The wisdom of my father

For only the second time, I am watching a Presidential election without my father Marvin Braiterman (1925-2004).  We bonded over politics, even more than baseball, though we didn't always agree.  He respected me for disagreeing. I'm remebering him now, and reading a book about other people's memories of their fathers.

                Wisdom of Our Fathers is the late Tim Russert’s sequel  to his brilliant memoir of his own father “Big Russ.”  Wisdom is a few of the tens of thousands of letters and e-mails Russert received from people who read the first book and felt compelled to share an anecdote about their own fathers. 

The second book has me thinking about how I would sum up my relationship with my father in an anecdote.  He was a very complex man, and Russert, who is a more gifted writer than I am, needed a whole book to sum up his father.

Like Big Russ, Marvin Braiterman grew up in the Depression and served in World War II.  Like most veterans of what my father called “the last good war,” he rarely talked about it, but he was more open than Big Russ because, as he always said, “I had an easy war.”  He spent most of it in England predicting weather for the Army Air Corps. 

Of course, there were the six battle stars he earned flying weather reconnaissance missions over the North Sea and mainland of Europe.  He only mentioned those once, in anger, to a driver with VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) vanity license plates, who called my father a lousy (obscenity) driver in front of his children.

The one World War II experience he often talked about was when he volunteered to serve as an interpreter when the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.  “Bodies stacked like cordwood.  The smell of death and rotting flesh permeated the whole city,” he said.  “The townspeople had to know what it was.”

My father was a public person, but a very private man.  From 1945 on, he tried to be what he called “an active participant in history.”    He was shy, and didn’t like many people, except his wife and children, whom he adored unconditionally, and a few intimate friends.  He was a bullet-headed intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge of American history and Constitutional law – which he taught at New England College in Henniker.  We spent long hours alone, talking about that stuff, which I was also interested in.

He thought I was the world’s best newspaperman, and always told me so.  He cried when I lost my first crummy job on a crummy weekly newspaper.  He let me live at home, paid my medical expenses, and supported me rent-free for three years, while I was recovering from a catastrophic illness.   When my retroactive Social Security payment (37 months) finally came through, I showed my appreciation and made him whole by giving him enough money for a new Toyota. 

After that, when I wrote a financial aid application that said I lived at home for three years, he said, “Don’t say that.  You paid rent!”  That legal advice got me a $20,000 student loan without even telling a lie.  He never asked me for money, and I never even considered not paying him.  He believed it was his responsibility to help me because he could, and I felt a responsibility was to repay him when I could.  No one said a word about money.

But like Russert says in his book, the most important thing a father can give his children is his time.  Sure enough, I most remember those long, late-night conversations about politics, law, history, the news, baseball (he saw DiMaggio, Lefty Grove, and Jimmy Foxx; we saw Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra), and anything else I wanted to talk about.   He was never touchy-feely, and rarely talked about feelings, but I always knew he was sharing himself, and expressing his love by listening to me, respecting me, teaching me, and spending time with me.