On September 3, 1963, the following little article appeared in the Cleveland Press:
"Boys With Horse Learn Enterprise Not Always Free
Free enterprise, which surely has more lives than a cat, was dealt another blow in Parma Heights yesterday.
In that suburb two transient boys with cash-register minds showed up on Beresford Ave. just off busy York Rd. With them was a horse.
They offered 25-cent rides to children they saw. Word spread like wildfire. Business, as they say, boomed.
Then police showed up and told the lads: "Get that horse back to the country where it belongs."
The two boys, their faces as long as the horse's, vanished toward North Royalton, whence they had come, quarters faintly jingling in their pockets."
A week later, the Teens Writer for the paper ran a bigger article featuring one of those youths and why he was selling horse rides.
The boy was sixteen and was trying to scrape together money for the last payment on the $45 he had owed for three tons of hay. Additionally, he figured he needed to earn about $6 a week to keep his horse and two month old colt in grain for the winter.
He had taken any job he could find to get the money he needed, but he couldn't keep up with the feed bill. Then came an inspiration. Why not sell rides on his horse to neighborhood kids?
The boy and a buddy went into business selling rides. Lines formed and the quarters came rolling in....until the police arrived in two cars and told the youths to get moving.
"It sure was good while it lasted," the boy with the shy grin said. "I was able to make a $20 deposit on the hay."
I have both of those news clippings tucked away in a notebook. That boy later went on to become my very own Dad.
Growing up, my siblings and I were sure that our Dad could do anything and fix everything because, in our small part of the world, he did.
My dad was never one to give a long, drawn out explanation when just a simple sentence would do. He had this look that he would give us when he wanted us to stop clowning around and a small handful of one liners that he might use if necessary. It was seldom necessary.
It wasn't that we were particularly good, he was just *that* good at conveying his wishes to us. It is an art that my siblings and I have wished we could mimick better with our own children: say less and mean more.
One time a bunch of my friends and families were together at a park. I was about ten years old. It had rained and the grass was super slippery. My parents had told me that they didn't want me to go barefooted. I'm not sure why they issued this command, but "everyone else" was barefooted and having the grandest time sliding on the wet grass. We were playing far enough away that surely my parents wouldn't even notice if I took my shoes off and slid in the grass for just a little while. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Why are children always doing things like this? Anyhow, my tale ends just like many other stories told for the moral of it: I ended up in the hospital getting stitches in the bottom of my foot because I happened to be the only child who ran over the only broken bottle that happened to be hidden in the grass in that park.
Did my dad tell me in a lengthy speech how I should've listened to him and how this wouldn't have happened if I had listened to him? No. When he found out I had cut myself, he marched right over from where he had been sitting, took a look at my foot, wrapped it in something and then hitched me onto his back. The hospital was right across the street from the park and I rode piggy back through the ER doors. I don't recall that he ever said much about the whole thing, but I'm sure he probably did. What sticks in my memory is that no matter that I was naughty, he still loved me and took care of me anyway.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that one of the things that touched my dad the deepest was when one of us children were sick or hurt. He didn't necessarily get up during the night to take care of us. Actually, my mom tells the story of the time she was nudged awake during the night by my dad. He told her one of the children was coughing and she should give them some cough syrup. So, she dutifully roused from her sleep to dole out the medicine.....only she found herself standing in the dark hallway in the middle of the night with a bottle of Robitusin and a spoon, not sure who she was supposed to be giving it to. The child had stopped coughing and my dad had gone back to sleep.
Medicating us children and coming to our bedside during the night was mostly Mom's job. Dad, now he would buy us stuff when we were sick. He would, I could tell, try very hard to select something that we would really enjoy. It was his heartfelt desire that it would somehow aid in our recovery. Just knowing he cared made me feel better! I remember he once brought home a box of black cherry ice cream because he thought I really liked that kind. It was actually quite low on my list of favorite flavors, but he was just so anxious to make me feel better that I ate it anyway!
All the while I was growing up, my dad alternated his interest between horses and old cars. Mom says when they got married, she didn't even know my dad liked horses because he was in the old car stage by then. Old cars aside, it was his love of horses that had him moving our family out of the city and into the country. I have mostly known country life, with a few years of city life thrown in here and there. Believe me, I prefer country living over the city any day and I have my dad to thank for that.
My dad still likes horses AND old cars and other things besides. My twins, Brady and Brock, have been helping him out with an old car project this week. I have to smile when they come home and tell me what Poppy said or did because in some ways he is different in his "old age" (although sixty-five can hardly be considered OLD even if he does have four children and twenty-three grandchildren). I'd have to say in most ways he's still the same as he ever was.
~Colleen
