

That’s the really crazy thing about it – I still get people telling me stories about him, and trying to explain the kind of guy he was to me. And this is a guy who, when I’m at my absolute best, I’m only trying to emulate. Amazing. I’m not really sure how to end this…and that’s good, because I’d like to think of this as ongoing…but I’ll admit that from time to time over the years I’ve Googled his name to see if anyone out there that he touched has written something new about him – and have always been a little surprised when I don’t find anything, because I feel like he should have his own entry in Wikipedia and a statue somewhere. So, I’m gonna put up this little statue for him on Used Wigs where it’ll appear the next time someone…probably me…Googles him, and where he’ll stand mightily next to the statue of “Big D”. Happy Father’s Day, y’all.

- Russ Starke