Family History

My Father’s Pastimes

My father was one of the worst golfers who ever lived.  He was a big guy, and he’d been an athlete when he was younger (he claimed that in high school he was the entire track team, competing in every event.  A track meet was like a decathlon for him).  He also, as a dermatologist, had a delicate touch for all medical procedures.  But put that man in front of a golf ball and something happened.  He swung too fast and often didn’t hit the ball squarely; when he did he had a terrific slice, so he spent the whole day walking down the right side of the golf course, often in the rough.  He was also lousy around the greens, and seemed to get the yips when he was chipping or putting.  He had bought a club that he thought would solve these problems.  “Let me have that chipper,” a remark he often made to his caddie, was one of the great comic lines of all time.  It was all my brother and I could do to keep from bursting into laughter, after he’d spent time poring over a shot (we knew what was coming).  In the clubhouse, there was a board where they listed people’s handicaps, and he had the second highest.  32.  Only one guy was higher, at 33.  At some point the handicap has no meaning.

Part of the problem was that, confronted with the choice of what golf club around Pittsburgh to belong to, he chose Oakmont Country Club, one of the most difficult courses in the world.  There were two other clubs in Pittsburgh where most of my friends belonged, Longue Vue[1] and Fox Chapel, but he tended not to like places where the upper crust went.  He wanted the good golf course.

What surprises me when I look back is that he wasn’t in the least bit self-conscious about his game.  He always had a caddie, who would witness this dreadful performance, and if we were on the course and ran into one or two people who would make us a foursome (depending on whether or not my brother was with us), he always offered to let them join us.  Total strangers.[2]

He neveretheless loved to play the game (and I loved to play with him, though I was terrible too.  My brother and I inherited his slice.  Is that genetic?)  He played on Wednesday afternoons, when all the doctors were out there, and often on Sundays as well.  You might have thought he’d have gotten better.  He never did.

I think what he really loved was walking the course.  Golf courses are beautiful, and sylvan, and he loved to walk.  If he had a free afternoon (in the winter, when it wasn’t golfing weather), he would go for a walk and invite me along.  We might walk in the neighborhood or go to Frick Park.  He loved the simple act of walking, looking around.

His attitude toward fishing was like his attitude to golf.  When I was young and we went to Cape May, New Jersey, he would rent an outboard (for a while he even had his own outboard motor.  I don’t know what that was all about) and go out on the canals, or the Delaware Bay, or the Atlantic Ocean, and fish.  When I think, sometimes, of how we took one of those dinky outboards that hardly had any horsepower and ventured out on the Atlantic, I’m astounded.  It doesn’t sound safe.  But he did it, and I never felt nervous because I was with him.

We would anchor and bottom fish, with squid for bait.  Our forays were never especially successful; often we didn’t catch a damn thing.  I think he just liked being on the ocean, smelling the salt air.  If we got a fish, fine; if not, what the hell.  We’d buy one at the fish market.

Around the age of ten, I became obsessed with fishing, I’m not sure why.  I read about it avidly, in magazines like Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, all of which I subscribed to.  I hated the winter issues that were largely about hunting.  Because I had the obsession, my father tried to find opportunities for us through his patients; one time we went to State College for the first day of trout season (I practiced fly casting by the hour in my front yard); another time way up the Monongahela river to fish for catfish (we had a guide, and caught three, in the foggy early morning hours when I could hardly see where I was casting; when the sun came up and the fog cleared, there was a huge steel mill pouring some kind of liquid into the river.  We didn’t eat those fish); to Lake Pymatuning, a man-made lake where we got skunked until the very end of our stay, when I caught a carp alongside the dock (my father called it a buglemouth bass to make me feel better); at a private lake owned by one of his patients that was stocked with trout, and where we also had a guide, who told me that he’d been the guide for Willie Mays and Hank Aaron as well; I caught some beautiful rainbow trout there.

I think that his most avid pastime—this is one I share with him, along with walking, although I skip the golf game—was reading.  He always read the paper when he got home from work, sitting in the living room chair that he preferred and drinking a highball (I think it was whiskey mixed with a little soda); after dinner he sat there and read fiction, sipping from cans of Iron City beer.  He took a nap after dinner, lying down in bed, then would get his second wind and go down for an evening of reading.  (I think the nap was a concession to his leukemia diagnosis, which he got when I was ten, though my mother didn’t tell my brother and me until I was sixteen, six months before he died.)

His tastes were somewhere between high brow and medium brow fiction; we had lots of books by John O’Hara, one of his favorites, also had Marjorie Morningstar, In Another Country, Herzog.  Toward the end of his life he read all of Faulkner, whom he loved.  His original ambition was to be a writer, and to live in the South, but his father would only pay for his education if he went to medical school, so that’s what he did (and had a wonderful career as a doctor.  Much beloved).  He took solace in reading fiction.  I wound up living out his true wish, though I didn’t know that; my sister told me years later, after I had published several books while living in North Carolina.

He went to bed somewhere between 11:00 and midnight, but was a problem sleeper, and would sometimes abandon the bed and try to find someplace where he could be more comfortable.  I don’t know what that was all about.  Sometimes on the weekend, if I had stayed up to watch the late movie and professional wrestling, he would stumble bleary-eyed into the room where I was watching, realize that place was taken, and head off somewhere else.  He sometimes went downstairs and had a snack.  He got back to bed eventually.

I often reflect on how difficult his short life was.  He was adopted by my grandfather at age two, taken from San Antonio, where he was born, to Pittsburgh, where he grew up.  He was a “bad kid” in grade school, getting lousy grades (I’ve often wondered if that was a subliminal reaction to being taken from his birth family; he wasn’t told he’d been adopted until he was an adult), so his father sent him to military school in Virginia, but as it turned out he loved the place.  He actually stayed there one summer to work.  His grades at that school were excellent.

He and his father apparently had that dispute about his vocation; his father would only pay for college if he went to Pitt and studied medicine.  My father’s grades as an undergraduate were lousy, but when he met my mother he changed the course of his life and got great grades in medical school, even though he was married and had a daughter, which was quite unusual in those days.  His schooling was interrupted by Pearl Harbor, after which he enlisted and served as a medic in the Philippines, earning a Bronze Star.

Once he got out of the service, he had to finish his schooling and do his residency as a dermatologist in New York.  When he got back to Pittsburgh he worked in his father’s office, earning a salary.  He didn’t have his own practice and reap the benefits of that until his father died, in the early fifties.  I guess that was his golden time; my brother Bill had been born in ’46, I came along in ’48, and Rusty was born in ’55.  But he apparently got his leukemia diagnosis in ’59 or ’60, so that untroubled period didn’t last long.  His final years, as his health declined, were quite difficult.  He died on New Years Day, 1965.

I have, as of this writing, lived thirty years longer than he.

[1] Note the pretentious name.

[2] He always introduced himself as Dr. Guy.  I can’t remember ever hearing him say Bill Guy.  It was a more formal time, of course, and in those days my brother and I called all adults Mr., with their last names.