My father always appears in my heart on Father’s Day, though he passed away a long time ago. This is my favorite picture of him, as he holds my twin brother and me on his lap.
If I would post a photo of him in the blue denim overalls he wore to work, that only would capture one side of him. To show a picture of him in the one suit and tie he owned and wore to church regularly would capture a very significant side of him that loved God and the little rural church where he worshipped but it wouldn’t be the total him. To honor God and to come before Him in His Holy Church, he insisted on wearing his suit and tie.
In the photo I have included with this column, Daddy is wearing a pair of his newest blue overalls with his best shirt. He is also wearing his nice Sunday hat. I am not sure what the occasion is, but he is not on his way to church. He was never too busy to look after my brother and me.
He was always upbeat and positive even though he had had a very traumatic childhood. One of nine children of a cotton farmer in Dime Box, he lost his father when he was eight years old, having to quit school in the third grade to help his mother and siblings work the farm. His mother, who was not in good health, was pregnant with the ninth child when his daddy died and the second youngest a toddler.
So I’m not sure Daddy ever learned to read English, though I suspect he read a little German. Yet, he was amazingly intelligent, capable of adding, subtracting, and dividing the largest amounts in his head, no doubt the reason he served as financial secretary for the church for many years. He had a sharp memory, he was an absolute perfectionist and had keen powers of perception. Those of us who follow him try to live by his unwritten “philosophy” (he wouldn’t have known what the word “philosophy” meant) of life: Always, I mean always, do your very best in everything you do, and let your only reward be in the knowledge of doing your best. The reward is not the A+, or the job promotion, or the raise in salary, — no, the only reward you need is knowing you did your very best (whatever that is, whether C- or A+).
My father loved the outdoors, he loved to hunt and fish, to build barns, plow gardens and chop wood. Yet he was very tender and kind and sweet, generous to the point of giving away his last dollar to help someone else. He liked all people no matter the color of their skin or their ethnicities. I never in my life saw him envious or jealous of anyone.
Although he was a rugged outdoors person, he would spend time in the house with my brother and me teaching us card games, his favorite game being the German game of Skat which he taught us to play by the time we were six.
Once, when I got a part in a play when in the first grade, I had to make or have someone help me make the most beautiful Valentine in the world. Daddy spent an entire Saturday helping me make that Valentine, even using his saw, plywood, and one of my mother’s lace doilies in the process.
He has been the role model for me, though I never came close to his standards. Once again I remember him on Father’s Day.
RAY SPITZENBERGER AND HIS WIFE PEGGY HAVE TWO DAUGHTERS AND THREE GRANDDAUGHTERS.