This is a picture of my father, and my son. Both of them were born on Dec 31st, so we would always celebrate both birthdays together every year. Sadly, we will only celebrate my son’s birthday this year, because today my father took his last earthly breath, at 11 am after his Grandfather clock had struck its last chime.
As a Christian, we can take great comfort in having the hope of a resurrected life after death. As an earthly human, I will miss the phone calls to my only father on earth.
We would talk about politics, economics and what I should do at my job. My mom used to say that these phone calls were my dad’s favorite thing to do. I know that it was my favorite. I remember coming back from an international trip one time. After I landed at LAX, and after the events of the trip, I decided that I would call my dad on the way home to discuss what had happened, the various customer issues, and the products that I was marketing. After talking for 30 minutes, I hung up. I heard a low whistle from the front of the Limo that was taking me home.
“Were you talking to you dad?” the Limo driver asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“I wished I could talk to my dad like that,” he replied.
Life was not rosy all the time. Living in my family was not easy as a child for my sisters or myself. Mainly because my father was the son of the depression and my grandparents were an unbelievably tough parents. Mind you, it’s not that my grandmother and grandfather didn’t love my dad, or that our dad didn’t love his kids. But life was different back then. Life wasn’t soft or cushy. Life was about doing your job and working hard. Children were expected to be little adults in our family. Our father raised us in a similar fashion as his own parents raised him, we were expected to work on the weekends, work after school, and get only the best of grades. As much as was expected of us, in his mind, he was much easier on us versus what he went through as a child, and he was right in this belief.
My father was the second of two boys, and most people never understood my dad because they didn’t understand his family, and they didn’t understand how my dad, the second child, was in such a contrast to the first child. My uncle, the first child, his brother, was born with a closed colon. My uncle, his brother was considered a baby born alive that was soon to die. It was an age where the idea of constructive surgery to save a baby’s life was not understood. However, the family was deeply entrenched in a Church which may have struggled with the concept of grace and freedom in Christ, and yet had the power of God flowing through their Church. My great grandmother believed that my grandmother had not given the child to the to the Lord, and so she came to my grandmother.
“Honey, you need to give this child over to the Lord,” she said, “If the Lord wants to take him home, you need to allow God to do that.” However, my Grandmother didn’t want to say that my Uncle was the Lord’s. After a day of reflection, she gave the child up and said “Lord, if you want to take this Child home, please take him.”
He pooped within the hour, and was saved. When my Dad would tell the story, his voice would break. There was several times when the Lord intervened in his life, and while he was not born, he would tell the story as if he was there. Everyone recognized the miracle that had happened, and my dad was told the story when he was born. And while my dad’s brother went on to become a long distance runner and strong while in college, the image of him as the weak baby and the sickly child always stuck. So, my grandparents never asked much physically of my uncle. Combined with a gentle spirit and the ability to not provoke my grandparents, he generally was the good kid growing up.
My dad, by contrast, came out of the womb as a walking, talking, break everything in the house son. He told many stories of how he visited the “rod of correction” as he would take apart watches to see how they worked (and having the spring exploded and ruin the watch). He would take wheels off of the trains and ruin these toys. When my grandparents told the boys that they couldn’t cross a line in the street, it was my dad that always heard his brother running upstairs to say, “Brother crossed the line! Brother crossed the line!” My dad was in his 80’s, and he would laugh about being the one to cross the line. When my youngest son, who can be a bit wild time to time, would break something, my Dad would always say, “Don’t punish him too hard, it reminds me of me.”
Dad being the strong one was the one that would be forced as a young boy to accompany my granddad to his construction sites. My grandfather had started “Deffenbaugh Sons Construction” and while his brothers were workers, granddad was the boss, and he was a pusher with a gift for making houses. My grandfather’s ability to frame houses and make anything was legendary. My dad was his son and free labor, and he would run him at the construction sites from morning to night. At a young age, my dad knew how to frame, how to plumb, and how to run electrical wires. His brother, still considered the weaker from the incident as a child, could stay at home. There was no greater of a contrast.
The depression hit in 1930, and Grandfather’s line of credit was shut down. Grandfather owed $5000 to his suppliers, which is close to $100,000 today, and when he couldn’t get construction loans, there was no way to continue the projects. While most people simply filed for bankruptcy, granddad thought this was wrong, so he paid all his suppliers what he owed him during the depression. However, he no longer built houses. Grandfather did all types of jobs, one of which was getting the highest civil ranking possible when he picked up a job in the Forest Department.
When dad was 15 years old, it was toward the end of the depression. Grandfather, who quit schooling after the 8th grade so he could go to work to make a living because his father was a drunk, had found him a job in the Forest Service. (Because of my drunk great grandfather, my grandfather, my dad and myself have never drank alcohol because we have seen how alcohol can destroy families.) My grandfather made sure that my dad and his brother never went hungry and was honest as the day was long, but grandfather was a tough man. My grandpa had left school to work after 8th grade, so his son could certainly work a good job for the Forest Service when he was 15. So my father, hardly 15, was off packing mules and supplies to the front line guys making roads and fighting fires. As a young kid, he was thrown in with 20 to 40 year old men. Many of them hard from living life on the road and away from their family. He said that he had to sleep on his shoes, or the other guys in the camp would steal them.
After being in the woods for multiple weeks, he said that he got home sick. So, he hitchhiked back into Portland to see his folks. When he showed up at the front door, they scolded him.
“No sense in coming home, when I went out and got you a good job,” my grandfather said. He wasn’t being mean. My grandfather was trying to teach him the ropes. He was trying to teach him to be independent and tough.
If my dad was hard on his kids, it was nothing like what he went through.
Dad went to Oregon State University, and worked in a gas station to put himself through college. My grandpa was ambivalent toward college. Remember, he did fine with his 8th grade education. This was to be a point of conflict for the rest of my dad and grandpa’s life. Grandpa thought that his son was always trying to show himself smarter because he had a college education. My dad always knew this was a silly issue, and he eagerly wanted his children to go to college. My dad was independent at 17 and getting his degree.
He said that “I did my college homework on the bus going to school. Math was the simple subject.”
I have never, in all of my life, met a man with a more natural aptitude toward numbers. Even while I got into college, I got stumped on a problem. My dad after not seeing a calculus book for 30 years, sat down and quickly remembered how to do the math problem. He would roll numbers around in his mind, and spit out estimations like some type of an iPhone app. While my Mom had a gift of humanities, grandpa was a walking calculator.
He was in college when a day that would live in infamy hit. He said that he was in his dorm room, with his roommate that smoked like a chimney, when he heard that “the Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor” on December 7th, 1941. So, he graduated from school, but enlisted in the military rather than be drafted. Since he was a bright young man, they decided to put him in the Air force. They needed meteorologists, and they trained my mechanical engineering dad to forecast the weather. All of his life, he would look at the weather forecasts and do a better job than the TV weatherman. They had contests for the recruits to see how they could predict weather patterns, and no surprise, dad was good at the Northwest, so they put him in the Northwest.
During this time, he took a trip to California to visit the homeland of his Church, the Apostolic Faith Church. This church came out of the Azusa Street Revival in the early 1900’s, and Los Angles was always considered fondly, even though the Church headquarters was in Portland, Oregon. This particular church branch is highly unique in its teaching. It was Methodist in its theology (free will reigned as all important). It was Holiness in its application (no smoking, no lipstick, no movies, no television). It was Pentecostal in its beliefs (healing of the lame, the cripple and speaking in tongues often happened). And it was conservative in its services (no speaking in tongues in the big assembly. No standing. An orchestra would play in the front of the church every Sunday the old hymns.) Because of the strange and unique features of the Church, no other Church was anything like it. However, it could be clique-like in its overtones and saw its fair share of politics. However, Dad was 100% part of this church and bought into the way it operated.
On the trip, he went to a social gathering for the Church with young men and women. Both my mom and dad were at that party. Mom said that the military boy (my Dad) had all the stories and laughter revolving around him. He was an exceptional pianist, and she was intrigued. Dad also heard that my Mother was playing the organ, and if I remember correctly, he went to Church to hear her play. He thought she played quite nicely, and thought that maybe he should figure out if she was the type of girl he should pursue. So, he then went on to try to find out how smart my Mom was, and when he found out that she was valedictorian of her class, it sealed the deal.
Later in life, he often said that marrying a dumb wife would be dumb. He would explain how he check out my Mom’s smarts before getting emotionally involved. Later in the relationship my mom found out my dad had been asking about how bright she was. She was quite mad, and she would say, “What happened if something happened to me after being married and I became dumb?” Dad would always say something like, “Honey, it’s different after you’re married. I was just checking out before.”
The budding romance started to falter, however. My mom’s father had died, and my mom, who was courting my Dad after the Los Angles meeting via mail, started working full time to bring home enough money to feed her family because she was the oldest in the family. As the oldest, she was going to provide and she said that she felt guilty buying stockings for work because she couldn’t give this money to her family. My dad would later say that he worried that my mom was literary giving herself malnutrition during this time, because she saw food as a luxury. He wondered if this impacted her whole life. During this time, she not only wasn’t eating right, but she stops sending letters to my dad.
When the mail dried up, dad was heartbroken and hurt. The few letters he wrote were not returned. He would make the military guy, who delivered the mail, empty the mail sack every time to make sure he had not missed a letter from my mom. They stopped communicating.
However, the war final was over, and my aunts and uncles started to get old enough to also provide for the family, and my mom and dad met again.
“Do you want to get together,” asked my Mom.
“If we get together, we’re getting married,” said my Dad.
[The following fourparagraghs are an additon to the original story 11/1/2009 after my sister brought up the following]
My mother was serious about my father, and she decided that this really was the man that she loved. However, she knew that dad was raised right, and that dad even knew who Jesus Christ was. However, my dad had not given over to the will of the Lord. Those of us from the methodist background have a term that we call “backslidden,” which means that somebody has fallen out of step with God. If somebody dies during this stage, it means that they go to God without forgiveness. Now, I do not know if dad was backslidden. I doubt that mom would have even dated him if he was backslidden, but mom knew that dad hadn’t really given all of his life over to the Lord. She also knew what type of a man my dad was. My dad would rather face hell fire and damnation rather than admit that he was wrong about something. All the Deffenbaugh’s had a very strong backbone, and a strong inability to say that they were wrong. It is a fault in the family.
However, when they do admit they are wrong, it is because they know that they are truly broken and contrite of heart. My mom knew that my dad could not lie to her or to the church. She told him, “I’m not marrying a man that doesn’t have the right relationship with Jesus. I’m not marrying you unless you go down in front of the church and confess the Lord Jesus as your savior.”
For some men this would be a disaster. They would lie to themselves and to their wives to just get what they want. This is a story that my mom would tell and my dad would agree to, but even years after it happened, dad didn’t want to talk about it much. My dad knew that he hadn’t given his life completely to the Lord, and he may of remembered what his grandma Deffenbaugh told him so many years when he heard the story of how his brother was healed. I don’t know what was going through my dad’s head, because he never told us. What we do know is that my dad rededicated his life to the Lord, and my mom saw him go down to the front of the church, and come back with the right relationship with the Lord. “I was there,” my Aunt Norma said at my Dad’s funeral.
I don’t know that I could recommend this method to any couple that I know, but I think that this was a risk free thing for my mom. My mom had a sixth sense about those that she loved, and she knew that as a wife the one thing she would never let her man do, would be to back away from the salvation found in Christ Jesus. During his whole life, my dad loved his salvation, but for most of his life, his salvation was made richer by his wife. And if it was my mom that encouraged him to go down that aisle, it was a decision that he made, and made him love his eventual wife all the more for all the days that he knew her.
He walked the aisle. They got married, and Dad was proud they were both virgins.
The fact that my Mom and Dad got married must have caught everybody off guard. My father had a short temper, and often said things that he would later regret. His wife would never say a bad word about anybody. Her family generally came from stock that reflected the gentle side of human nature. If somebody stole something, her family might say “well you never know if that person needed the money more than us.” My dad would have grabbed a 2 by 4 and gone after the thief. Occasionally, his loss of temper resulted for the good.
An example is from when they were first married: my grandmother on my mom’s side never had much money, but what little she had, she would share. If she had an house, any one could ask her for a nights stay. In one instance, my mom’s mother had a family that was living with her. My grandmother had given up her bed to the couple, and she was sleeping on the couch and sewing shirts to make ends meet. (My grandmother sewed shirts for Sammy Davis Jr and Clark Gable in Los Angeles, but since her church didn’t allow her to see movies, she had no idea of who they were. She had a gift with a sewing needle and was in demand. She admitted that Mr Davis was very nice, but Mr Gable was no fun to be around.)
My dad was visiting his mother-in-law and saw this family homesteading in her house. He went into the house, blew his fuse, and threw them out of the house.
“They were living off of a widow,” he said.
My mom said it was one of the best things that my dad did when they were first married. She knew that it was the wrong thing for these people to leach off of my grandmother, and while she could have never of throw that group out of her mother’s house, my dad did it effortlessly, and felt no guilt about it.
Even my grandmother was grateful, but at the same time, she felt that my dad was tough on this family without a job. If it was up to her, she would have left them stay since they had a tough life. I asked her about the incident when I was only a child of 11 after I had heard the story one day in the car from my mom and dad.
“Your dad is a hard man,” was the only words she wanted to say.
Dad was so involved in the church that he decided to become a lay teacher. As my mom would tell the story, they were part of the church, and the services and events that dad would hold were very well attended and growing. As a matter of fact, it became apparent that the senior pastor of the church was getting smaller and smaller groups to his services and the off night events led by my dad was getting larger and larger. Then one day, the senior pastor came in and announced to other people on his staff that my dad “had lost the Spirit of The Lord in his preaching.” Overnight, my dad was told that he couldn’t lead events, and his career as a lay pastor was broken. He told various flavors of the story all the years of his life. It broke his heart, and ended up turning him out of his chosen church, as nobody in the senior management of the church checked on the events. Although this was filled with pain, it got him out of the ministry, which I believe was the best for his life. When I was a young man I thought I might want to be in the ministry, and dad came in and clearly called out that he would not stop me, but I needed to feel the call of God calling me out. “I believe you can’t force your way in,” he said. He had tried, and he had failed.
Now, it would be easy for some to blame the Church that dad went to for the unkind words that he received. Perhaps, some in the church might recognized that my dad had a bit of an ego, and I’ll never know if dad was too aggressive. This is not the point. If you knew him later in life, you would recognize that not to use his skills in business would have been a vast misuse of his talent. Although struggling in his church, he loved his church, and even years later, he would reflect back kindly and with passion on the lesson of this church. Although he may have had hurt still from those many years ago, I could see that it was all by the hand of providence for the best.
Even with these problems, it was an easy life at first being married because dad was hired by Shell Oil, and he was perceived as an up and comer. After being there for a couple of months, they told him that he needed to go to the library and find all the resources so Shell could start refining asphalt. As a young engineer, he came back with the solution, and the plant went on to add this process to their output. They told him that he had a very bright future and would probably end up being the senior engineer (the top technical person at the plant), but my grandfather needed help on his farm, so Dad decided he needed to help him out and he quit Shell Oil.
So, after being in the Forest Service, after being in the Air Force, after being a Meteorologist, after being a preacher, and after being an oil man designing refineries, he became a farmer. Dad read every science book on farming there was. My Grandfather, with only his 8th grade education, would read everything, but couldn’t do the science. However, when the mint on the farm started throwing off 3 times the previous yield, my grandfather knew something right was happening.
My dad and grandfather would get along great. However, my grandmother always wanted to help my dad and mom run their life. So after turning around the farm (and hurting his back in the process), dad knew that he needed to get his wife away from his mom. My grandmother was loving but controlling. However, my grandparents felt abandoned, and when my dad left the farm, he had nary a cent. My grandmother’s brother and his wife, “Uncle John and Aunt Edith” took in the young couple in their house in Seattle. Mom would almost always be in tears when she describe this time, as he was so thankful that somebody took them in.
So mom and dad were in Seattle, and dad was bright and interviewed everywhere. Except for Boeing. He did not want to get a job at Boeing. He heard bad stories about them. He heard they were big. He looked everywhere. And when all job avenues closed down, he said he came home one night.
“I took my hat off my head and was throwing it on the shelf, and I told your Mom, ‘Well honey, maybe the Lord just wants me to work at Boeing, and if that’s what he wants, I guess I should go,’” he said. He said he gave up his will to God’s will. And as soon as he said it, he felt the power of God come down on his shoulders and he began to cry like a baby. He told that story many times to me, and each time he describe the hat going onto the shelf with a mime of the action, his voice would break and he would catch himself before he shed a tear. 50 years after the fact, the same emotions.
He went down to Boeing, and they hired him immediately to work manufacturing engineering. However, by this time, he had two young girls. He needed more money to get a place to live. He heard that they were hiring in finance, and he said, “I only wanted to know one thing. Were they paying overtime?”
They were and he moved. He went into estimating contracts, and became extremely successful. He had up to 1,300 people working for him at one time. He setup Boeing’s plant in Huntsville, Alabama.
“They told me that they’d make me a Vice President if I moved to Wichita, but I couldn’t see moving you kids,” he told us. Tough man. Soft heart.
So, he continued to work at Boeing, but he said that he needed some future earning power. He always listened to my grandfather. As I said, my grandfather was tough, but he loved my dad. They fought, but he loved my dad. He basically left him without a penny after the farm, but he loved my dad. For instance, when dad bought a piece of land to build his first house, my grandfather came down and put weeks of free effort into helping my Dad build a house on it. All for free.
Now my grandfather was filled with prudence and entrepreneurship. Grandpa had bought business, lands and apartments. So, when dad said that he needed some investments, my grandfather offered his advice. Part of this was to buy my grandfather’s old farm. Many years later, when the farm turned out to be an incredibly lucrative investment, some in the family thought that my Dad had some how cut out his brother. My Dad used to tell me, “I offered it to my brother first, and told him that I was going to buy it if he didn’t. Your uncle laughed at me and basically said that it was a useless piece of land.”
The land was in Vancouver, Washington. Dad had read in the newspaper that the long term plan for the area was to have a bridge to Portland in the next 20 year. He knew that the land value to sky rocket some day in the future after the bridge came in. So he bought the land. Many years later, it was worth millions of dollars. Many people will say, “Man don’t you wish we have bought this land 20 years ago?” Dad was the man that did it.
He had this investment, he had other investments. He bought apartments and nursing homes. When he finally retired from Boeing, he had enough. He was 60 years old, and he “retired” to his 20 acre spread on Puget Sound with my mother.
Retired to most people means golfing. To Dad it meant taking a piece of land and turning it into a little piece of heaven. So while he would put in roughly 25 years at Boeing, he would end up putting in 24 years as a full time job of recreating 20 acres on Puget Sound. I could not begin to describe everything that he did, but, as an example, when my Mom stated she wanted the house that was on the property to be their permanent home, Dad decided that it was a bit too small, so he propped up each of the four sides and pushed the walls out. He did things that most men would never consider doing.
Then 6 years ago he lost his wife of over 50 years. She was 79 years old and still playing the Organ for church all these years. Her death was amazing. They had a church group at the house, and they were singing hymns. My Mom, who was playing the piano, said “I’m dizzy,” and passed out. She died within 24 hours of a brain hemorrhage. We thought the loss of his wife would kill him, but while he was down for about a year, he came back. He found his friends, made his property shine, and was delighted when my Children would spend their summer vacations at the house with my wife. I always asked him to come to California, but he said he wanted to die in his Port Orchard house.
However, 4 years ago, he called me on the phone.
“My lungs aren’t that good, and they think that asbestos got into my lungs and it is going to kill me,” he said.
Somewhere in the years, he was working in the refinery. Asbestos was everywhere, and he said that he had often been covered in fine fiber. While we close down a house today if a little is found in the ceiling, he had been breathing in asbestos dust. After all these years, the fibers were cutting his lungs apart. While he could still argue the finer points of the economy, his lungs were giving out. I had my wife and kids spend an extra long summer vacation with him this year, as I expected that maybe I would only get one more year out of him. When I visited him a couple of months ago, he would sit in the kitchen in front of the big window that overlooked the Puget Sound, and we would talk just like we had for the last 40 years of my life. He would watch “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” with my kids every night and guess the answers. My Dad and I even went around on his property in his motorized golf cart. While he didn’t want to walk very far, we would talk about everything. He would describe the buildings he wants to build, and the changes that he wanted to make to the land. So, when he said he wasn’t sure he would last over 6 months, I was sure he was wrong.
But my sister called me on Thursday to say that dad couldn’t get up the stairs, and that his helper had found him in between the floors. So, they got him into bed, and they called hospice. Hospice put him on a morphine drip, and while my sister was driving to his house, he died. Not 5 paces from where his beloved wife had taken ill and lost conscious just 6 years earlier.
And while I have a jagged hole in my soul, and my heart feels as if it will break, I recognize that it was a life well spent, and I know he ended up doing exactly what he wanted to do.
He died in his house today next to where his wife had left his side.
Although there is grief in passing, I know that he had many books on the scriptures, and I saw him many times by the side of his bed praying. Death had no fear for him, and when I go, I hope that I can go the same way.
God is good.
