A Post For My Father

Today’s post is a little different. Well, a lot different. There will only be a handful of (mostly very short) sound files offered – although all of them are still from reel-to-reel tape! – and mostly I will be telling a story. For those who will choose to indulge me, I thank you. I understand if others choose to pass this by, and hope you will return next time, when I'll return to the more typical focus of this blog.

This is the story of my father, and my life with him. Because today, December 7^th, 2021, is the 100^th anniversary of my dad’s birth.

Frank Purse was born in Tacoma on December 7^th, 1921, and was the oldest of three children born to his parents in the next few years. The family – and the area – was very poor. In 1928, when he was six, his mother died. HIs siblings were about four and two. As his father worked many miles away, and was unable to care for his children day to day, they were moved to the home of their aunt and uncle, who had a child of their own and were in similar financial straits. They remained in this home for all of my father’s childhood. Around the time my dad graduated high school, his father remarried, and the entire family reunited and moved to the North Shore of Chicago. He began attending the nearby Northwestern University, pursuing an Engineering degree, and drove a cab to help pay the bills.

It was while the family was celebrating his 20^th birthday, on December 7^th, 1941, that the attack on Pearl Harbor was announced. Dad eventually went into the service. He flew the P-51 mustang, was Captain of a fighter squadron, and was stationed in King's Cross, England, making flights over Europe.

After the war, he returned to Illinois, and Northwestern, and at some point, the family moved to Evanston. Around 1948, he became friendly with the young woman whose apartment window faced his own, across a gangway.  This was Mary Frances Godwin, a classical soprano with a promising future, and the woman who would become my mother. One of Mary Fran's acquaintances commented that “Mr. Frank looks like a Movie Star”, and pictures from back then show him to have looked somewhat along the lines of Clark Gable or Errol Flynn. Maybe you'll agree:

In quick order, Frank and Mary Frances were dating, then married in 1949, then had my sister in July of 1950. My brother followed in June of 1954, and I finished the trio of children six years and two days after my brother, in June of 1960. Along the way, dad had long since gotten his Master’s Degree in Engineering, and had begun a career of what would turn out to be nearly 40 years at Universal Oil Products (UOP). When I was one year old, the family moved from a four flat in Skokie, IL to a large house in a wooded neighborhood in what was then the boondocks – a tiny town called Northfield - population about 4000, at the time. This is where I would grow up, and where he and my mom would live the rest of their lives. Our modernistic ranch house, complete with a flat roof, except for the living room, which had a ceiling that went from 10 feet to 12 feet on a diagonal angle, can be seen below, in a picture taken just before we moved in: 

Just about the first thing dad did after taking ownership was to cut those bushes on the left WAY back so that they weren't completing blocking bedroom windows. 

And here’s the family, not so long after we moved to Northfield. I bet you can figure out which one is me:

As I’ve written before, when my dad wanted something, he wanted the best. It’s more complicated than that, though. Having grown up poor before the depression, and no doubt even more severely after 1929, he was not one to spend his money loosely, or often at all. But when he did want something – most of the time something to do with audio – he didn’t go halfway. So it was that when reel to reel recording became an available “thing”, he bought the top of the line for that moment (1952), a Concertone behemoth which retailed for $400 at the time – roughly $4000 in today’s money, although he likely got a discount, as it was a recently retired studio model (from Columbia Records, I found out years later). That must have put quite the dent in the young couple's finances. He continued to buy the latest in reel to reel machines for the rest of his life – a more compact mono machine in 1963, a top of the line Ampex stereo model in 1966, and Teac machines in roughly 1976 and 1989.

So, I was afforded the possibility of falling in love with the reel-to-reel tape medium. I’ve written about that, before, as well, and won’t repeat myself here. But my dad’s interest in this medium made it possible for me to develop this obsession, so his interest in reel recording is as responsible as anything for the existence of this blog, as well as my previous reel posts at WFMU.

My dad was generally speaking a serious guy, but with a wonderful spark of dry humor when he felt like it. But I get the feeling from the few recordings I have of him that he was looser and more fun in the early days of my family, than he was by the time I was growing up. I ascribed that to the increasing demands of his job, as he moved up in ranks at work, as well as the demands of having three children, rather than one or two. He was also a more musically active person in the 1950's than he was by the time I have memories.   

The longest recording I have that involves my dad is one I shared many years ago at WFMU, made on Christmas morning, 1952, with my sister, then 2 ½, singing Christmas carols. He talks quite a bit and plays piano on at least one song. It was the first time they used the Concertone. I will not repost that here, but you can find the entire tape here. In that same post, I also included a somewhat later Christmas recording, with dad playing piano and my sister singing. He is a bit more vocal here than on the 1952 tape, so I will include that one here. Plus, it's December, and this tape is Christmassy, too. 

Download: Marcia with Daddy – Santa Claus is Coming to Town

Play:

When my sister was around three – probably on her birthday – dad taped her reciting a gory little poem - entirely inappropriate for a preschooler – called “Taffy”. I love the noises she makes as she leads up to the violent ending, as well as his rather gleeful encouragement at her performance. He then turned on the PA monitor speaker and had her sing Happy Birthday to herself, which she did not quite finish before the tape ran out.

Download: Marcia – Taffy & Happy Birthday

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One more tape of my sister and my dad, first playing Chopsticks together, then duetting on the old folk song “I Love My Rooster”. That’s dad on the piano again. I love how he suggests that they're in a bad key for their voices, then moves the song almost completely out of his range.

Download: Daddy and Marcia – Chopsticks & I Love My Rooster

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Sometime after we got our compact 1963 machine, my dad was playing his baritone ukulele and leading the family in a favorite of ours, “The Braggin’ Song” (aka “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago”). This is a song we knew from the wonderful rendition by Odetta and Larry, which you can hear here, and which I was to sing with my mother, decades later, on many occasions. 

My brother started up the tape recorder to capture this moment. For whatever reason, this resulted in the performance stopping, and he was encouraged to record later. I’m not sure why, but it’s disappointing. But this little fragment – really three sections of performance – is very dear to me. 

Download: The Family Sings “The Braggin’ Song”

Play:

I don’t really recognize the father I knew in those tapes. By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, I never once saw him play his beautiful electric/acoustic Gibson sunburst guitar, and almost never saw him play the ukulele, although he did teach how to play that instrument. Despite his rudimentary piano skills, during my childhood, he would really only play two songs on the piano, and that was probably a few times a year. I think one was "Deep in a Dream", and I can play the other song, as he would play it, but can't remember what song it is. 

I do hear the man I knew, with his shy, dry humor in this next little bit of tape, made right after he bought our 1963 machine, as he and my brother Bill tested it for the first time. Here, they will quote a few lines from The Smothers Brothers, he makes a joking reference to a folk song about a train, and then he recites the first line of a particularly awful poem, one which we all knew from a self-published book of awful poetry that our family somehow had obtained. Bill then finishes the first verse. In case you can’t make out the words they are:

My paw held me up to the moo-cow moo, so close I could almost touch

And I fed him a couple of times or two, and I wasn’t a ‘fraid-cat much.

Download: Dad and Bill – A Few First Recordings

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Dad’s taste in comedy leaned towards the intellectual and the offbeat, and comedy albums were played around our house seemingly all the time. For me, above all others was the man who made the best stand up (well, sit down) comedy albums in history, Shelley Berman. But I also can't say enough about Stan Freberg, Tom Lehrer, The Smothers Brothers, Victor Borge, and many more who filled my brain with a very specific and dry sense of humor. It helped that he was inclined to express his own humor in the same way.

~~

Person A: “Time Flies…”

Dad: You can’t. They go too quickly.

~~

Dad: Is it warmer in the country than it is in the summer?

~~

And the best one:

Dad: I feel more like I do now than I did ten minutes ago.

~~

I've been told that, in his early days at UOP, he would sit in a room, on a stool at a drafting table, with several other guys, all of them doing the same. In that setting, he lived for that moment when someone would come in looking for one of his peers, so that he could say "he sits two stools behind me". Ho ho. 

I also remember him just about losing it while we were watching a football game together. There was a field goal kick, and the camera was poorly centered, not showing the cross bar. The kick was low, and after it was over, he started laughing, pointing out that both he and I had gotten out of our seats to try to “look over the edge of the bottom of the TV screen” and see if the kick was good.

At some moment in 1968, he scraped his foot open on a rough spot or maybe a nail or something on the floor somewhere, and made up a little nonsense song about it.

“Scraped, Scraped, Scraped it on the floor

It don’t hurt no more, ‘cause the skin is tore”

No, that doesn’t make sense, but that was him. And, remarkably, there is an ever-so-brief tape of him singing the second line of this song. I am so glad to have this tape, because it captures of side of him that I saw far too rarely. My mother sings for a moment, and later comments on how awful this tape seems to be. The young child yelling "Talk Dad", and later having a laughing fit and otherwise being very loud, is me. The older child heard is my brother Bill, who encourages dad to sing, which he does, just a bit, after feigning having injured himself. It is Bill that is playing the piano, and who sings part of the first line of the song. 

It probably took you longer to read that section than it will take to listen to this 37 second piece of tape:

Download: Frank Purse – Scraped, Scraped!

Play:

(It’s worth noting that everyone in our family was in the habit of making up songs – often to existing tunes – about everything and anything they did, heard on the TV, or that came up in conversation. I still do that to this day.)

And that's really the last – meaning most recent – significant recording of any length that I can find of him, unfortunately. Anything more recent is along the lines of simply checking sound levels or making brief comments at group gatherings.  

~~

In addition to everything else, dad subsidized the musical education of my brother and sister (both of them exceptional musical talents), as well as nine years of both trombone and piano lessons for me (not an exceptional musical talent). And as I mentioned, when I was 15 or so, he taught me ukulele chords, which I later transposed for myself onto guitar, when I became a self-taught guitarist in the late 1970’s.

Still, in those years, I didn’t know him very well. He was an occasional world traveler (for work) by the time I was seven or eight - even before that, he made many trips to California, where he was on the team that was perfecting the catalytic converter. And from the time that I was 12 and into my early 20’s, he was very frequently off in exotic places like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and China (soon after Nixon opened up relations with that country), overseeing refinery construction and things like that, often for weeks at a time. He had the great stories about his experiences in those countries.  

There were wonderful things my dad did around the house. He designed and built by hand an enormous and complex model train set. The kids got to help a bit, but I was still little at that time. But if I’m ever in a hobby store, and get to the model train area, the smells of the various parts that permeates the area takes me right back to those wonderful days with the model trains.

And when I was in my early teens (and my siblings had long since moved out), he, my mom and I took a driving vacation across the country to Yellowstone, and many points on either side. It was joyous, I saw parts of this country everyone should visit, and I got to know both of my parents much better. This was a pivotal moment in my life, as I’d spent the previous two years increasingly depressed and anxious due to worsening bullying during 7^th and 8^th grade. Getting away like that, in a sort of cocoon with them, helped me prepare for massive changes that were coming my way, and that I would make in myself, as I entered a high school where almost no one knew me. A few weird memories stick out. I especially remember the day that, out of nowhere, he recited to me a couple of off-color poems featuring bathroom humor, which was so out of character for him as to leave me speechless. That was also the trip on which he allowed me to have a sip of his beer. I hated it, and 47 years later, it remains the only sip of beer I’ve ever had.

When I was in my later teens, dad designed and built a deck for our back yard, and put me to work with him, which was greatly enjoyable and a time of deep bonding. Again, if I’m ever around pieces of wood being carved up on circular saws and the like, there is a very distinctive smell that takes me right back to working with him on that deck. We also lived in a house with a relatively soft wood exterior, so every several years, we scraped off the old dirty paint and repainted it, and I treasure those memories of working and talking together, as well.

Here’s a picture of dad from 1977. Note the new Teac tape recorder behind him, and the various cabinets and shelves containing or holding recorded sound-related items. Dad built all of that cabinetry and shelving. I also love the good humor that radiates from this photo. This is how I remember him. 

My dad was definitely a man of his era. He didn’t talk about the war, and he didn’t talk about feelings – he was generally quite taciturn. He certainly had elements of “the organization man”, in the phrase of the day. He (and his peers) drank alcohol at meetings, at lunch, and at home, and he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. As a child, I was diagnosed with fairly severe ADHD, and was put on Ritalin. I was bouncy and extremely loud and boisterous, and tended to quickly rub him the wrong way with my sheer energy level. Later, I was a heart-on-my-sleeve teenager who was an open book about my feelings, seemed to fall for every girl who was intelligent and cute, and got destroyed, emotionally, on a regular basis. And I couldn’t comprehend the need or desire to imbibe in mood altering (or addictive) substances. Dad and I were not at each other’s throats in any way, and we certainly got along and enjoyed each other, but at a certain, important level, each of us was a mystery to the other. And in retrospect, I’m sure it didn’t help that he seemed to be on business trips half the time.

Dad’s drinking never got out of control in the ways that we all known drinking can: he was not an angry drunk or someone who drove while intoxicated or anything like that. But by the early 1980's, the amount he drank had become very concerning. Some nights he would have five or more mixed drinks, and often got very quiet and withdrawn. Sometimes he would go to bed by 7:30 PM. And the amount he did ingest (including the cigarettes), combined, I’m sure, with the stress of his job (where he was eventually a Vice President) did have me planning some sort of intervention. I asked both of my siblings to come home for Christmas, 1983. But before either could arrive, two medical events took place, two days apart, just after his 63rd birthday. He was diagnosed with diabetes on a Wednesday, then had heart attack on the subsequent Friday. There was a hospital stay, and following that, he never again had a drink of anything stronger than wine, and never had another cigarette, quitting cigarettes and hard drink cold turkey. And that – and some great doctors - gave him just over another 11 years.

It strikes me with some degree of shock that I am less than two years younger, today, than he was at the time of his heart attack. He had long since seemed like an old man to me at that time, and aged rapidly over the rest of his life, although he was at all times vital and engaged and very physically active. I'm 61, and I don't feel old - I feel like I'm 25, and have felt that way, since I was...25. I wonder if dad felt old, then, at 63. 

I was still living at home – which I did until I got married a month before my 28^th birthday, and as dad moved into retirement, I got a chance to know him much better. We spent a lot of time together, and I’m sure we enjoyed each other the most of any point in either of our lives. He welcomed my friends into the home, and when there was a chance for conversation, enjoyed interacting with them. He and I worked on projects together (painting the house… again, redesigning the yard, making repairs at a block of apartments that he owned), watched shows and movies, and developed a really nice, adult-to-adult relationship.

Here we are after he retired and grew a beard, and I had Chicken Pox (at age 25) and had no choice but to grow a beard:

Beyond the sort of personality mismatches between us when I was a child and adolescent, we had our differences as well, into my young adulthood. A few little ones, but primarily, one major area of difference.

Dad was a lifelong Republican. This was primarily due to his view of financial and military issues: he was generally socially moderate, but seemed to consider those areas to be personal views, not things to be addressed with tax dollars, and he absolutely did not consider social issues to be worthy of basing one’s vote on. By the mid 1980’s, he told one of my siblings he thought that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of his lifetime – I'm sure Reagan's policies made him the wealthiest he was at any point in his life (if he was ever home on a weekday, no matter what else he was doing, the Chicago TV station that played real-time updates of the stock market was always on). 

I, meanwhile, had been spending time getting a degree in Human Services, taught largely by Psychologists and Social Workers, and between that and my burgeoning fascination with American Folk Music – and its leading purveyors – had turned me from someone who was disinterested in politics into the Socialist-leaning Democrat that I’ve been ever since. Our solution was that we barely ever spoke about politics (but, to be fair, I should add that we didn’t talk about politics before my awakening, either). Perhaps – no, probably – because of my privileged upbringing, I had little to no interest in finances. I liked money, and I worked – from about age 14 on, I would do whatever would bring in cash, mostly cutting lawns for several years, but later driving delivery, restaurant work, even driving a cab (just like he had). But I doubt he would say I had the right sense of the value of money, or the right respect or understanding of it. Today, where he here, he'd likely say I still don't. And once I got a Bachelor's Degree, it gave dad fits that the jobs I was interviewing for, jobs which required my new degree, would pay me little more than his employer paid for secretaries. 

In retirement, my parents got to enjoy each other's company more richly and consistently. They traveled quite a bit, and dad was one of the early adapters of the home computer revolution. He used his new computer to completely design the new kitchen they wanted to have built, to replace the very worn and not user friendly kitchen that had been in place since that house was built in 1952. Near the end of his life, he became absolutely fascinated with trying to beat every deal of the then-new FreeCell software. 

Dad welcomed my future wife into our lives, and once Gina and I were married, helped us out financially at first, and also with manual labor, helping to paint our first apartment, and, once we had moved to a house, helped argue our case to a lawyer who was giving us trouble. He assisted me financially, again, when I went to graduate school. He even helped me tear down a wall where we wanted to remove a closet and in doing so, enlarge a part of the basement. He loved my children deeply, and one of my favorite pictures shows him, in the yard, holding hands with the older of my two children, who was then three years old.

That work in the basement was actually the last time we worked together. A few weeks later, we got together to celebrate my mom’s birthday – it was the middle of April, 1996. That was the last time I saw him. I got paged at work on May 3^rd, 1996, responded to the call, and learned that dad had died in his sleep. He was a bit more than six months away from his 75^th birthday. Aside from his history of heart problems and other chronic issues, there had been no immediate worry that he would die soon. The previous day, he’d worked in the yard and gone on errands with my mom. I’ve always felt that he had so much more to do.

At his funeral, my siblings and I each spoke about him, giving very personalized and thus very different versions of his story, and ours. I took comfort in the words of the priest at the end of our speeches, something to the effect that he’d rarely heard such a level of tributes, and that Frank Purse (who he had not known – dad was not a churchgoer) must have been a very special man.

He was. He was a good, good man, and once I knew enough to admire him, maybe late grade school, I did admire him, and I never stopped admiring him. So many of my childhood and teen friends had combative relationships with one or both parents – deteriorating connections, angry outbursts by one or more person, even having to move out to escape an untenable situation. I do know that, being the youngest of three – and by many years – I got a more patient, experienced and relaxed father during my teen years than did either of my siblings, who each had at least moderate young-adult conflicts with him, and I know that I’m fortunate to have been parented by him later in life than they were. My dad and I had a few arguments, and I shouted it him on about a half-dozen occasions, and he at me perhaps three times, but that was about it. And I am forever thankful at my great luck at having been born into a prosperous family, where there was never material need, and where there was an abundance of love. 

Dad did what was right, especially when it was important to do so. (I learned long after his death that, on his first trip to China, he was offered a visit by a prostitute – he pointed at his wedding ring, and was told “that doesn’t matter here…” “It matters to me” was his response.) He was always ready to help a friend, neighbor or relative. He worked his way from a poverty-filled childhood to the vice presidency of a company building oil refineries. And he almost never, that I recall, told me I was wrong about something, preferring to let me know in more gentle ways, and to try and help me see another angle. He loved me through and through, even though he clearly didn’t fully understand me when I was a severely hyperactive eight-year-old, or a depressed 13-year-old, or a love sick 16-year-old, or a 25-year-old with a preference for socialism. And I loved him just as much, even if I couldn’t fully relate to how his poverty-stricken childhood, war experience, political views and job experiences had left their mark on him.

I'd like to add one more thing. There is an musical artist named M. Ward, who I believe to be the best recording artist of our new century. M. Ward and Bob Dylan are now the only people releasing music that I will purchase upon release, without hearing first. He has a song called "Requiem", in which some of the lyrics put me in the mind of my father. Not all of the lyrics match, but enough do that I'd like to share it. And musically, it ranks among the more powerful tracks I've ever heard, too. The video is great, too, and you can see it here. 

Download: M. Ward - Requiem

Play:  

Okay, I should stop now. I’m making myself cry.

Thanks for everything, dad. I love you, and I miss you.

I’ll close with mom and dad, photographed in 1993, an overwhelmingly happy and content older couple, still deeply in love, after 44 years of marriage. 

Oh, those wise eyes of his, and that wry smile...

A deep thanks to everyone who made it all the way to the end of my story. I hope you found it enjoyable and meaningful.