Today would be my dad's 97th birthday. Although he died nearly four years ago, dad, Walter B. Lehmer, lived to see 93 of those birthdays, 66 of them while married to my mother.
Dad and I were not particularly close. In fact, it was mostly an "oil and water" relationship in the years we lived under the same roof. (That roof, incidentally, literally topped "the house that Jack built"). But, as time went on and I became a parent myself, I gained a greater appreciation for what he did for his family. As the first born of a couple of first-borns themselves, we each had a bit of an independent streak. Considering that my parents were children of The Great Depression and I was of the much more prosperous post World War II generation, it was, perhaps, inevitable that we wouldn't always see things eye to eye. Of course, I lost most clashes with Dad, many of them ending with "because I say so."
But I truly believe that he always had the best interests of his children at heart.
As I alluded to earlier, Dad built his own house at a time when his career with Union Pacific Railroad was just starting to blossom. Money had to be tight when he bought truckloads of lumber reclaimed from old boxcars for sub flooring. Frugality was the norm through much of the early years as he toiled as a carman before rising to the foreman ranks. My brothers and I took turns sitting on a stool in the basement while he buzz cut our hair. He took cheese sandwiches to work during second and third tricks (evening and overnight shifts), often bringing home half to share with his boys.
But he also brought us a dog just because, well, boys need a dog (and, truthfully, because Mom fell in love with this particular one). This was the same man who turned down a postwar job in the California oilfields so Mom could return to Iowa and show off her brand-new baby (me). One of my favorite (long lost) home movies is of Dad with his young sons sitting at a small table in a closet pretending to have a picnic, drinking from small metal cups that sat on small metal saucers. It sounds suspiciously like tea time, but I doubt that is what we rambunctious boys called it.
Dad wasn't much into sports although he did enjoy bowling and golf as an older adult. Nevertheless, when my church little league team needed a coach, he stepped up. In the summer of 1957, he took my brothers and me on a day train trip to Kansas City so we could see a major league baseball game. (It wasn't much of a game, Boston beating Kansas City, 16-0, but I did get to see Ted Williams in his final season). Ironically, it was softball that brought my parents together. They met when Dad was hitting grounders to his sister Phyllis' team, the same team Mom played for.
I like to say that I worked my way through college, but most of that work was because of Dad. His railroad connections got me jobs as a mail handler in Council Bluffs and Omaha and a variety of jobs at Omaha's Union Station in the mid-1960s. My last railroad job was as a full-time, union dues-paying, midnight to 8 a.m. coach cleaner while still a full-time student at Omaha University. I spent much of those two years sleeping in my car between classes. I also spent a couple hours each night sleeping on the job.
A coach cleaner's job at Union Station in those days didn't consist of cleaning coaches at all. Our job was to put drinking water in passenger cars. As the train pulled into the station, we stood at its side, trying to knock down the handles that would release the air pressure from the water tanks as the train passed. This saved time, since a nearly empty tank took a while to bleed off. Then we drug hoses from pits and filled them up. It was actually an artful ballet when trains were long and you had to work more than one hose among several cars.
As a major stop on UP's main east-west route, we typically handled up to six trains each night. If they were on time, the last train would rumble through around 4 a.m. If the train was westbound, they would typically add cars. Conversely, cars would be cut from eastbound trains and shunted onto stub tracks so passengers could continue sleeping, if they wished. Few passengers on the coach cars did, though. Typically, one of the coach cleaners would check out the coach cars on the stub, under the guise of cleaning, which was actually done later in the day in Council Bluffs, across the Missouri River. What he was really doing, though, was looking for an empty coach. If one was found, most of the workers whose work day was essentially over, settled in for a nap. At least one of us would remain in the work shanty in case the rest of needed to be summoned back to work. Or woke up before our shift ended.
One day no one woke me. It was only the jostling movement that woke me, just before the switch engine pulling the cars toward Council Bluffs reached the bridge. I caught the eye of a switchman, got off the train and picked my way through the rocky track bed back to the station and the shanty. Of course, the third trick guys were long gone and I was greeted by a host of mostly unfamiliar faces of the day crew as I sheepishly approached my locker. I'm sure I made some lame excuse, but everyone knew what had happened. I'm sure that included my dad, the day foreman that particular day, who just looked up briefly from his desk in his adjoining office.
Although he must have been embarrassed to learn that his son had been literally sleeping on the job and pretty much flaunted it in front of people he had the duty of supervising, we never talked about it. My railroad career ended not long after that incident and Dad went on to higher management positions on the U.P. staff (where he once escorted Howard Hughes to the West Coast) and as General Car Foreman of Council Bluffs, which is a much bigger deal than it sounds.
He retired within weeks of my moving to Des Moines in 1981 and our contacts became even less frequent than before. After Mom died in 2008, it became clear that Dad's mild dementia was getting worse. My brothers Ron and Dave assumed most caretaker duties for Dad in his later years but I would occasionally make the 125-mile west to take him to medical appointments. Even as his dementia worsened, I was pleased that he always knew who I was, often introducing me to others as "my son, Larry." Sometimes he'd introduce me to the same person twice within minutes.
Dad's birthdate of Nov. 22 was usurped on his 43rd birthday in 1963 by the terrible events in Dallas, Texas, but I always remember it for what it meant to me as I was growing up -- that Walter B. "Jack" Lehmer was one day younger than Stan Musial. To a young baseball card collector from Council Bluffs, Iowa, that meant something.
P.S. Here's a picture of my grandparents taken at their home just a few months before Dad was born.
Author Larry Lehmer's book about Dick Clark and American Bandstand -- Bandstandland: How Dancing Teenagers Took Over America and Dick Clark Took Over Rock & Roll --is available from Sunbury Press. His book about the last tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- The Day the Music Died: The Last Tour of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens -- is available at Amazon.
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