On Father’s Day, it is traditional to write about those wonderful times you had playing catch with Dad, about how he always came to your games and school events.
Not for a moment of my life have I doubted that my father loved me and cared about me, and yet I can remember playing catch with him precisely once. His eyesight was bad, and he had so much trouble judging trajectory that he once got hit in the head at a bowling-pin toss in Kremmling.
My Dad ran a laundry and went to work at 5:30 six mornings a week to fire the boiler so there would be steam when the crew got there, and he stayed at the laundry till 5:30 p.m. He didn’t have a lot of time or energy for my ballgames or school productions, although he attended a few.
My Dad did take my brothers and me hunting and fishing, and sometimes we camped in the mountains. But mostly I felt close to my Dad because I worked with him, starting in 1964 at age 13 on the sorting table in the laundry.
In the laundry, I acquired many skills which have been utterly useless since then. In the past 30 years, I have never had to thread pipe, re-cover the rollers on a flatwork ironer, rod the flues of a boiler, rebuild a steam valve after grinding the seat, or lace a flatbelt.
It is, however, hard to express the sense of competence I felt after he taught me how to make my own soap for a nasty washroom job. Some restaurant customers used gunny sacks to clean their grills, and every so often they would send these stinking, grease-laden “grill wipes” to the laundry.
The trick was to follow the old home recipe for soap. Start with tallow (the bacon and hamburger grease caught in the cloth). Add lye (known as “hot alkali” in the washroom), and apply heat (superheated steam) while stirring (the rotation of the washing machine). If you did it right, suds would appear in the froth of the washing machine, and your home-generated soap would build up and clean the greasy jute bags.
When that’s one of the high points, you know that a washman’s job doesn’t offer much excitement. But there was a time at the laundry in Longmont when I saved my father’s life.
I was in the washroom, tending to the Saturday afternoon chore of cleaning 600 pounds of “shop wipers” – the red rags that mechanics use. They were so filthy that they took about three times longer to wash than the usual stuff, like motel and hospital linens, so they always got put off until the end of the week.
Dad was in the boiler room, working a set of clamshells to pull crud (mostly fragments of wipers and stringy mops) out of a sewer manhole. He leaned down to pull at some recalcitrant object and then slipped.
Eventually I heard a muffled “help, help” from the boiler room, went back to investigate, and saw a pair of kicking legs sticking out of the floor. As soon as I stopped laughing, I pulled him out, realizing that if one of my washing machines had drained while he was stuck there, he would have drowned.
It’s not that I wanted to be in that laundry then. My dad and his father had the Crystal White Laundry in Greeley, where I began working. In 1968, my folks moved to Longmont, where my dad managed the Model Laundry. I worked there off and on before my brief Army career in 1972.
Upon my discharge, it was my understanding that I had something like a constitutional right to 26 weeks of full unemployment benefits while I pretended to look for work. So I went to the state Job Service office, next door to the laundry on Main Street, to sign up for my paid vacation.
The woman looked at my name, then made an announcement. “Your dad said you’d probably be by. He said to send you next door. He needs a washman, and you can start this morning.”
My Dad, my brothers and I spent a lot of time together – working, going out for coffee, fixing cars, talking about machinery. We seldom had bleachers or an auditorium between us. You get to know people by spending time with them.
There are a lot of ways that fathers can be fathers without ever tossing a ball.
Happy Father’s Day to the other Ed Quillen, the respectable one.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
