John Loughran Gillen 4/22/2020 -- 9/27/1984

 April 22, 1920 -- A boy is born in a small house in a small patch town in the soft-coal country of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, right down on the West Virginia border. His mother is tired. She's raised three children nearly to adulthood and buried a few more, fed and cared for her coal-miner husband, held her breath through explosions and strikes and mines working out and harsh weather and coal dust. In the first few months, she's convinced she has a stomach bug. But the blue-eyed charmer, her "change-of-life baby," grows into a witty, curious, wisecracking storyteller; a prankster; an autodidact; a spinner of yarns.

After graduating from high school, he went down the mine for a hot minute, decided that wasn't for him, and sweet-talked his way into a job in the company store -- based strictly on his ability to touch type. When war broke out shortly after, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and soon found himself in the United States Navy, one more young ordinary seaman in a long line of earnest, dedicated patriots who were going to save the world from totalitarianism.

The war left its mark on him and he would spend most of his later years refusing to talk about it. Once, when "I'll Be Home for Christmas" came on the radio, someone overheard him say to his wife "You know, Sunshine, a lot of the fellas never made it home for Christmas." The eavesdropper saw him blink back tears and that was about as deep as it got. More went unsaid than said; it took a diligent search years later of his service records to learn what he had done -- and where he did it -- in his quest to secure freedom for all people.

Somewhere in there was a brief, unhappy marriage that ended in the most cliched way imaginable: A quick divorce in Reno en route to California, where he'd marry his emerald-eyed princess and (finally) have a little girl. They ended up living the other postwar cliche: A ranch-style tract house in a quiet suburban setting with good schools; three cars (his mother-in-law lived with them almost from the start -- and it was HIS IDEA!); enough money (not tons, but enough); and ready access to groceries, medical care and the basic necessities of suburban life.

Working in procurement at a Los Angeles-area division of U.S. Steel in the years before strict government purchasing regulations, he was part of a team known for . . . uhhhh . . . making sure there wasn't too much surplus material left onsite to rot. Not one of those men had a patio cover made of less than #18 rebar and "nobody knew" where it came from. His wife grew roses, pelargoniums and fuschias, all fussy plants that required loads of attention, while he proudly tended their dichondra lawns. Nobody ate inside all summer (redwood patio table with attached benches, right?) and the wives had the good sense not to ask why their deskbound husbands were coming home with cases of top-grade steaks every few weeks. Suppliers sent them Christmas baskets, football tickets and weekends at the Spa in Palm Springs.

The little girl was sweet, a little mouthy, a terrible room tidier, pleasant, a good student, relatively compliant and not much trouble (until later). She adored her Daddy. The mother-in-law had her own activities and an endless parade of "gentleman callers" but the foursome was strongest and happiest together. Holidays were a dizzying festival of 12-foot Christmas trees, marathon baking sessions, all-night giftwrap parties, and Thanksgivings shared with visiting colleagues from countries that had no comparable tradition. The daughter remembers her Daddy telling the family about a man from Thailand he'd invited because he was "damned if I'll let him be all alone for Thanksgiving." (The man came, utterly bewildered, and had absolutely no idea what Thanksgiving was all about. But he got into the spirit of the thing, ate heartily and seemed to enjoy himself.)

The man was a deep believer, a committed Christian who said almost nothing about his faith but tried to live it with every breath. No hard-luck story was too improbable for him, no villainy was unforgivable and no "holiday orphan" was uninvited. Militantly unchurched, he angrily rejected Catholicism but requested a Catholic funeral. He declined to go to even a Christmas Eve service with his wife and daughter but refused to put his (copperplate) signature on the funny, secular cards his wife brought home one year. (Fear not, he gently persuaded her to exchange them -- no voices were raised and no tears were shed. After that, she sent religious Christmas cards until the end of her days.) The family lived on paradox, I guess.

He wasn't perfect; he was no saint. There were dark spots, storm clouds, ice-cold quarrels, red-hot quarrels, horrible times. This is neither the time nor the place to enumerate their nauseating ugliness. Suffice to say there was enough love in that simple suburban house to keep everybody going.

When the daughter, having spent a week in Washington, D.C. during her senior year of high school, expressed a desire to go to college there, his wife quailed at the idea. "She is NOT going that far away! She's too young and Washington, D.C. is nothing but crime!" she shouted, cowering in horror. (To this day, nobody knows if she meant street crime or the Nixon administration.) He held his tongue and his temper. "Just think it over, Sunshine," he said. "She's headstrong and hardheaded; if we force her to go to the small private women's college 45 minutes away--the one you chose because you always wanted that life--what's she going to get out of being there when she doesn't want to? She's a lot tougher than you think she is because we raised her right. She can handle this and we need to let her." A few days later, he quietly took the daughter out for pizza. "It's late in the game but get on the phone and see if you can 'sell yourself' to a school in D.C. I'll handle your mother." She sold, he handled, she went and she's now near retirement age and swears it was the undisputed best choice.

Time passed. The girl grew up, the grandmother aged. The blue-eyed charmer retired from an international architect-engineer-construction firm shortly after the daughter's college graduation, but not before she started working there and dropping in to her Daddy's office now and then for breaks and a short chat.

Two years later, on September 27, 1984, he shuffled off this mortal coil and found the peace that eluded him in this life. He got his Catholic funeral (a nice Irish priest probably bent some rules) and is buried in a military cemetery in Southern California. Dressing for the funeral, his wife pulled a veiled chapeau from her closet, looked at her daughter through tears and said "I'm going to wear a hat for your Daddy one last time. He always loved women in suits and hats." Honorary pallbearers were wonderful family friends, the owner of a local Mexican restaurant (sadly, now gone) and his numerous sons, all in those short-sleeved embroidered shirts that might (?) be called guyaberas. They brought color and life to a heartbreaking day. His oldest sister, the last of the family, came from Pennsylvania to help bury her baby brother.

He was not there to walk his daughter down the aisle when she married. He was not part of the rescuing committee when she showed up at the parental house at midnight with a baby on her hip sobbing "My marriage is over." He didn't get to take his wife to London, one of her dearest desires (again, fear not -- she went a few years later and took up residence in Harrods Food Hall indulging the love affair of the century with English Cheddar.) He wasn't there to cheer his favorite nephew through Air Force retirement and a second career as an airline pilot. He didn't get to meet his grandson (though most doubt that he's truly absent from the young man's life). He wasn't around to see his wife through to the end, but that's probably better, as her death would have killed him anyway.

But this man lives on, with the verve and energy he used in his own too-short life. His daughter jokes that as long as there's a breath in her own son's body, her Daddy will never be truly gone. He gave her an insatiable desire to learn, to know things, to understand people, to experience as much of this gorgeous big, beautiful world as she could possibly cram into one lifespan. His fervent Steelers fandom lives on, to the extent that even his baby grandson's first sweatsuit proudly boasted the hypocycloid logo before the kid was out of diapers. "His" red sauce graces most of the family's holiday tables now, and the daughter keeps roughly a gallon of it frozen "just in case."

If you haven't figured it out by now (and you have), I'm honored to tell you our protagonist is my father. And I'd happily give up a kidney to be shopping for one more wallet, one more belt, one more comprehensive account of the history of God-knows-what for his birthday (hardbound, please). I'd pay any price to throw some burgers on the grill and make him the simple birthday dinner he would have asked for. As it is, I will pray for the repose of his soul, send love into the universe, and try to make my Daddy proud on what would have been his 102nd birthday. And I will miss him until my dying day.

Until we meet again, Daddy, Little Sunshine loves you.