My Dad

The story of a man as I saw him, through my eyes, experiences and the tales he told.

I wasn’t there.  I didn’t see it happen.  On December 8th, 1932 a boy was born into the world in Oklahoma.  He joined his father, mother and three sisters in the heart of the country.  His parents named him Billy (not William) George.  Some stories survive his childhood and they center around his father (William) and the lessons he learned from him growing up.  William had served in the U.S. Army during WW1 as an artillery teamster in France.  He had been an Oklahoma City Police Officer and he had been a blacksmith.  There are tales of catfishing and bird hunting and working in fields.  At one point they lived in southern California as migrant field workers, picking crops by hand.  

Times were hard compared to other places and definitely by our standards today.  This was between two wars and there wasn’t much to be casually had for the average family then.  As we know WW2 started the day before Billy turned 9.  His memories that I have heard are reminiscent of the somber mood of the country.   During the war, one of the recurring memories that he relayed to me include the sounds from the big warbirds taking off and flying in the area.  He still gets goosebumps at the sound of a big radial engine.  His life was that of a normal schoolboy during those times with friends and buddies and regular life went on.

 

Sometime in middle school he championed an unknown little tomboy of a girl.  They didn’t know each other then.  She was playing marbles with the boys and beating them when one little ruffian decided he was mad at her for winning his best marbles.  He told the little blonde girl that he was going to whip her when Billy stepped in and told him he’d have to come through him.  The little tough relented and that story rested.  This story resurfaces in 2017 as they are sitting reminiscing.

 

When he was 15 there was talk about this little blonde girl with a lineback dun horse that was racing against and beating everyone around Lawton.  They met at one of these races and somewhere in there, this strapping young man started wooing the little blonde tomboy named Margie.  They would get used pop bottles and turn them in for the return fee and use that money to go to the movies together.  This went on for a couple years and finally in June 1950 they were married.  He was 17 and she had just turned 16 in February.

 

School ended for them and the workforce beckoned.  Stories abound of working on ranches with horses and cattle, doing those chores of a working cowboy’s life.  They didn’t have a car to start and would get around on horseback.  One story of a vehicle they had the use of was on a ranch owned by Bonny Owens.  Bonny was a man and had given them a house to stay in and loaned them an old pickup truck.  The story goes that there were no floorboards in the truck and you had to park it on a hill to roll start it every time.  

Another story that I vividly remember is of the time she decided that he needed more wave in his hair so she set him in curlers just before the boss showed up at the house one evening much to Billys’ embarrassment.

 

In 1952 the first child came along.  Billy (not William) Wayne.  The stories of the time were pretty hard scrabble but I never once heard either of them complain.  One vivid remembered story is of the baby bed being the top drawer of a chest of drawers.  The house they lived in had cracks between the boards and when the wind would blow Margie would cover the drawer with a damp towel to keep the dust off of him.  

 

There was a period of working as a welder on pipelines with an older cousin to make a living, laying pipeline through wild swamp country and living the life of a construction hand.  Two more children came, Daniel and Janet.

 

A change came in the wind and they moved to Washington State where he pursued a career in welding.   Working at the shipyards in Tacoma (one of which I worked at many years later) and at the Bremerton Naval Shipyard.  I remember him telling me about helping to refit the new jet age flight deck on the aircraft carrier Coral Sea there.  He talked of some of the other shops he worked on there as well.

 

They lived in Tacoma, Washington and that is where I first met Billy G.  In May of 1964 amidst some trauma that is normal, a late (8 years younger than my nearest sibling) boy was born into the world.  Jeff is my name and if this story is myopic in any way, the fault is solely mine.  I remember sojourns with my siblings and mom and dad to visit relatives who lived in the area, but my memories of living in Tacoma are truly limited to flashes of airplanes in my mind.  Many years later, I understood why, as mom would take us in the car down to the landing approach area for McChord Field and we would watch the military planes coming and going.

 

We moved to a little town called Eatonville, where we had horses, chickens and dogs.  Dad started breaking and training horses as a business and I hung around the house.  My older sibs were in school and my playmates were the chickens and our two Collies Kathy and Carla.  We had a Welsh pony that us kids were in charge of named Cyclone.  I remember in the summers, going to the creek and using him as a diving board.

 

I remember my father’s huge hands holding mine and looking up at the towering giant who would pick me up and play.  Put me on the back of the horses, encourage me to learn and discipline me when I needed it (I remember more than one spanking).  I also remember my sister as a constant presence.

 

Dad had a freak incident one day while shoeing a horse for a client… he slipped on the dewy grass and broke his back.  I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but during recovery, he was  offered a job as a welding engineer with Bechtel Power.

 A decision was made to take the position and the next thing I knew we were packed up and driving across country.  Really, Plymouth Massachusetts in 1969. We had sent my oldest brother off to College in Texas so it was down to just 5 of us on the trip.  We weren’t able to take the horses so they stayed in Washington until we could retrieve them.  I remember a house up the hill from a lake that we lived in.  I remember catching a catfish in the lake and trying to keep him as a pet in the bathtub  (very short lived) and I remember having chicken pox.  A normal childhood, right?  Dad was a shirt and tie company man who didn’t have to get down in the trenches anymore and we lived the typical life of a 70’s family.  There were friends made and life went on.  At one point Dad and Daniel flew to Washington, bought a one ton truck and loaded up the horses and brought them to us.  The story of that trip has the two of them getting off the highway at the wrong exit and winding up in Harlem, two caucasian cowboys with a truck full of horses, in 1970.  Just picture that.  There was no problem and some locals got them headed back to the right place after laughing and joking and talking about why they had a truck full of horses.  

There were visits to the old seacoast towns, historic places like the Plymouth Rock and even a visit aboard the Mayflower 2 which had been constructed and sailed from England to Plymouth to commemorate the pilgrims landing.

 

That job ended and we went to Connecticut next.  I remember a snug house and a change in dogs, we now had a Dachshund and a Siberian Husky.  More friends were made and one of the strongest memories I have is of sledding down the hills on the local tobacco farm and going into the old wood barn and smelling the tobacco.  I remember dad bundled up against the cold with that stupid Dachshund under his coat because the dog was too cold to walk in the snow.

 

Wyoming came next in 1973.  Rock Springs, along Interstate 80.  This is when some of my strongest memories were made.  We couldn’t buy a place right away so Bechtel housed us in the Best Western Outlaw Inn.  We knew where we were going to live but a house had to be brought out and a well had to be drilled so in the meantime we lived in the motel.  I was enrolled in school in Superior and each school morning I would eat breakfast in the motel restaurant and they would pack my lunch.  When we did finally move onto our place along a canyon called Horse Thief Canyon, we had a 14 by 70 mobile home and they couldn’t get good water in a well thousands of feet deep.  Dad built a steel 5,000 gallon water tank and we would put 55 gallon drums in the back of that old one ton flatbed truck and drive into Rock Springs and fill them then return and empty them into that tank.  Danny had started working as  a welder and Janet had college classes so a lot of the things we did in Wyoming were accomplished by what had become a family of 3.

 

Dad and I went and got the lumber to build a barn for the horses, built raised garden beds, fenced the property.  My ninth birthday rolled around and dad was home from work when I got off the bus.  After I had changed out of school clothes he gave me my birthday present.  My first real gun!  It was a single shot .22 rifle and a whole bunch of shells.  He took me out back to our target area that day and a long life filled with making a living around guns started.  I should back up and say that all of us kids were raised with loaded guns of varying calibers in the house.  We were taught not to touch things that weren’t ours from an early age.  When we got old enough to hold a gun, Dad and mom would take us shooting and teach us how.  We knew without video games, what a gun could do and the consequences of abusing them.

 

We had our horses in Wyoming and rode a lot.  Some of my strongest memories there are arranged around our horses.  Dad and I would saddle up and ride out to explore the area.  We lived in western history central.  This was the land written about by Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey and Luke Short.  The country and the characters made famous in the movies by John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark.  Every canyon had a story to tell, every dry river bed held a heartbreak and lost ruins of homesteaders dreams were scattered all over the area.  The Overland stage ran through here as well as the pony express.  We had wild horses running the open plains, antelope and deer would often be in our yard.  This was a dream for a young boy.  Dad and I discovered old sod houses in the canyons and wondered who had lived there and what had happened to those long lost souls.  We would speak with the roaming Basque sheep herders that lived in their wagons with their dogs tending the roaming flocks.  We would make a rest stop in the cold weather in a canyon bend and build a small fire as a warming respite from the biting cold as we rode on winter days.  If someone had been around to photograph us we would have been indistinguishable from the cowboys 90 years earlier with our chaps, boots, hats and coats with the collars turned up and ropes hanging from our saddles as well as rifles slung in scabbards.  One of dad’s favorite stories is of us riding across the canyon and seeing some rabbits up against a hill.  I ran my horse over to them, jumped down in mid stride while pulling my rifle from the scabbard and once I hit the ground, opened fire on my quarry.  To this day, neither of us remember if I hit the rabbit (if I did, we took it home and ate it, as nothing was killed for sport) but we both laugh at the memory.  We collected Apache Tears (obsidian orbs) from amongst the lava beds.  We explored old towns that were just ruins.  We collected fossils and old relics of those bygone days.  We were in Wyoming for 3 years and a lot of my character was formed there at the guidance of the man I still thought of as a giant among other men.  

 

One hunting story from Wyoming was about Prairie Chickens.  A bunch of the guys at his work got together and decided to go hunting them.  A Prairie Chicken is a strain of grouse that lives out in the sage lands and there were big flocks of them north of Rock Springs.  I had earned enough money from chores to buy a single shot .410 gauge shotgun and dad had drilled me with practice shooting on thrown pop cans so that I could hit 3 cans thrown at the same time before any hit the ground.  Thanks to his teaching, I was pretty good with that gun.  Anyway, there were about 20 of the guys and me out that day and as we got out of the trucks, they all agreed to let “the kid” have first shot at the birds since I was only 10 and had a single shot gun.  Well, they let me get in the first shot and before any of them could raise a gun, I had knocked down 3 birds and was taking a bead on a fourth.  When the smoke had cleared I had 4 birds and they were left open mouthed.  I remember dad just smiling and shaking his head as he cut a piece off his old red bandana to tie around those birds feet and hang them from my belt.  Needless to say, the guys didn’t have any qualms about not letting me have first shot after that.  Funny enough, we heard that story relayed at an old welders reunion party 30 years later from one of the guys that was there.

 

I remember one incident at school.  We were studying about the pilgrims and I told the class about going on the Mayflower 2 and seeing the Graves and homes of those pilgrims.  The teacher, who had not traveled, much listened in disbelief and after class called my dad at work.  She told him I had a very active imagination and he agreed before asking what the call was about.  She told him of my story and then said “he hasn’t really been there, right?” and dad told her we had been.  It totally shook her up, having never been to either ocean herself.   Dad splurged in Wyoming and he bought a 1974 Dodge Charger it was the fastest car he’d ever owned and he had a blast driving it.

 

Next on the agenda was Michigan.   We had relatives there as well as the next job.  I was a little unhappy at first because I so loved our life in Wyoming.  The kids in the new school called me the Wyoming cowboy.  Eventually dad got me straightened out and I spent time planting a garden, fishing in the local river and wishing I had a mini bike.  I had a 10 speed bicycle  that I rode everywhere and spotted the mini bike at a yard sale.  But I didn’t have the money and mom said no so it was just a dream.  Middle school, I took Spanish and tried football and scouts.  The best time though was hunting with dad.  Uncle Don had some farmland that had been planted in corn and after the harvest, we hunted pheasant.  Duck season rolled around and dad taught me to hunt them.  We cleaned and ate a lot of birds.

Tragedy……Dad and Danny were roping calves in Michigan with the state roping association.  Danny had married Alice and her brother in law had an arena at his house.  They were practicing and the cinch ring on the saddle broke, throwing dad into the fence post.  Danny rushed to his side and saved his life by keeping his airway open.  Broken ribs and vertebrae.  Months in the hospital then convalescence at home and a move to Arizona at doctors suggestion and courtesy of the Bechtel family, there was a job there.

 

So, once again, we were off to unknown country.  The movers packed us up and off we went to live temporarily in the town of Litchfield Arizona.  We met up with another Bechtel family and I learned to skateboard there.  We bought a house out in the town of Buckeye and settled into small town life.  We did a lot of exploring in the Sonora Desert learning about the plants and animals.  One of the things I remember best about this time was going dove hunting with dad.  We would go out into the fields and the irrigation ditches  around town and hunt dove.  A limit of dove each and we had a pretty tasty meal.  There were many experiences to be had and lessons to be learned here.  We got to connect with cousins that had not been seen in many years and explore the old mining towns like Wickenburg and the Vulture Mine as well as learn much more about geology and precious stones.  We also learned a lot about each other.  We traveled across country in a Ford van that we had built the interior of into a camping vehicle. 

One of the funniest times here was the day we were out west of town hunting pheasant in a field.  The most economical way to fertilize the fields there was by airplane.  If you have never seen a crop duster, google it or the plane “AGcat”.  The pilots were indeed the last of the pioneer airman breed.  They would take off in these dusters with minimal instrumentation and usually not being able to afford a full tank of fuel, would fill the dusting tanks full of the chemical of the day and take off into the sky.  These pilots would rarely get over a few hundred feet off the ground but they were true acrobats.  You would see them start high and dive into a field, often to below the level of the power lines running down the roadside.  They Would level off and open the dump on the dusting tanks and spray a line, flying to the far end of the field where they would wheel up and often do a wing over and come right back down into the field and spray the next line in the field.  Being crazy for these planes and their antics, I soon came to recognize the hammerhead, Immelman, and the reverses they used to line up on those crops.

Any way, we were out hunting and we heard the powerful engine of the crop duster in the next field over.  We stopped to watch and saw him come down from on high, like a fighter plane from 1915, his radial engine howling and his biplane missing only the top wing guns to be out of the golden era of war birds.  He came down from on high and did a swathe, wheeling up and swinging over, he dropped out of sight on the far end of the field.  There were power lines on poles on each end of this field, so we had seen him fly under the ones on our end of the field.  Well, we heard a tremendous “bang”, heard his engine sputter and cease and could hear the wind still streaming over his wings and a loud cursing voice.  We saw him land not too far away on the gravel road and we ran to see if he was okay.  As we arrived near his plane, I could see that the wooden propellor had been sheared off on each end and this knight of the air was climbing out of his cockpit cussing a “blue streak”.  He stripped off his WW1 flyers cap, lit a cigar and said “They’ll fire me for sure”.  We asked if he was okay and he said he was, but he figured the company would fire him because this was the third phone pole he had flown through in a month.  He then proceeded to tell us he had seen a bunch of pheasant two fields over.   We thanked him and walked away shaking our heads over the whole incident, and got a couple pheasant in the field two fields over.

 

Palo Verde started up and we were sent to St. Johns Arizona.  A coal fired generating station.  My freshman year of High School, my first true girlfriend, more hunting and fishing.  Dad mentored me in growing up and choosing a path to follow.  His advice was to always be true to yourself and not compromise.  He would take me to football games, dates with girls, and lots of hobbies.  Again, there was a lot of hunting and fishing as well as a year I spent learning to fence, you know, with swords!  Always a strong supporter, Dad encouraged each activity as a learning step in life.

 

A change came and he decided to separate from Bechtel and return to welding with the Boilermakers union.  A move to Valley, Washington where he bought 40 acres of land with a log cabin on it.  A true log cabin, it had no foundation, just log pilings upon which it sat.  He worked away from home because there was nothing close.  Usually he was gone all week and would come home Friday nights and leave again on Sunday night.  He put a lot of trust in me as a 15 year old kid and gave me a lot of responsibility.  On our weekends we built barns, cut timber, cut firewood, built gardens, fished and hunted.  We raised some cattle and he encouraged me through high school to do whatever I wanted, but to do it well.  I was the president of the FFA (Future Farmers of America), raised a dairy calf, ran a rabbitry, and learned responsibility.  When I graduated high school he gave me a car.  

 

Another move, back to western Washington and the Yelm area.  

Here is where I split off, with dad’s whole hearted support, I joined the Air Force to be a cop.  There were many years of constant support and help back and forth that followed.  A divorce for me and support from him as I went through that hardship.

 

He was always there when one of us kids needed help or just someone to talk with.  There was rarely any judgement on his part, he would listen and then give the best advice he could.  He would unconditionally help anyone who asked, especially our family.

 

There were many family gatherings and to see him play with the assorted grandkids was always a joy.  His pride was in our family, no matter how extended it became or how many generations it ran to.  At any given time, he was mentor, teacher, helper, confidante, counselor, companion to each of us and through the next 2 generations.  He “adopted” many people through the years who just needed that man in their life.

 

Through the years we spent together, I never experienced a more honest or open person.  His smile was genuine, handshake firm and purposeful and he gave of himself freely.

 

For the last 20 years I was lucky enough to live only 15 miles from him.  This meant many spontaneous fishing trips to the many local lakes.  We could spend all day and not say a lot, just fish and be or we could solve the world’s problems.  There was never any pressure to “get things done”.  Hunting trips, shooting trips, helping each other with home projects, and just generally being friends.  He was always proud of us kids and our families and would tell us.  His support for our endeavors never waned.

 

The call came one day in August and the news was given….CANCER.  that damned disease that knows no boundaries and cares not for your heart.  No real prognosis,  6 months?  Chemotherapy became a treatment options after long consideration. I was appointed as having his durable power of attorney.   Trips to chemo treatment,  the doctor, radiation therapy.  December rolled around and the doctor says the chemo is no longer working, another decision and no more chemo, entry into the hospice system.

A great Christmas celebration at my house and another at Kurt’s (a grandson) where dad enjoyed himself and got to spend more great family time with three generations of family and friends.

The long haul started in January.  Long nights spent at his bedside progressing to long days as well.  When asked how he felt he’d just give a smile and say, “okay”.  He never wanted to put anyone out or have us fret over him.  He had good days and bad as to be expected.  He had visits from long absent grandchildren that brightened his days and the constant companionship of his dog George.

March 20.  Brother Bill and I sat next to the bed and talked with dad, holding his hands and playing old country music he enjoyed on the stereo till midnight.  Bill stayed up with him and woke me around 4 am to take over.  I gave him some medication and held his hand and talked to him.  He passed away around 630 or so.  He went quietly and peacefully, no agony, restlessness  or hard breathing.   He just went to sleep.  As always, he did this task with his usual quiet strength.

 

This story is not a full accounting of his life, as no person can give that.  This is just a tale of some high points I know of or witnessed.

 

I sit here writing the last of this story crying.  We had his funeral that Friday and his memorial is scheduled for this Saturday.  I haven’t let him go yet and probably never shall.

 

Billy George Jackson;  my friend, counselor, confidante, teacher, My Father, My Dad.

Those who knew him loved him and he returned that love unconditionally, whether family or friends.

 

I miss you dad.

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