Prior to Remembrance Day I was looking for old copies of my hometown newspaper (my dad’s column about why he joined the Merchant Marine was in one of them) when I came across an old manilla folder filled with a large nugget of Harrison family history, i.e., my dad’s hand-written notes pertaining to his naval memoirs and a typed copy, 21 pages long. Better than one Norwich Gazette column, it is!
["Better than one Norwich Gazette column, it is!": photo GH]
I am now making an effort to turn the notes into a book that will include 2 - 3 dozen photos from dad’s war years, from 1941 - 1945, and while reading his notes the phrase ‘like father like son’ has crossed my mind several times.
He writes, “I was from a family of seven, three girls and four boys. My mother needed a new door sill for our home so she somehow procured a lovely board from a lumber yard. I stole the board and Sonny Bucholtz and I hollowed it out and used it for the main part of our first ship, the Bluenose.”
I recall visiting his mother, my grandmother, in my dad’s family home when I was 5- or 6-years old, and the house was no palace. It was one poor family my dad grew up in, especially after his own dad died when my father was a 10-year old. In humble surroundings he learned the value of a dollar, didn’t part with any dollars easily, and I’m much the same way.
He and I are similar in other ways as well. We both like working with wood (he turned out scores of birdhouses in the 1990s), but I don’t steal mine. I rescue most of the lumber I use for chairs and birdhouses and, as some readers know, I buy the rest in order to save time with cutting and sanding.
Like my dad, I enjoy a good laugh and don’t mind (too much) if others laugh at my expense.
I don’t think dad will mind if I share the following from his naval memoirs:
I quit my job at potteries (in Hamilton, 1941) because of a small misdemeanor of taking a smoke. I was called to the office and reprimanded but the foreman wanted me to stay on, but when I quit, I quit, and he knew where he could stuff his clay, which was formed and molded, then enamelled and heated at high heat for use as electric fence insulators, toilet and sink bowls and for electric stove elements.
I can understand dad’s feelings of indignation, his stubbornness, getting his back up, so to speak. I’m still laughing, however, about all the things he learned to do with clay before, or was it after (?), stuffing it where the sun don’t shine.
That was one great sentence you cooked up, dad. Thanks.
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Please click here for a laugh on me.
http://itstrikesmefunny.blogspot.com/2011/12/i-wish-id-said-it-first.html
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