Father's Day 2011

My father worked at Breece Plywood on Thirteenth Street along the floodwall. He worked there from 1937 until 1969, around the time it closed. His office was parallel to the railroad tracks, and I used to love going there on those occasions when he had to go in for one reason or another and I happened to be out of school. Sometimes the boiler tender would allow me to sling a few shovels of coal into the massive furnace, or blow the whistle which marked off some noteworthy point in time. Often I would slide a Coke out of the machine which had a serious design flaw that lined up an open cell every so often and left a bottle vulnerable to attentive pilchers.

Although the time I shared with my father at Breece's was mainly in the Sixties, the factory and offices as I saw them could have easily been seen in the same condition four or five decades earlier. It was a place frozen in time.

My father hit his teen years about the time the country hit the skids and fell into The Depression. I recall an event my dad told me of a scene he witnessed through his office window, and though he didn't explicitly say it, I believe the event must have taken him back to his own childhood in those cold days of austere deprivation. He saw two children about eight or ten years old walking down the railroad tracks. These were neighborhood kids, he figured, since he had seen them walking the tracks from time to time. He began to notice they would carry between them a bushel basket and every once in a while they would bend and place something in the basket. After a couple days of this he walked out to ask them what they were doing and they said they were picking up coal, which had fallen from the passing rail cars so they could keep their house heated. He asked around the plant who the kids were, and somebody knew them. He called the coal company and had several tons of coal delivered to the address. They probably never knew how it happened, but at least for that winter they knew warmth.

Thanks to my dad for that lesson. Now, on his tombstone are the words, "what you have done to least of my brothers you have done to me." He was a good man, and I miss him.