The License Plates

 Dad was into vanity license plates, and a handful of them graced various vehicles over the years.

When he married Grandma Billington, she was already driving a van with the vanity plate 7DWARFS. That got an upgrade, to 9 KIDS, now that Aunt Karen and I were in the mix.  When Uncle Daniel was born, it was promptly upgraded again, to 10 KIDS.  Although I don't know how many of them you met, after the original group of us kids were adults, Grandma and Grandpa Billington eventually adopted five more children from various sources, from the foster system.  15 KIDS.  Lots of looks on the road, no doubt.

There were others of course.  Every Ham Radio call sign Dad went through after he reobtained his license as an adult in the 90s, until he got the highest license rating, he had the plates for, too. KG7HB was his first one. I don't remember the other call signs now, but once he got his Extra Class rating, he filed for a vanity call sign to go with it, W7FJB, and of course got those plates as well.  Those call sign plates were what he kept on his daily driver for probably the last 20+ years.  He loved being a ham radio operator, one of many hobbies that he honestly never made enough time to enjoy for himself.

The plate he had from even before I was born, and kept active on his 1963 Dodge Sedan even after it was undriveable, was FJB 3.  W7FJB had displaced it as his #1, but the FJB 3 plates were dutifully renewed annually, and those new reissue plates would come in sometimes. He wouldn't install the new ones, because no need, but he absolutely was not going to let them go back into the vanity pool, either. Here's one of the pristine, never installed ones.

Another notable plate was DADCAT, which kicked around for quite a while in the 1990s, and I think most of you remember when we got the MOMMY plates put on Mom's car when we lived at the Fire Station House. When Dad and Grandma Crook were first married, vanity plates were really not her thing, but Dad convinced her to put in for some. In those days, nothing about that process was electronic, so you had to write down three choices. Someone somewhere would get the form routed to them, manually check the files to see if anyone already had the plate you wanted.  If so, they'd check your second and then third choice.  If all were taken, you'd get a letter telling you to try again. Grandma Crook put in for PATTY for her first choice, and her initials RPB for her second one. Unsure what to do for option three, she just put down MOMMY.  And that's what showed up, weeks later.  In retrospect, it's amazing that one wasn't already taken, too.  That was in 1974.

After all the kids grew up and moved out, Grandma Crook signed over the MOMMY plates to Aunt Karen, who drove with them for many years, but eventually your cousin David grew up.  Karen decided it was time to let them go, and we had moved back to Washington by then, so they went to us, which was awesome. I remember riding in Grandma Crook's 1963 Pontiac Station wagon, in the back, no seat belts of course, all the time, with those plates on it, and then her other cars she bought later.  There's another story about the Pontiac wagon and fire trucks.... making a note for later.... but having the MOMMY plates at our house, on a car that you guys all got to ride in.... pretty cool full circle for me.

Mom of course moved to California eventually, and couldn't keep them since she no longer lived in Washington. I had those plates transferred to the blue cargo trailer to hold onto them while I was still there.  When I decided to move back to Nebraska, I gifted them to Ashley Domingo, one of the moms from VanWestCC who had six children of her own and who I was sure would treasure them as much as our family did.  Those MOMMY plates were in the family for 47 years!

As an aside, around the time I first got Farley the Dodge Diplomat, I became aware of how license plate numbers were assigned in Washington. Several years before, Washington had rolled out the blue mountain on white background as seen a few paragraphs up, and reset their numbering scheme from XXX000 to 000XXX so they could start over at 001AAA.  Farley's plates were 437DJH, and I kept noticing a bunch of other DJH plates around locally, like more than I expected under the assumption that plates were assigned statewide.  I asked Dad about this, since he bought and sold so many cars through the GSA state auctions (yet another tale) and knew the folks at the DMV on a first name basis.  Turns out, batches of plates are sent to the various county DMV locations, so having a bunch of plates in the same sequence being issued out of one location would of course result in you seeing that sequence often in the general area of that office.  Which makes a lot of sense, of course.

I observed over the next few years, as updated sequences were coming out, that the 000D__ plates had given way to the 000E__ plates, and the 000F__ plates were coming up fast. I mentioned to Dad at some point that the the F-series plates were of course going to come up and cross FJB at some point, and wondered where.

Well, like I said, Dad knew people.

Several months later, Mom and I moved to Nebraska for the first time. It was 1993.

I didn't register Farley in Nebraska right away, because it wasn't clear how long we would be there.  Kept renewing the Washington plates, because we were, after all, college students, not ingrained residents, yet. Turned out that helped make the upcoming surprise possible.

One day, got a thick envelope from the State of Washington.  Huh, what's this?  Opened it up, and could not believe what I was holding.

Standard issue sequence plates, from Washington.  Not vanity plates, but regular serial sequence plates like everyone else gets.

004FJB

Are you SERIOUS??

So, the rest of the story.  Dad went to the DMV and talked to his People, in that friendly disarming way that he did, and inquired about how each office got whichever letter sequences they do.  Turns out they just routinely order batches of plates when they get relatively low, to make sure they have the next ones in before they run out of whatever is on hand.  The letter sequence they'd get when they did this was just whatever was next, no rhyme or reason.  So Dad laid out his plan and explained why it would be so cool, and the ladies at his DMV office there loved it.  From that day forward, they checked daily to see what letter sequences the State was up to and had issued to various offices, and when the FJB plates were included in the next batch to go out, they ordered that batch in even though they didn't really quite need them yet.  Upon arrival, they removed both sets, 003FJB and 004FJB, and gave Dad a call.

Dad pulled off a lot of impossible miracles in his life, no doubt, but this one is right up there with the best of them.  How does anyone manage to get regular series license plates for their car with their initials? There's 1000 plates per letter sequence, so take 1000 random people and maybe you might get a few hits. But if you have a roman numeral after your name and get that plate with the right number?  Inconceivable.  Unless you're Frank Billington III and have lots of People on your team.

The next year we decided we were in Nebraska to stay, for a while anyway, and registered the car there and got Nebraska plates on it. But this event was one of the greatest surprise gifts ever, and I still have those plates, somewhere, they will always be treasured.  I don't know if Dad ever installed the 003FJB plates on anything. He certainly registered them to one of his cars, but I don't know which one.  I'm certain they're still around, and I hope that Grandma Billington does not toss them...

The Catalog

Before the internet existed, the best way for a company to promote and sell their products was with printed catalogs sent in the mail.  A few companies still do this, but the days of catalogs for everything are long gone.

Once you purchased something from a company like this, or so much as showed interest via some other correspondence, you were likely to get added to a mailing list and would start getting catalogs from them perpetually forever. You see, even if you didn't want anything from it, chances are you'd leave it lying around and someone else would pick it up to look at in a waiting room, or bathroom, or just bored at work, because.... no internet.  And certainly, no smartphones. Back when I was a kid, at breakfast we would read cereal boxes. The backs were covered with cartoons or puzzles or some nonsense to hold your attention (and upsell the product), but it didn't take long to get through that, so you'd read the sides.  The ingredients.  Where it was packaged.  Everything.  In the bathroom, if your present task required a long sit and there were no copies of Reader's Digest handy, you might even stoop to reading shampoo bottles and stuff.  Maybe you guys also did such things before you got your smartphones?

Anyway, that was a big tangent, sorry.  Catalogs.

Also when I was an older kid, say 13+, I already knew I wanted to be a firefighter.  Aunt Karen briefly had a subscription to the trade magazine Firehouse, before I took it over. Every advertisement in there, for everything from work gloves to radios to hoses to actual fire engines and ladder trucks, had a Reader Service Card number on it.  Magazines always had those paperboard postcards you could tear out of an issue and fill out if you saw it wherever and wanted to get your own subscription to it. Firehouse also had those, but in addition had the aforementioned Reader Service Cards, with numbers on it from like 100 to 250 on the back. You'd fill out the postcard with your name and address, circle the numbers of things you wanted to know more about, send the postcard back in, and they would forward your info to the various companies to respond as they saw fit.

Now, these companies don't know anyone from anyone. So when I started filling out a few Reader Service Cards, they started sending me stuff like crazy with no idea that I was not yet even in high school.  I got a VHS cassette of a demo for an airport crash truck once. Tons of marketing trinkets, many posters of fire trucks in the style of posters you'd see at a car dealership. And catalogs. So many catalogs!!

One of those catalogs was an emergency services staple: Galls. You could buy nearly everything to equip your police department or fire department with this thing. You could not buy actual police cars or fire engines, and you could not buy firearms, but everything else was here.  Uniforms, and genuine custom engraved badges. Protective gear. Batons and handcuffs. Holsters. EMS equipment of all varieties. Hoses and nozzles. Axes and Pike Poles. Everything! In particular, I remember the body armor suit designed for use when training police dogs, it was orange and bulky so the dogs could practice subduing real people - almost certainly whoever had lowest seniority on training day and got to dress up and look like a sumo wrestler all day!

Among all the other things, Galls always had pages and pages of emergency lights.  For a middle school fire geek like me who was still so very far removed from the actual job, I admit spending too much time on these pages dreaming of how I would equip a truck myself if given the chance.

Now Dad was working for Tacoma City Light at the time, and their substation operator vans had these lame original style light bars on them, with two wimpy little amber strobes attached.  Understand that the term "light bar" originated from early in emergency services when police cars and fire trucks transitioned from a simple bubble gum light in the middle of the roof, to multiple lights. But roofs were curved, and the lights need to be horizontal on all planes to be effective, so the solution was to mount a literal bar on the roof, and attach a couple of lights and maybe a siren speaker to it, like in this pic. It was about 1985, and the City Light vans still had these lame original light bars with these two dinky strobes that had been getting transplanted from one van to the next as the fleet replaced them. I was disappointed. I showed him what I thought they ought to have, especially because I knew that sometimes the substation operators ended up first to arrive at wires down or other things simply because they were closest, and felt they definitely needed more.

About six months later, Dad came to stop by the house to visit while working, but instead of calmly driving up and putting on his hazard flashers while parked in the street, he came flying up the street, and screeched to a slightly crooked halt in the middle of the road like a SWAT team rig making a surprise entrance, in a shiny new TCL van that was sporting a glorious full-width Federal StreetHawk lightbar, flashing ambers in all directions like THIS STREET IS NOW CLOSED!

I'm sure it was a big scene. Unfortunately, I wasn't home.  He intended to surprise me, but didn't actually make sure I was there to appreciate the full effect.  No matter, this little shenanigan impressed the hell out of ALL the kids on the block. So, while Mom had told me what happened later and what I had missed (although she had no idea what kind of lightbar it was or why that mattered), I then heard all about it from the neighborhood kids, but was still missing full context, not knowing the full story.

Later it came out. Dad had asked Mom for one of those Galls catalogs I had told him about and left lying around.  New ones showed up like quarterly, so it isn't as if they were hard to come by at the house. He took it to the fleet guy for TCL, because of course he did, and convinced him to equip the new van about to come in with a StreetHawk (the current coolest lightbar at that time according to me), and made it all happen. It was unsurprisingly well received by all the guys, and became the standard for I don't know how long.

The payoff didn't quite go as he planned, but that didn't matter to me, I was still deeply impressed to see my wish come true for him and his other guys in that silly way.  Even after he retired from TCL, I would see those fleet vans driving around, eight years on before moving to Nebraska the first time, still sporting those StreetHawk lightbars, and I knew my small part in how that had gone down, and how Dad made it actually happen.  Good times.

You can just barely see the lightbar on the van in the photo of Dad below, hidden behind the upper edge of the open door.

Catch!

 You kids have all experienced how I will sometimes toss something at you.

Usually, but not always, I make sure you're ready. And I try to not ever toss something that could genuinely injure you.

This still mostly manifests when it is time to toss groceries for putting them away at home.  Or, at the store, tossing an item to be put in the cart.  Sometimes tossing an item from the next aisle over, to go in the cart.

This is something I picked up from Dad. I always just viewed it as fun unpredictable silliness befitting a fun Dad, but I guess you could dig deeper and find additional meanings in it if you wanted to.  I am sure there are threads of trust, teaching agility, impressing the need to be prepared.  But yeah, I think it was mainly intended to ride the fine line between a little bit of irreverent fun and a shade of low-risk foolishness.

One day when I was around 14 or so, Dad and I were at a convenience store on the way to his house.  I don't remember for sure, but my memory tells me it was really early morning, and I was really tired and unmotivated. But always loving my time with him, as typical, I did not choose to wait in the car, when I could be inside, with him.

I'm standing in one of the aisles, hands in my pockets, when I hear "catch!"  I turned just in time to see a full gallon of milk arrive through the air, bounce off my hip, and fall to the ground.  Kablooey.  Milk, everywhere!

I really didn't process it super fast, but I remember standing there, looking at the floor. The split gallon jug is draining its last bits of milk, and I'm standing near the center of this gigantic milk puddle.

Dad was so mortified, the memory of it just makes me smile and laugh. He was so sorry!  He was concerned I would feel guilty for missing the catch. He was soooo apologetic to the nonplussed cashier, who was working alone.  Oh my gosh this memory just cracks me up to remember.

He asked the cashier where the mop bucket was, and the two of us cleaned up the mess ourselves, and of course he paid for the splattered milk. He just kept apologizing over and over, and I kept telling him it was fine, and trying to not laugh too much.

Dad was always about memories.  Unpredictability, if done right, produces lots of great ones, and even when it fails, chances are it will still stick.  This one clearly did. As I like to say about all the things, good or bad, this is where we get The Stories.

Baseball

To be totally honest, I'm not sure if Dad really loved baseball, the game, as much as he loved baseball, the memory maker.  It's possible he really loved the game too, maybe even likely, except that outside of watching or attending games, I don't remember him ever actually talking about baseball.

When we were little, we watched baseball games on TV often enough that I remember them.  Remember again, we are talking about the mid and late 1970s, when the Seattle/Tacoma broadcast TV market consisted of only five channels until 1985, when a whole new 6th local channel came online!

Later in life, Dad didn't watch much TV, but he still loved attending games at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma, as long as a bunch of family was there to enjoy it with him. I'm certain all of you attended at least one of those, probably more than one.

Back when I was a younger teenager, Dad would pick me up from home in his Tacoma City Light work van, and we would hang out through his entire shift.  As a Substation Operator, most of his work routine was performing switching if something was going on, but mainly was collecting readings and doing substation inspections, setting up equipment for next day work, or resetting equipment after work was completed earlier in the day.

After those chores were done, which usually took less than a couple of hours, he was basically on standby for the rest of his shift, and could more or less do whatever he wanted within his service territory.  When he got hired, there were three substation operators on duty by day, but within a few years, there was just one, which meant he could pretty much go anywhere in the greater Pierce County area as long as he wasn't doing anything obviously sketchy.

He had two favorite substations.  Cushman Substation was once a central power station in Tacoma, constructed with beautiful architecture, such a far cry from today's gray or tan metalclad control houses that are pure function and no substance.  Cushman was spooky, and old. So many things in there just got put down one day and never picked up again, it was like a time machine.  I remember when he showed me the old operations daily logs from when it was staffed 24/7 decades ago.  I thumbed through them looking for historical dates to see if the operators had noted anything. I remember finding fun comments on the day of the first Moon landing, and sober comments on the day of JFK's assassination, and on Pearl Harbor Day.  Certainly there were more.

While Cushman was romantically historic and delightfully spooky with the ghosts of power company guys of the last century, his most favored was Pearl Substation, and I admit I don't really know why.  Others were more remote, or more comfortable.  Maybe it was convenience?  Something must have happened there that made it dear to him, because that is where we ended up, more often than not.  It is not nearly as beautiful as Cushman, but still old enough to not be boring.  But compared to Cushman, it is a tiny building.

I have memories of going to Pearl frequently, but not until after stopping at the store for supplies.  Hot dogs, buns, soda, snacks. Then upon our arrival at Pearl, we would haul everything in, including the black and white TV that went almost everywhere with him when he was working.  You see, while we didn't have access to the 500 channels that we have today, the channels you did get were transmitted from towers like radio, and you could pick them up anywhere within range with your TV, all you needed to do was plug it into the power outlet. No cables. No WiFi. Just true broadcast television!

And there we would park ourselves, hotdogs and drinks and snacks, watching the baseball game on his black and white TV. At the time it was so cool to be with Dad and do that. I mean, who else gets to hang out in a forbidden substation building where most people can't go, just to watch baseball. But looking back, I know I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have, and would give anything to be able to do it again.

But going back to those earliest days of watching baseball on TV at home, and eating dinner in the Family Room (what today would be called the Den).  Aunt Karen and I had these little footstools that converted into tiny chairs.  On the seatback it reads "My little stool will help me wash and brush and watch TV".  Back in the days when excessive TV wasn't considered a bad thing, I guess.

I found this picture online, and this is exactly the same footstool, but I believe Dad still had my actual one, so if it turns up and any of you want it, let me know. In this configuration, it is a chair, but if you fold the seatback down, it became a little helper step up so you could stand on the chair seat.  To help you get high enough to wash and brush in front of the sink, of course.

But Karen and I used them differently than intended, and who knows which one of us started it.  We would put them on the floor in front of the TV, with the seatback down so it was in footstool configuration, but then we'd use the helper step as a bench seat, and the top of the thing as a tabletop.  Yes, if you can picture it, we'd wiggle our legs through the nearly impossible gap, and then we were all set with these adorable little table/chairs.

Rounding up our footstools for a baseball game was an occasional ritual, one that definitely made enough of an impression to remember it after all this time.  I also distinctly remember the last few times I did this, because getting into it to sit on it that way became increasingly difficult, and getting out of it was an even bigger production. Alas, we had grown too big. We still used them as tables for a bit after that, but sitting next to them instead.

In retrospect after writing this out, I do recall him having baseball games on the radio sometimes even when no one was around, so I'm pretty confident he genuinely loved the game.  But that just plays into everything else about him, how he loved to share his interests with those he loved.

Aunt Karen intends to keep attending games at Cheney Stadium with Uncle Brian and their friends who always went with Dad, because that's what he would want, for them to keep making memories. I hope to join them sometimes too, and hopefully some of you can as well.

Forgiveness

I was 3 years old when Dad broke my right hand ring finger, the last bone, right at the fingernail bed.

We were in the back yard of the "L" Street house, and he was loading tires into the back of his 1953 Ford pickup (which hasn't run since the mid 80's but is still parked at his house to this day).

Back in the 70s when this story takes place, it was normal to ride unrestrained in vehicles, or even outside of them in the back of trucks and stuff.  Heck, a lot of cars still being driven back then were old enough that they didn't even have seatbelts to wear if you wanted to, and seatbelt laws were not yet a thing.

And this is why I was trying to get him to lift me up and put me in the back of the truck.  I was 3, and it was clear he was about to go somewhere, and I loved going anywhere with Dad because the chances of stopping somewhere for a random treat were usually good.  But Dad was lifting Heavy Things and didn't want me to get hurt, so he told me to stay back. Did I listen?  Of course not. I went up to the truck tailgate, put my tiny hands on it, and begged him to lift me up.

He did not see me, mind focused on lifting mounted truck tires (tire plus rim = heavy) and chucking them into the truck - have I ever mentioned that Dad was as strong as an ox back in the day?

Anyway, the tire came down right on top of my hand.  The damage, honestly, could have been really, really, really bad. As luck would have it, and I call it good luck, it broke the one bone but left the rest of my hand basically unscathed.  But the break was bad, it almost tore my finger off at the break, just some skin and tissue at the base of my fingerprint were holding it on.  It was bleeding pretty good.

I howled. Dad scooped me up immediately in his gigantic arms and hustled me into the basement (it had a walkout door to the back yard), ran up the stairs (no mean feat considering he weighed like 350 at the time) and sat me on the counter with my feet in the kitchen sink, and put my finger under the faucet to rinse it off.  I think Mom was pretty alarmed too, of course, but I don't remember that part.

I vaguely remember being at the ER and it being looked at, and I remember the padded aluminum finger splint that they put on me after stitching things back together as best they could.  It wrapped around the tip of the finger and then ran the length of my palm.  I still remember that the foam rubber padding on it was green.

Funnily enough, I thought the splint was awesome.  You see, Dad had badly sprained or broken a finger just a few months prior, and had worn exactly the same kind of splint for a month or so.  Coming home with a hand and finger splint like Dad's was basically the greatest gift you could give me then.

After a week or so, my splint got trimmed down so it just splinted my finger and not the hand.  I wore it proudly. The fingernail grew back over time, with the permanent ridges in it that I think you all have felt because it seems like this has come up at least once with each of you.

Dad basically never forgave himself for this.  He didn't talk about really it while I was a little kid, but after my late teenage years and onward, I'd say it came up at least a dozen times or so between us.  He just had to say sorry again, because how must it feel to accidentally break a bone on your toddler son?  I always hugged him tight and laughed and said it was one of my best stories and I wouldn't trade it for anything, and of course let him know that he was forgiven long ago.

Now, I can kind of relate to this because of what happened to Jim when we lived in the Camas house.  Since I brought up this story memory, I can't ignore my own experience in the dad role. Mark may remember this, but Joe probably not, and Bells was not born yet. I had a really good idea to make memories - a page straight out of Dad's book - by buying unfinished wood chairs from Ikea, some decorations from Michaels that you older kids each picked out yourselves, and that we would paint and decorate them and then you'd have keepsake chairs that you decorated yourselves, along with good memories of those times.

Here's my memory of the event, and Jim can add corrections if I'm off here... Jim was not enjoying himself when we were painting them outside in the yard, and was becoming uncooperative. I had pretty strong feelings about the value of memories and really wanted it to be a whole family thing. At some point Jim decided he had had enough and decided to walk back into the house, and something he said or did triggered a horrible response in me, and I reached out to grab and stop him. We ended up falling down, and as I recall I fell on his leg, Didn't know it at that moment, but it ended up being sprained and needing medical attention.

Because of my horrible reaction, the memory day I planned was utterly ruined.  The chairs didn't catch on, probably because of the resulting negative association, and they eventually ended up in the barn at the Fire Station house until the humidity caught up with them and made them warped and unusable, and now they're gone.  This will always make me sad, there's no way past that.

I am certain that you guys all have far more memories of the really good times we had, and am hopeful that this time where I really badly failed doesn't overshadow things. But where Dad had trouble forgiving himself for what was a clear accident, I likewise find it basically impossible to forgive myself for something that was so preventable.

This started out as a memory of Dad, and I didn't expect it to go into my own experience as a father, but I guess this will be the nature of these posts, I just need to start typing and see where it goes. I will keep asking for forgiveness from you all, because I know that in this case and many others I could have done better.

As to the epilogue of the tale of the accidental broken finger, I am 100% sure that Dad still had my tiny aluminum finger splint up to the present, and I certainly hope that whoever ends up going through his things recognizes it for what it is and that it might find its way to me again.

The Giver

The little cone shaped game pieces, I have no idea what they were from, but they were red and yellow, and did just fine standing in for traffic cones for my Hot Wheels cars.

Man, I had SO MANY Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars.  And so much track!  Had them well past being a teenager. A large portion of my belongings were mixed with Mom's when we were married, but got left in a storage unit in Tacoma.  After a couple of years, I don't remember why, but we asked if we could have the stuff moved to Dad's for safekeeping.  He moved the stuff, but Grandma Billington basically went through it all and liquidated everything without him knowing.  I don't think I can ever forgive her for that, we both lost so many sentimental things.  Anyway, that's when all my original tracks and cars disappeared.  But you older kids will remember when I bought a bunch more again later, we had some epic tracks sets!  Starting in the upstairs of the Sunset Trail house in Plymouth MN, running down the stairs and all around the living room.  That set got boxed up when we moved to the Crystal house, and then got sold off when we moved back to Duluth and had to trim our belongings back again.

I loved my Hot Wheels collection, and Dad was always adding random cars to it, any excuse to snag another one at the store and sneak it to me. There's family pictures of me somewhere when we were on a vacation trip, at a campground.  There was a large tree trunk distended from the ground somewhat, and there were roots just barely poking out of the ground just so in a way that made ledges and ramps and platforms and nooks and crannies, and I had all my cars out all over that tree trunk and dirt.  I was 6 years old, it was heaven.

I still more or less remember the last BIG layout I built in the basement of the "L" Street house where I grew up, I was probably 13 or 14 by then.  It was a combination NASCAR style wide track, with different Grand Prix style routes out and about on the fringes, a couple of bypasses, and access tracks to the center "arena" where of course the dozen or so fire trucks and ambulances were ready to go!  There were an awful lot of bad crashes, seemed like those rescue squads were busy an awful lot.

One of the biggest Hot Wheels track hauls I ever got was, interestingly enough, from a collection that Dad found at the City Dump.  Of course I didn't know the source until years later, but remember being gobsmacked... who in the world could throw this stuff away??

All the way through my adult life, Dad still occasionally gifted me another Hot Wheels car.  He would squirrel them away and then later run across one and remember to put it in his car to give me later.  Most of those cars ended up in the hands of you offspring, and later, were passed forward to Nico and Jamie.  I still have a few around, unopened.

Dad was always giving. His love language was gifts. He would collect stuff for weeks/months or longer and eventually bring it all to you at once.  A lot of it was, to me, honestly clutter. I was pretty messy in my earlier adulthood but I really started to move towards being more orderly maybe 5-6 years ago, so I got rid of a lot of the things he gave me over the years.  Honestly I don't really regret that, although you might think I would.  The blown wiring that melted in epic fashion, the failed oven element with crazy char, pencils from a fire department open house in 2004, keychains from a towing company, bumper stickers, 10 back issues of QSL (ham radio magazine)... I mean, I would have boxes and boxes of stuff if I had held on to all of that!  I kept a few important things, though, to be sure.

Just unpacking.... more later....

The Security Alarm

The house that I grew up in was built in 1925. I'm not sure when the garage behind it was built, but I assume it is close to original to that time, because while it has (had?) a big set of swing doors facing the alley, it was barely big enough to park my 1976 Toyota Celica in it, circa 1991.  The garage is still there as far as Google aerial imagery goes.

My parents separated when I was six, but I still have a bunch of memories of that garage when all of Dad's stuff was in it.  He was a world class DIY mechanic and handyman, there really wasn't anything he couldn't fix, as far as I knew.  He had a tool and supplies for everything in that garage, and it was packed!  There are so many stories about the things he repaired and fabricated, but those are for later.

As far as I know, when we got the house, the garage was basically nothing more than a small car shed sized to basically fit a Ford Model T.  He ran overhead wires out for power, and for a phone - the days way before cordless phones, let alone cell phones. I remember him extending the electrical system out there to add an exterior light for security, too, to the point that I remember him carefully sanding and rehabbing a light fixture (that he probably had rescued from the City Dump when he worked for Tacoma as a garbage truck driver), and then painting it a weatherproof gray before mounting it.  Last time I drove by there a few years ago, it was still there.

Here's how big the old garage is, as seen on current Google Maps aerials.

I'm not sure if there was a specific event that set this off the events of this story, or he was just being proactive. Having the mind of an electrical engineer, a good decade or so yet before he was hired at Tacoma City Light, it was easy for him to wire up an additional light fixture in the garage that would turn its bulb ON when you flipped the switch to turn the rest of the lights OFF.

Here is just one of untold lessons he taught me, long before I became a power company guy like him.

How it works is the concept of resistance.  Electricity wants to take the easiest path.  If you present it two options, it splits in opposite proportion to the resistance, favoring the easiest route.  All you have to do to make this work is tap the hot wire before the light switch, run it to the new alternate fixture, and then terminate the new circuit at the neutral wire back at the switch.  This makes a direct, non-switched circuit so anything you put in the new light fixture will just be on all the time.  Unless....

...unless the light bulb you put in there has a more resistance than the other lights, when the switch is on.

Low wattage incandescent light bulbs have more resistance than high wattage bulbs. This increased resistance means less electricity can pass through them, which results in them being dimmer.  Thus, a 25W bulb has a lot more resistance than a 100W bulb.

So Dad sets this up, and puts a red 15W light bulb in the special fixture, which he has mounted to the wall inside the garage's man-door, just above the adorable little 4-fuse panel and wall mounted rotary phone.  When the light switch is ON, the four 75W bulbs along the garage rafters are provided with power, and they offer ample low-resistance paths for electricity, so whatever remnant is finding its way to trickle through the red bulb when the switch is ON, it isn't enough to produce light from it.  But when the switch is OFF, the little red bulb is the only path, and so it lights up.

And then he makes sure, when the neighborhood hooligan kids are around or within earshot - not that they were all hooligans, but you know some of them are, sometimes, or will grow older and get that way - he makes sure they are aware of the security system he has installed, and that it is active when the red light is on, and the red light is real easy to see when you look through the little windows on the garage.  Mind you this is like 1976, an era when commercial consumer-level security systems essentially didn't exist, so of course the kids have no idea what this "security system" might entail, or what it might do if activated.  Call the cops? Set off a claxon?  Electrocute them?  Pre-internet, your imagination could be a powerful deterrent to risk because you just have no idea about stuff.

The "security system" was automatically "armed" just by performing the task of turning off the lights on your way out, making the red bulb light up. It was always "armed" when no one was out there.

Maybe the neighborhood was safe enough at the time that risk of crime was low (we never locked our front door in those days), or maybe the hooligans were adequately spooked, but Dad had a ton of expensive stuff in that garage and no one ever broke in while his stuff was in there, even though it would have been easy to do.

Success.

The Key Ring

My dad was amazing, and perfect for me. He placed high emphasis on being a man of solid character, and on making great memories. Basically everything that I've tried to do to be a decent person is based on the model he showed me. If there is anything you ever thought of me in a positive way, it's quite likely because I learned it from him.

Now he is gone, and my world will never be the same. 

We didn't get to talk as much lately as I would have liked, but I do know that there were no words left unsaid between us. I always knew how proud he was of me, and he always knew how much I loved and appreciated him. If you still have the chance, I encourage you to do the same. Love unconditionally. Leave great memories. Leave no words unsaid.

This blog is established as my way of coping with this loss.  I've had so many memories of him swirling in my head these past few days, and I needed a place to put them down, and to share them with my own children.

This is the one that keeps popping back in the most.

A few years ago, while visiting Tacoma, our car was overdue for an oil change. I was sitting in the lobby of the service shop as they did their thing, just looking at my phone, when I heard a very familiar jingle of keys.

Now, it isn't especially unusual for people to carry a lot of keys on a clip, but I knew those keys.  I got up and walked around the corner, and there was Dad.  He didn't know I was there, either, it was just all chance.

Back then we didn't live all that far apart, so it wasn't like I hadn't seem him in a long time, but I still remember the flood of happiness that came over me. The comfort of his sudden presence, heralded by his all so familiar jingling key ring.

I didn't think about it much at the time, but I'm thinking now, that I was well over 40 years old, lots of kids, established life, pretty much had my act together as much as anyone can at that point, but there's just something magical about knowing your dad is there. He can help you out. He can answer questions. Stories can be shared.  I loved his presence.

It is hard to know that I can't ever have that again.  He helped me grow to reach the point that I wouldn't need him, but that doesn't mean I don't still want him here.

Love you Dad.

More stories to come.