Hell, if you think I’m just some “fluffy-headed Liberal,” think again. My dad was the biggest fan John Wayne ever had. Born in 1926 in the back of a Ford Model T, he grew up on the side of a mountain outside Dalton, Georgia. His father, a horse rancher by trade, was ruined by the Great Depression and turned to gambling (badly), impoverishing his wife and seven sons.
🎬 Act I: The Old Man and the Mountain
He would disappear for days at a time, showing up one day with a beat-up Harley-Davidson he’d won, and maybe a few days later with a scrawny cow. But most often, he came home with a haunted face, hoping whoever he owed money to wouldn’t find him.
My grandmother gave him an ultimatum. Join the CCCs (Civilian Conservation Corp) or get the hell out of her life. The CCC was specifically created by President Roosevelt’s government for struggling families. The husband would live at the camp, working on various construction projects, and his paycheck would be mailed directly to his wife.
Everything went well for the first two months. Then the checks stopped coming. Grandma walked down the mountain to the post office and asked the clerk why her checks weren’t being delivered.
“Oh, why yes ma’am. Your husband’s been droppin’ by and pickin’ ‘em up on his way home. Real nice of ‘im.”
When her husband finally came home for his monthly family visit, Grandma greeted him at the door with his own shotgun, both barrels cocked. “Don’t you ever darken my door again.”
He left and never came back. The boys knew where he was. They just didn’t want anything to do with him.
⚒️ Steel Magnolia vs. the Great Depression
My dad and his older brothers hustled to stay alive, working at a local dairy when they could, picking poke salad on the roadside, stealing food from local farms, frog-giggin’ in swamps, and running ‘moonshine’ across dry counties in a beat-up Model A Ford the brothers chipped in and bought for $25.
Was he proud of some of the things he had to do to survive? Of course not. But he wasn’t going to sit by and watch his little brothers starve either.
🚢 Fire and Saltwater
He volunteered for the Navy on his 17th birthday in 1944, serving in the Pacific in WWII. He spent two months in the hospital recovering from burns after a kamikaze raid on his ship as it sat dockside in Saipan harbor. Then he was assigned to a mine sweeper, prepping for the invasion of Japan. If you know anything about naval warfare, you know his odds of survival were nil.
But he did his duty.
🛠️ Raising Seven Sons the Hard Way
Now, as to how Dad grew up, my grandmother could have done the Old Testament thing and deferred to her no-good, useless, broken-down, gambling-addicted husband as she’s required to by certain Bible passages the Christian Nationalists love to use to promulgate misogyny. And I’m pretty sure her boys would have grown up to be very different men.
But Grandma was the living embodiment of Steel Magnolia. She was where my dad learned self-reliance. She kept those boys fed, with a roof over their heads, and clothes on their backs, even when she had to move them from shack to shanty because she couldn’t pay the rent. She taught my dad and his brothers how to take care of their clothes, keep the floors swept, and the house clean—even living in a one-room shack with dirt floors, an outhouse, and no running water.
What did you learn from your parents?
She also made them read the Bible and learn what Jesus taught; not cherry-pick Bible passages to push an agenda.
What my dad and his brothers learned was to live in service, care for those who had less than they did, and never take shit from anyone, regardless of the price.
From the Navy, he learned duty, honor, sacrifice, respect for the flag, and how to be a team member and a leader.
After the war, my mother taught him about love.
(Too bad she didn’t teach him how to cook. Eating my dad’s cooking is a scary story all by itself.)
❤️ A Life of Service
And the other thing he learned—from his mother, his wife, and in a sad way, his dad—was that living in service to his wife and family was the highest calling a real man can have. My parents together were a comical sight: dad was 6’-2”, mom was 5-2”.
But my dad adored my mother and would have laid his life down for her in a heartbeat.
🔁 The Cycle Continues
My dad eventually became a cemetery superintendent—not a high-paying job but an honorable one. Mom always worked as a secretary and occasional bookkeeper. They found a way to live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood they couldn’t afford so my brother and I could grow up going to excellent schools, hanging with kids whose dads were corporate vice-presidents, dentists, and engineers.
Obviously, I grew up very differently than my parents.
I rejected my parents’ down-to-earth values and created my own glorious mess. But that’s a story for another day.
🚸 Odds Stacked, Lessons Lost
I grew up with the luxury of seeing self-reliance firsthand. And I still didn’t manage to learn the lesson.
So, what are the odds that a kid growing up with crack-addicted parents or surrounded by a neighborhood of gangbangers and criminals, is going to learn how to go to school, study diligently, get a job or go to college, or start a business, and contribute to society rather than take from it?
Not good, my friend. Not very good at all.
And in view of what my dad sometimes had to do to survive growing up in the backwoods of Georgia, I don’t think it’s fair to judge kids who grow up in the worst neighborhoods, without a healthy parent to guide them. They do what they have to do to survive. And that rarely prepares them for a better life.
So, what are we going to do about that?
Think about the kids growing up in chaos today. Will they ever get the shot my parents gave me? If you’ve got thoughts, stories, or solutions—drop them in the comments. I’m listening.
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