2012
June 15, 2012 (Friday)
Father’s Day will be celebrated Sunday. If your father is still living, please do all you can to honor him on this special day. He will not be around forever. I know. I had several fathers. They are all gone now.
My birth father was Charlie Fake, born in Prescott, Wisconsin but a Texan since the age of seven. His drawl belied his birthplace. He was a quiet, hard-working man. His first marriage, however, to my mother was a stormy relationship resulting in several separations and finally, when I was nine, divorce. He was always kind to me. We fished together in Freeport and around Houston. He was injured on the job when he was about 45 years old, and, although he continued to work and rose to plant superintendent, never fully regained his health. He died two months before his 72nd birthday, in 1979, in a fire at his home.
Because my parents found living together difficult, my sisters and I spent a lot of time living with our maternal grandparents. My grandfather, John Forest Lowe, was known by all his grandkids as “Big Dad.” Looking back now, I’m sure I was spoiled rotten, but I was dearly loved, and knew it. (He died in 1958 at age 76). The on-and-off living with them turned to full-time when I reached Fifth Grade, and didn’t end until the summer before Eighth Grade, when we children moved to our father’s home with our new stepmother, Dorothy. I lived with them for a year before moving to live with my mother and new stepfather, Joe, when I was in the Ninth Grade. I lived with Daddy and Dorothy again for a semester when I was a Senior in high school. I then lived with Mother and Joe, working in their restaurant in the Houston Heights, the final summer before going away to college.
Joe Heim, my stepfather, was a loving and kind person. He was always good to me. He and my mother were in the restaurant business, and on many days I would ride around town with him, buying wholesale food for the restaurants. In his youth he had been on the selling side of Farmers Market, and knew how to haggle for the best prices. It was fun watching him work. His business was good partly because he was the kind of man everyone liked a lot. He died in 1994 at age 84, and I conducted his funeral service.
Before he went off to the war, my Uncle Lloyd Lowe took me under his wing and did things with me like a dad would do. He rode the roller coaster with me, paid for my first plane ride from South Main airport in Houston, took me to the rodeo, boxing matches and wrestling matches, and the roller derby, and even taught me to shoot a rifle. He died in 1985 at age 75. He worked as a welder for Hughes Tool Company. He loved me, too.
I was greatly loved by all the men in my life as I grew up. I miss them all.