Letters from my father

My Dad didn't talk too much about his past, a feature that may well have something to do with the fact I don't know that I ever asked.

Since my mom's death a little more than a week ago, I've vowed not to leave a pile of  junk for my family to pore through.

Things that seem important at the time they were squirreled away, aren't really that important. Did I really need a dozen or so annual Oshkosh AirVenture official programs? I think not. So out they go.

I do recall, however, an anecdote about famed Berkshire congressman Silvio Conte, who died back in 1991 (aside: he came to our wedding). Upon cleaning out his sizeable desk in Washington -- he was ranking Republican on the House Appropriations Committee -- they found an entire drawer filled with nothing but drawings and notes from his children and grandchildren, archived through his 32 years in Congress.

That seemed like a nice thing for people to find -- proof that they mattered.

In my den, the bottom drawer of my file cabinet is filled with drawings and notes from my children. Don't tell them; let it be a surprise in the not terribly distant future.

Over the past few years, my mother has sent back to me, things that she either saved during my childhood, or things I sent her during my adulthood. Most of them don't matter much to me. But they mattered to her and this was her way of saying these things mattered to her.  This is the language the Collins clan speaks, what with sons not asking questions when they had the chance and all.

In the process of throwing stuff out today, I came across The Book of Myself, which I believe Carolie and I gave to my father one year for his birthday, to encourage him to tell his story.

My dad was big on diaries and documenting his day.

This book, however, asked a question on each page, the totality of which would be the Book of Himself if the person answered the question in the blank space provided.

My dad was not a big fan of following instructions, however.

On the page titled "One of my dad's strongest traits was..." he wrote:

"Transplated 30 boxes including Rutgers-Marglobe Tomatoes plus butternut squash. Repaired gas leak in greenhouse. Eileen went to Spags today."

"May 5, 1997," he added so that we would never forget the great butternut squash planting of 1997 in my family.

On a page on which he was to answer the question, "The Best Part About Marriage Is...", he reported that it was Monday January 3, 2000 and that it was "unusually warm outside" and that the person who had been renting my grandmother's trailer had brought him $375 for the rent. In cash.

Nothing says lifelong romance like some greenbacks you don't have to report to the IRS.

It's the most Greatest Generation diary in the history of the Greatest Generation.

Anyway, I was cleaning out a book case, denying my children and future heirs the chance to read about what was to happen at the 2009 Oshkosh Airventure, when I found these two pieces of paper tucked in the book.

My father's life. Or at least his childhood.





(You can click on the images and get a bigger version)

My father, you can probably tell, wasn't much of a storyteller. I don't know when this was written, but clearly it was a time when he wanted his story to be known, if not then, at some future date, perhaps. Now, for example.

As we clean out my mother and father's house for a last time, I'll be digitizing all the documents and photographs for whomever in the future might want them. Better, I suppose, than piles of shoeboxes and old albums.

I've got a few of those with my story, too, though one of my retirement projects is to get those reduced to the digital form.

I've lamented for years that my former employer ignored 20 years of my calls for its digital archive to be preserved before it fell to dust with web site redesigns and changing technology that made it valueless. The last dozen years of my life is tucked in there too with a blog whose archived future remains somewhat cloudy.

Then there's this blog too, which, of course, Google could decide to terminate at any time.

We are told that younger people today don't want any of their parents' -- or grandparents' -- stuff. The technology that allows us to capture every 7 seconds of our lives, is also the technology that makes it easier to delete it all.

History vanishes at an ever-quickening pace, making it harder for the future to know that we were once here.

Planting squash.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 1922-2019

When my kids were very young, they were subjected , over their strong objection, to the wanderlust of their father, who likes to find out where roads lead. These came to be known as "Dad's Dumb Detours", but it wasn't until 2005, when my mother was visiting a year after my father died, that I realized the source of this curiosity.

"I wonder where that road goes?" I said to her as we pulled out of a parking spot overlooking the Mississippi River in Hastings.

"Let's find out," she said.

Ruth Eileen Collins, 97, who died today, imbued that curiosity in at least her youngest child, who did OK with his mother's inheritance.

Nobody ever wondered what my dad saw in his wife. She was drop-dead gorgeous start to finish

In that same visit, we hit on many of her "loves". She loved going to the horse races. Her own father, who left her mother when she was young, lived a life of harness driving, horses, and hay.

Picking the ponies

Mom wasn't much for handicapping. She bet a horse if it had a nice name and usually came up empty. In her trip to Canterbury Downs, however, she did OK.

Displaying our winnings

Years later, I asked her what she wanted for Mother's Day. Growing up, all the siblings knew what was coming.

"I want good kids," she said.

"What else?" we'd plead, looking for a more realistic alternative.

She got her wish, although it took some time.

But that wasn't the answer I got the last time I asked the question.  "I want to go to the horse races," she said. So we did. One of the last visits anyone made to Suffolk Downs.

She had dreams, she revealed while we flew a Piper Warrior over Sleepy Eye, Minn., that year.  She said she always wanted to be like Amelia Earhart.

"Fly the plane, Amelia," I said as I took a picture of that moment.

A Piper Warrior is not easy for an 83 year old woman to enter. By then, it was too high a step for her to reach. But she wanted to fly with her son, so she backed herself into the wing and rolled herself up the wing and into the lone door of the aircraft.

We ended up landing at a small and quiet airport in Fairmont, Minn., where we sat on a bench surrounded by cornfields, snacking on crackers we found inside along with a refrigerator full of soda. A lone tractor in the distance was the only sound as she said the scene reminded her of growing up in Mt. Gilead in central Ohio. She seemed the happiest I'd seen her in years. Though she'd spent most of her life in New England, her inner child was at home on the prairie.

She never became Amelia Earhart, of course. 

She graduated from high school -- Gold "F", which was a perfect 4.0 GPA at Fitchburg High School -- became a hairdresser and during World War II, met a man from Ashtabula, Ohio while at a dance at Whalom Park.  He was stationed at Fort Devens before heading to England, where he was a medic at a B-17 base.

At their 60th anniversary in 2002, in lieu of a toast, I -- being a radio news talk show type -- interviewed them at the luncheon in their honor instead.

"What was the first thing he said to you at the dance?" I asked. But she would not answer.

Interviewing Mom and Dad at their 60th anniversary celebration (2002)

It was not until a few years ago when she called me one afternoon and explained why she couldn't answer the question in front of a restaurant  full of people.

"He said to me, 'I can't dance with you; you're married," she said.

I didn't pursue it  but she obviously wanted to get that off her chest. But, really, it was none of my business and I never mentioned it again, although I did recall at the time that when I called her to tell her in 1980 that my then-wife and I were divorcing, she revealed that she had been divorced too.

Arriving at 95th birthday celebration (2017)

These things have a way of working out. She and my dad were married for 62 years. When he died, we kids got to see the love letters he sent her constantly from England, where he documented his desire only to return to his bride.

He applied for the Officer Candidate School, not because he wanted to be an officer, but because he could return to the States and be with her.  On November 22, 1943, he was notified that he made it into the program and would be coming home.

He never did become an officer, though he moved from base to base and she, of course, followed. She made hose clamps for bombers and fighter planes in a factory in Rockford, Illinois and was proud of the fact she made pretty good money doing it. They lived in New Jersey and New York for a time during the war and always remarked that the people of New York couldn't do enough for people in the service.

When I  moved to New York in the '80s, I felt better about the city because of that.

A wartime letter. Click to enlarge

In her later years, she read all of her husband's wartime letters. Then, a few days later, would start reading them again.

She kept one other letter nearby. The one from his mother, pleading with him not to marry her, and citing whatever flaws she felt didn't meet her standards.

The love in those letters isn't something kids would typically recognize in parents; that's just the nature of things.

But I saw it in 2003, when she and my dad visited us for what turned out to be the last time together.  Dad was pretty much blind and couldn't walk very well.

I emerged from my room and stumbled on them in the living room; he in the rocking chair, she on her knees tying his shoes.

Between the two of them, they provided a childhood that was perfect in so many ways. She got up early to take her youngest kid to hockey practice, and drove her daughter from one county fair to another in the summer, taught her kids to live on their own, and -- as a friend of mine described it -- "sat shotgun" for them all until the day she died.

Watching the Mississippi River go by in Red Wing 2005

She raised her kids and managed her home while working as a hairdresser in a shop dad built in the basement.  She could garden with the greats and keep a grudge for  years over a perceived sleight in the gladiola judging at the Lunenburg Grange Fair.  She could play the piano even though her husband -- for reasons never fully explained -- painted it pink one year.  She could live with the pain of burying her husband,  her oldest son, and a granddaughter, and put a foot in front of the other, because "what else can I do?"

She loved the ocean and, in particular, a small trailer on a spit of land on Plum Island in Newburyport in which, somehow, a couple and their five children lived until being turned loose to explore each morning.

Twin sons, the last of the brood, did not stop mom from enjoying the beach

The trailer, beachfront property by then, was extorted from them by the brother of the local police chief who vandalized it until they sold it for $5,000, eventually giving each of the kids $1,000. I used it to buy my first car.

The multi-million dollar home that went up in the trailer's place, still stands.

In September 2016, she wanted to go to the beach one more time, so I took her back to the Parker River Wildlife Refuge (one of her favorite spots which we referred to as kids as "the other end of the island"), she couldn't walk well but we made our way up the boardwalk and there we sat for a half hour, looking out at a glorious past. (longer version here)



Before leaving the island, we stopped one more time to look at the spot where the trailer was. If she was bitter about it, she didn't let on.


Mom wanted to die in her house and got her wish. She was still in control of her faculties enough to be disgusted by the Boston Red Sox and worried about who would rake her leaves, and still winning at Rummikub, mostly because her visitors had been warned about the perils of beating her at any game.

Her father had helped build her home for her by taking down a piece of the barn. She and her husband lived there for 62 years, she raised her family there, and there was never a more stubborn Yankee than Eileen Collins.  She was not going to leave that home.

And so her children did everything they could to keep her there against the advice of others, and, I hear, the scorn of a few. But she had more than earned the right to stay.

For Ruth Eileen Collins, the most inviting road was always  the one that led her home.