Before He Was My Father

His history was very hidden.

Maybe that was trauma. Maybe it was temperament. Maybe those are not as separate as we pretend.

His father died when he was thirteen. His sister Catherine died not long after. Houses burned. More than one. Whole portions of family memory, photographs, and ordinary evidence were lost before I ever arrived to ask about them.

Or maybe he was simply quiet.

That explanation always remains possible with my father.

Still, I knew there had been a life before us. Before my mother. Before the farmette. Before Fort Howard. Before the version of him I knew in T-shirts, jeans, flannel, and work boots.

I knew it in pieces.

That is how his earlier life came to me.

Not as stories.

As fragments.

I once asked him what he did for fun as a kid, and he told me he collected bottle caps after the Brown County Fair.

He lived near the fairgrounds in West De Pere, close enough that the fair was not just an event but part of the geography of childhood. For a few days each year, that place must have transformed: lights, animals, rides, food stands, machinery, voices, dust, music, all the strange temporary abundance of a county fair.

Then it would end.

The crowds would leave.

The booths would come down.

The fairgrounds would go quiet again.

And my father, still only a boy then, would walk the emptied grounds collecting what had been left behind.

Bottle caps.

That image stays with me.

A boy after the carnival, gathering small metal circles from the trampled grass.

I do not know if he collected them because he liked the colors, or because boys collected things, or because they felt like evidence of the great event after it had vanished. Maybe he liked the variety, the stamped logos, the little industrial emblems of sodas and beers and brands I would not know. Maybe it was simply something to do.

But it feels like him.

Or maybe it feels like the beginning of something I later knew in him: the instinct to notice what others left behind.

Long before he salvaged wood, skids, fieldstones, scrap metal, machinery parts, and usable boards, there was a boy walking the fairgrounds after everyone else had gone home, looking down.

Seeing what remained.

He also rode his bike around West De Pere.

I know almost nothing beyond that.

But I can imagine him moving through the village in the 1950s and early 60s, past small houses and church lawns, past the post office where his father worked, past the river and the fairgrounds and whatever streets formed the map of his boyhood. A kid on a bicycle owns a town differently than anyone else. Every alley, curb, shortcut, hill, and patch of gravel becomes part of the body.

I wish I had asked more.

I wish I knew the routes.

I wish I knew who rode with him.

I wish I knew whether he ever stayed out until the porch lights came on, whether he had some favorite place near the fairgrounds, whether he felt free there before the losses began.

He became an Eagle Scout.

That much I know.

His father, Donald Howard, had been in the Navy during the war — Aviation Radioman Second Class — and after the war became postmaster of West De Pere. Donald and Dorothy were Scout leaders together. That detail matters to me because it means Scouting was not just something my father joined. It was part of the family structure.

His parents built that world with him.

Meetings. Uniforms. Badges. Projects. Campouts. Skills. Knots. Service. The slow, deliberate formation of a boy into someone capable.

Both Jim and my father became Eagle Scouts.

I do not know what my father’s Eagle project was.

He never told me, or if he did, I did not know enough to keep it.

That absence bothers me now. Not dramatically, but persistently. An Eagle project is supposed to represent effort, leadership, completion — a young person doing something concrete in the world. I would like to know what he chose. I would like to see whether it rhymes with the man he became.

His older brother Jim was an Eagle Scout too, and somewhere in the family stories there is the remarkable fact that Jim was in the news for saving their baby sister from drowning. I need to ask more about that. I need to ask while the people who know are still here.

That is one thing this writing has taught me.

Questions have a shelf life.

After my grandfather died, after Catherine died, after the fires, my father continued. That may be the most important fact about his adolescence.

He stayed in Scouts.

He made Eagle.

The structure his father had helped build for him did not disappear when his father did.

A boy can be shattered and still keep going through the motions of achievement. Maybe the motions are part of what saves him. Maybe a badge, a troop, a project, a uniform, and a set of requirements can become a rope across grief.

I do not know.

He did not say.

Later, in college, another version of him appears.

The version with horn-rimmed glasses and sideburns.

The French and German student.

The president of the chess club.

I wish I could see him clearly there, not as my father-in-retrospect but as himself: young, intelligent, maybe shy, maybe more socially alive than I imagine, sitting across a chessboard in some Oshkosh room with fluorescent lights overhead and winter outside the windows.

To be president of the chess club is such a specific fact.

It is small and enormous at once.

Small because it is only a club.

Enormous because it shows a young man before the farm, before the factory, before the long practical life, gathering himself around intellect, language, strategy, and play.

He was not yet the man I would know.

He was still becoming.

At Oshkosh, the country was coming apart in the background.

He was there during the Vietnam War years. He remembered protests downtown. He remembered buildings burning. He remembered knowing when to leave and head home.

That is one of the most dramatic fragments I have of his young adulthood, and also one of the least developed.

Buildings burning.

My father deciding to get away.

There is a whole scene there, but I only have the outline. The heat of unrest. The charged air of a college town during the war. Sirens maybe. Crowds. Smoke. A young man who had already known enough family catastrophe for one life looking at public chaos and deciding he did not need to stand closer to it.

He went home.

That detail feels very much like him.

Not cowardice.

Judgment.

The ability to read danger and leave before becoming part of it.

He studied in Europe too.

Mostly France, Germany, and Liechtenstein, but other places as well. He loved Germany and Bavaria. Munich mattered to him not as a tourist postcard but as a center of what he was studying. He had planned to go to the Munich Olympics in 1972, but the terrorist attack stopped his train from coming in.

The train did not arrive.

That is another image I cannot quite shake.

A young man somewhere in Europe, close enough that Munich was part of the plan, and then history intervening with violence. The Olympics became something else. The trip bent around it. The slides that might have existed never did.

He was also supposed to go to Moscow, and that part of the trip was canceled too. I cannot remember why.

Another missing branch.

Another road in his life that stopped before it became memory.

What remains are the slides.

He had slides of his travels, and we watched them when I was young. Sometimes just our family, sometimes extended family, sometimes friends gathered in the dark while the projector clicked and warmed the room with its little mechanical hum.

The slides were his earlier life made visible.

France. Germany. Liechtenstein. Castles. Normandy. Mont-Saint-Michel. Places tied to our Bohemian heritage. Small countries and old cities and landscapes that seemed impossibly far from rural Wisconsin.

If I asked, he would talk to me about them.

He helped me pronounce the names.

That was one of the ways he opened the world.

Not by making a speech about travel or culture, but by saying the place-name correctly and letting me try.

Mont-Saint-Michel.

Liechtenstein.

Normandy.

Bohemia.

Those words entered me early, around second through sixth grade, and did some quiet work there. They made the world seem older and larger than the one I could reach by bike or car. They made me want to go. More than that, they made me want to go with him.

I imagined taking similar trips someday.

Hopefully with my father.

That did not happen.

Or not in the way I dreamed.

The slides also carried a family joke. In picture after picture, according to the adults, he seemed to be surrounded by pretty women. My mother teased him. Others teased him. There was laughter in the dark whenever one appeared.

I loved that laughter, though I only partly understood it.

It let me see my father as someone younger, someone who had existed in a world of students and travel companions and European streets, someone who could be teased by his wife for a life that had happened before her and yet somehow belonged safely inside their marriage.

That kind of teasing is intimate.

It says: I know this part of you, and I can laugh with it.

I wish I had those slides digitized.

I still have them.

That fact feels increasingly important.

They are sitting somewhere, small transparent squares holding light that has not passed through them in decades. The younger version of my father is inside them, along with the castles, the women, the train that did not make it to Munich, the countries he taught me to pronounce, the world he once walked before becoming the man who raised me.

I should digitize them.

I say that plainly because it is not only a technical task.

It is an act of inheritance.

A box of slides is not memory until someone brings the light back through it.

And that, maybe, is what this whole chapter is about.

His history was hidden, yes.

But not entirely.

It survived in objects, fragments, overheard lines, family jokes, and the few answers he gave when I thought to ask.

Bottle caps after the fair.

A bike in West De Pere.

An Eagle badge.

A chess club.

A burning downtown.

A train stopped short of Munich.

A canceled Moscow.

A carousel of slides.

A father in the dark helping his son pronounce the world.

I do not have the whole story.

I probably never will.

But I have enough to know that before he was my father, he was a boy walking the emptied fairgrounds, a Scout formed by parents he would lose too soon, a student of languages, a young man with a chessboard, a traveler standing near history as it broke open.

And then, eventually, he came home.

Not just from Europe.

From all of that.

He became my father.

But the earlier man did not vanish.

He is still there, waiting in the slides.