Things I think about when I remember Dad.
He worked HARD, every single day. He didn’t leave his farm work to relax or enjoy time with family. The farm always came first and he really worked hard from sun up to sun down.
Dad was good with his hands and tools. He could build just about anything he could imagine. He had an engineer’s mind and a mechanic’s hands. He could see things in 3 dimensions and create them. He knew how to fix everything. His hands were huge, his skin was always tanned and tough. His nails were often chipped and broken from his work.
Dad liked to help people. He shared what he had. He gave away thousands of pounds of fruit every year. He hated seeing good fruit go to waste. People came to him when they needed help. Dad had equipment for every need. He built most of it.
Dad was a gentle farmer who loved the soil he worked. He let nature run its course, allowing weeds to grow in the rows that he’d plow under to nourish the soil. Other farmers poisoned the weeds and had immaculate orchards. Ours looked natural and green and healthy. Dad said, “If weeds will grow, the trees will grow.” He knew every tree and vine on our property, and he loved each one and cared for them.
Dad always wore jeans and work shirts, usually gray. He always carried a handkerchief in his back pocket, the bandana style in navy or red.
Dad’s hair was dark and his eyes were brown. With his year-round suntan, he looked a bit Latin. His hair stayed dark until he was quite old, then it was peppered with some white, but it never went completely white.
When the world turned to computers, Dad signed up for a class to teach him how to build a computer. He figured he’d have to know how to build one to understand how one worked. That didn’t go so well for him. He fairly quickly decided that he could live without a computer, and he did. He never really learned how to even open an email. Computers were not intuitive to him. They were a foreign entity.
Dad was often impatient with people who didn’t see things the way he saw them. If it made perfect sense to him, it was right, and any other point of view or opinion was wrong. It wasn’t always easy for him to understand why some people did things another way, including Mom.
Dad had beautiful penmanship. When he was in grade school, he brought home a penmanship paper with a bad grade. Grandpa made him practice and practice until he could write beautifully, both in cursive, and printing. His printed letters looked like they were printed by a machine. He could have had his own font.
Dad was civically-minded and got involved in the community. He was the PTA President for many years and helped build and improve the equipment at Washington School. He was a leader and people respected him. He was a member of Toastmasters and went to weekly meetings to practice being a better public speaker.
He was a Church leader, serving in a Bishopric, then as Bishop of the Reedley Ward. He later served many years on the Stake High Council. He was often traveling to church meetings.
Dad prayed sincerely and thoughtfully. He was a spiritual man and was very serious about what he believed.
Before we moved into our new house (1968), Dad and Mom worked on “house plans” all the time. They were very intentional about the home they designed and built. Every detail mattered to them. It was a perfect fit for their lifestyle.
In his later years, Dad read junk mail and often fell for miracle cures for his aches and pains. His body worked hard for so many years, it finally slowed down when he was older. His legs got stiff and his body ached. Kris had to hide the mail from him so he wouldn’t order scamy miracle cures.
Dad loved working with wood. When Eric started helping with the farm, Dad started investing in wood-turning equipment. He loved going out to his shop to work on his projects. He made bowls and vases and toys for our kids. He often had wood chips in his hair and he smelled of sweet sawdust.
Dad loved sweets and would sneak a second piece of pie, or cake or ice cream, feeling entitled to just a bit more. He was known to lick a plate clean on many occasions.
Dad often worked nights. He had a spraying business to earn extra money. He sprayed trees for dozens of farmers in our area, often sitting on the spray rig through the night, treating the trees after the sun had gone down.
He also spent many evenings out irrigating, walking row to row with his shovel, checking to see that the furrows were clear so the water would reach the end of each row.
Dad killed black widow spiders by pinching them. We saw them often around the farm. Dad seemed fearless.
Dad built BBQ stove/grills out of old barrels, cut in half the long way, then filled with hot coals. He loved marinated meat, grilled and served with pilaf rice.
Dad loved to sing. No one in our family had a fancy voice. He wanted to be a soloist, so he took voice lessons from a man at Reedley College. He trained his voice to sing well, and always participated in the Ward choir. He practiced in the shower and on the tractor.
When we were kids, we sang in the car, with Dad taking the lead. He loved to sing Bill Grogan’s Goat, There Were Three Crows, Down in the Valley, You are My Sunshine, and other folk songs. Sometimes he sang in German.
Dad could not tolerate modern music or the stations we kids listened to on the radio. He always tried to play what we called “elevator music” in the packing shed. As soon as he’d leave the shed, we’d change the channel to listen to popular music. He called rock ‘n roll “monkey music.” If a singer’s voice wasn’t classically trained, he considered them a lousy singer (singers like John Denver or Neil Diamond) and he couldn’t understand why people liked listening to them.
Dad had a junk shed as large as a house. It was filled with every part or piece you could imagine. He never threw away a scrap or a screw or a wire or a pipe. Everything might be useful someday.
Dad was very patriarchal. Men had the final say. Women did what men told them to do. He was in charge in our family. No ifs, ands or buts.
Dad claimed he was conceived in the Panama Canal on his parents’ honeymoon trip to America. He was born 9 months later in California.
Dad’s first language was German. He learned English when he went to Windsor School. He always pronounced the “th” sound as a soft “d.” Dis or Dat.
Dad could really snore. His snoring would wake everyone in the house. Sometimes it felt like the walls were shaking. I could hear him at night in my bedroom with 2 doors and a hallway between us.
Dad took a short nap every day. He’d come in from the farm, have lunch, then lie down on the floor behind the sofa and within seconds, he’d be snoring. He’d wake himself up after 20 minutes, get up and go back to work.
Dad thought TV was the devil’s device. On Saturday mornings we’d want to watch cartoons. After school, we’d want to watch Gilligan’s Island. If he caught us watching TV, he’d turn it off and send us out to work on something. He made up jobs for us to keep us away from the TV. In all my growing up years, I hardly ever saw him watch TV. I don’t think I ever saw him watch a sporting event. He did like Lawrence Welk on Sunday evenings.
Dad cut our hair when we were young. The boys usually had butches and I had a short pixie cut. Haircuts happened on Saturday nights. We sat on a stool with a wooden box beneath us. After the haircut, he’d brush our necks with a barber’s brush made of animal hair.
I’ve never seen Dad read a novel. He thought fiction was a waste of time, something fabricated, made to manipulate your emotions. He read church books and farm magazines. He was a slow reader.
Dad had a little brown weather box in his office. It had an antennae and a battery. It picked up the weather station. He was always checking the weather.
Dad liked homemade ice cream and we usually made it a couple of times each summer. Summers were HOT.
Dad loved Boysenberries and we had a big patch of them growing between the driveway and the orchard under the walnut trees. Mom made pies and cobblers and we canned them to eat with donuts, a favorite Saturday evening treat.
Dad liked growing a variety of fruits on our farm. The orchards were plums, peaches and nectarines, but we also had vineyards and oranges. We had a patch of a couple of dozen tangerine trees, 2 fig trees, 2 grapefruit, 1 lemon, 1 jubejube, and a few dozen walnut trees. One year he tried to grow a male and female kiwi, but they didn’t do well. There was a quince tree at Grandma’s, also a large loquat tree in her back yard. She also had an Italian plum (for prunes).
Dad was physically strong. He was 6’2″ tall. He had skinny legs and a short waist. He had really broad shoulders and a lot of upper body strength. He had a great smile with perfect teeth. Women thought he was very handsome.
Dad loved our farm dogs: Shep, Baer, Nasha and others that followed after I left home. The dogs followed him when he went out irrigating. They guarded our home and shed. We had a sign out front that said, “Trespassers Will Be Eaten.” He always had a farm dog. The dogs barked whenever anyone came into the driveway.
Once dad built a doghouse for Shep and Baer. It was too big. They didn’t want to sleep in it. So Dad added a second half (balcony) and turned it into a tree house, bolting it 12 feet up on the palm tree in the tangerine patch. A 12′ ladder took us to the trap door in the floor. We could fit 2 sleeping bags up there and it was a fun place to hide away.
Dad didn’t lift a finger in the kitchen. That was woman’s work. The only think I remember seeing him make was peach smoothies. He’d dump a whole jar of canned peaches into a blender and add ice.
If we were seated at the dinner table (we each had our certain place to sit) and he wanted something, he would say something like, “do we have any salt?” That meant someone needed to get up and go get the salt for him. He was there to be served. He never helped with the dishes.
In all my years of competitive swimming, and 100s of swim meets, Dad never once left his farm work to watch me compete. The same was true of our water polo matches. We all swam and played waterpolo. He never watched us compete. His farm work was always more important.
Dad could yodel. And he had some Lederhosen. When we were little he’d wear them when he went out at night to irrigate.
For many years, Dad sold Conklin products. Some were roofing products. Others were car or household products. He was a distributor and was quite successful at it.
Dad loved to go to the Fresno and Tulare County Fairs. We went as a family every single year. We’d look at all of the animals. Reedley, the Fruit basket of the World, always took the grand prize for the best produce. Dad would spend time in the tents with all of the farm equipment. We’d look at the new products and gadgets for kitchens and homes. He bought my new Pfaff sewing machine at the Fresno Fair. We were not allowed to go on the rides, but we did eat fair food, sometimes even cotton candy and red candied apples. We loved going to the fair.
Dad took care of Grandpa Rudolf until he died. Dad fixed a room for him in our garage. Grandpa like to sit in his wheelchair in the yard and watch who came and went.
Dad grew up in a family of boys and if you didn’t take what food you could get when you could get it, it was gone. One time he visited and I served a pot roast. He took half of the meat before anyone else got any!
Dad could butcher and clean and cut a chicken like an expert. We raised about 100 chickens each year and butchered them in the fall. Dad could also eat a chicken like an expert. He crunched the gristle and sucked the marrow from the bones. He ate every part of every piece. He always took the neck and back pieces, knowing that no one else would eat them as clean as he would.
Dad built a gas shack with 3 large tanks–2 for gas, one for diesel fuel. The tanks were up on a high platform to make it easy for gravity to feed the gas through the hoses to our cars and tractors. I didn’t go to a gas station until I was in high school. I’d always pumped my own gas at home.
Dad liked to drink buttermilk. When we sometimes went to a restaurant, he would often order a glass of it. Maybe it reminded him of drinking it as a boy when they had their own cow.
Dad did not play games or do puzzles. They were a waste of his time. And he did not want to be rushed. He was slow and methodical. He also spoke slowly and deliberately. He was too serious to laugh or giggle.
Dad worried about me going to live in Africa, but he knew he couldn’t stop me.
Every year Reedley Ward had a booth at the Reedley Fiesta. We sold Pronto Pups (corn dogs) and soda drinks. $1.25 for the corn dog, $.75 for the drink. Dad built the booth and stored it in the shed each year. We raised a lot of money for the building fund this way.
Dad kept in touch with his German cousins and relatives, writing letters and visiting there several times during his lifetime. He was always interesting in their farming and they were interested in his.
When we were kids, Dad took us to the Kings River down at Kings View Hospital Farm after dark to catch bullfrogs. We had gigs and headlamps. I held the gunny sack while the boys did the spearing. We brought the frogs back and gutted and cleaned them out in the packing shed late at night. Dad thought the meat was a delicacy.
We also raised and butchered rabbits. Rabbit was a popular German dish and Dad liked it much more than Mom did.
Dad carried a briefcase to all of his meetings, church and civic.
Spiders often spun webs across the vineyard rows. Dad attached an antennae to the front of his tractor to break the webs as he drove through them, keeping them off of his face.
Dad once gave me a piece of dating advice I never forgot. It had to do with breaking up with a boy. He said, “If you have to cut the tail off a dog, don’t do it an inch at a time!”
My dating John was thanks to Dad. He and John’s cousin had the idea that John and I needed to meet. A year after they gave John my name, he finally called me.
Dad loved to snack on nuts and dried fruit. And he loved an occasional Dr. Pepper.
While I was growing up, our family never vacationed in the summer because of the fruit harvest. We were tied to the farm from late spring to early fall. Some years we took trips during our Easter Vacation. We went to Death Valley, Yosemite, the Gold Rush country, and Carmel by the Sea. When I was close to graduating from high school, we took a road trip to Utah to visit BYU.
Dad never wore a wedding ring. He thought it was too dangerous because he was always working with equipment. He didn’t want to lose a finger.
After retiring from the farm work, Dad liked to travel. And he also loved taking photos, but he did not like to take photos with people in them (they messed up the composition). He took artistic landscape photos. I wonder if anyone ever looked at them.
As Dad aged, his body aged. The years of hard manual labor caught up with him. He lost a kidney, he got new hips, his legs weakened and got stiff. Sometimes he hurt all over. He moved less and less. In his last few years, he used a walker and spent most of his time in a chair in the living room. His mind was sharp, but slow.
Galaxy Quilt by Ann Lewis given to Art Laemmlen on his 89th Birrhday
He thought he’d live to be 95. Both of his parents lived to be 93. Dad’s heart was strong, but his body was not.
Dad had a stroke on 14 October 2019, the day we went into the MTC to be trained for our mission in Bamako, Mali. He died 5 weeks later, on 18 November 2019, free at last.
I’m grateful to be a farmer’s daughter. Dad called me his “Darling Daughter.” I learned a lot from my him. Many of the lessons I learned live on in me now.
