On This Rock

My hero, my rock. My Dad. Even on those days when he would come home at the end of the day and spank us, I didn't blame him. He was without malice. Mom made him do it! She never laid a hand on us, but all day if we had misbehaved, she would insidiously threaten, "Wait till your father gets home." (I forgave her when I became a mom and was on "the other end," so to speak.) In my book, he could do no wrong. Even if he broke a ruler on my backside.

We little girls were not without our wily techniques for payback, however. On any early weekend morning, if we were very lucky and a little stealthy, we could sneak in his room if he were still asleep and carefully pull the top sheet out from under the end of the bed, and there find those tender white soles of his feet, and TICKLE TORTURE! He was helpless, and would yelp and jump straight up out of bed. Ahh, revenge, sweet, sweet, sweet revenge!!! We knew he'd fought a war, but we were the invincible foe those mornings.

ERNIE & JOYCE (SISTER)

With us, he was a lamb. Maybe he just knew his way around women, seeing as he grew up with them.  Three sisters, no brothers. Or maybe he just was born with the knack of getting along with people in general. Whatever genes he inherited, he also received the legacy of his name. His grandfather's. Ernest C. Sholes. The middle name is one he didn't like at all and so kept it this big secret, and we could never reveal it, under pain of some unspoken dire penalty. So you're just going to have to guess. How about playing Hangman? Four letters total, and you have the first.

ATTENTION!

Most days I just couldn't wait till my father got home. He was so laid back, just so easy to get along with. Just such a light touch. Totally deaf in one ear, and going gradually deaf in the other (nerve damage from the bombs when he was a soldier in Europe in WWII), he wore a hearing aid. He could make it whistle at will, and he turned it off whenever he didn't want to engage with the world for a little while. He could turn off the volume on the TV and entertain himself by making up his own dialogue or commentary. The only person I've known who never needed therapy. We thought it was pretty cool to be deaf, because he made it seem like fun and never once complained.

READY FOR ACTION!

After Pearl Harbor, like so many other red blooded young American men, Ernie couldn't wait to join the Service and defend his country. But as noble as he wanted to be, they wouldn't take him because he was too skinny. So he resorted to scarfing down bananas as a strategy to gain enough weight, and sure enough it eventually worked. He was in! Off to bases from the East Coast to the West Coast, and then on to follow Patton to war torn Europe to liberate the oppressed. He was a radar specialist.

ERNIE DETECTING ENEMY AIRCRAFT

Other than the ear damage, he came home physically unscathed. His sweetheart had given him a knife to protect himself, and happily it never got up close and personal in any of the trenches for him to have to use it.

GOOD LUCK CHARM?

Besides that knife, I have, and dearly treasure, copies of the letters he wrote his Mudgie during his absence and the service record book she kept for him. He was her hero, and forever mine as well.

Along with his Sargent stripes, another souvenir he brought back from those Army days was a bad habit.  Smoking. I used to love the smell of cigarette smoke because it meant Daddy was home. He gave it up cold turkey some 15 years later after his lungs got punctured by broken ribs, courtesy of an off duty ambulance driver who ran a stop sign and plowed into our car.

One other thing about the Army back then was that it made it pretty impossible to give a girl much notice if you got it in your mind to marry her. So one day his High School sweetheart got a telegram saying he had a brief leave from base in North Carolina so how about getting married next week.

JUST MARRIED

So they pulled it off on Sept. 21, 1943 and took a 2 day honeymoon in Lake Geneva, WI.

FOREVER SWEETHEARTS

Then he was off to Europe and war for the next two years and then some. But he kept his heart on his sleeve and that girl on a pedestal for the duration. And for the 47 more years after that. Till they played "Taps" for him that one last time.

STILL

So he was a terrific husband. But how was he as a Dad? Well in plain terms, they were just plain mean, my folks. They were a team. Even though it was the greatest injustice, my parents were adamant about putting their children to bed early. Very early, every night. So early, in fact, that we were usually in bed long before the sun even went down in the summertime. See what I mean? Long, long, long before. Talk about unfair!

But Daddy had a way of enticing us into going along with that program regardless of how woefully inconsiderate it was. His trick? Sheer fun! He played different games with us night after night. He'd get us laughing with corny jokes, and then he'd come up with all kinds of different approaches to get us exactly where he wanted us, with whatever goofy idea suited him at the time.

To get us to pick up the living room before bed, sometimes he would commission us into his "army". He would designate us “Sergeants” as we saluted him and he would then give us our orders--- like where to put away the folded clothes, or books or toys that were out of place. He'd have us marching along in cadence, all of us on the left or right foot together as we shouted along, and ending up with "Sound off, 1-2-3-4, 1-2---3-4!" We little girls thought we were promoted to being grown ups, heroic soldiers at that; practically thought we'd get Presidential Medals of Honor for a job well done. Boy, could we get into it.

Another night he might pretend to be a robber with a gun. And would gruffly tell us what to do so we wouldn't get shot. Again we'd be sent to put away clean towels and whatever we had strewn about. A little scary, a little exciting. He could just as easily choose to be the Sheriff and make us Deputies. Or a Mafia Boss who would assign us "deliveries."  Or the scenario could have been Cowboys and Indians, or whatever his imagination lent itself to that particular night. Sometimes he would pretend he had an invisible dog on a leash that would "bark" at us to get our full cooperation. It was always something---something that would make us smile or laugh, and MOVE! Nothing he couldn't get us to do.

When he got us upstairs into our shared dormitory bedroom and into our beds, Daddy would stick around for awhile to play quiet games with us or tell us stories. We learned a lot from playing those games. Games like “States” where he would call out the name of a state and we would have to respond with the name of its capital city. Or we had to somehow identify makes and models of cars; that would always end in hysterical laughter when someone would identify the mystery car they couldn't really pinpoint as “Jalopy”.

Sometimes he would make up far fetched stories or tell us about his childhood when he lived on a farm. He was strange--- the only person we had ever heard of who used to ride on a cow. Then there were the nights, not often, when we would coerce him into telling us stories from his life as a soldier in World War II. When he was in training in the Army in North Carolina, bathing in a river, he was paralyzed with fear when an extremely poisonous coral snake slithered up to him. We loved to hear him tell that because of the allure of the element of the danger.

And he lived to tell of it, so we knew there would be a happy ending, after all. He really couldn't be coaxed into telling us about the really dangerous or sad experiences he had during the war in Europe. He would only go as far as how sick he was on the Queen Mary, the ocean liner that took him across the Atlantic. He was so seasick that for Christmas dinner on that boat he had one lime lifesaver. One.

One puny lime lifesaver? That seemed pretty strange, a little quirky. We begged and begged him to tell us more stories about the War, but he would just never go there. They probably wouldn't have been very fun to hear or to end up dreaming about. Fathers know best, after all.

But there was a time I only learned about more than 75 years after it happened, that my sister Jan shared with me in 2023, when I called and asked her for a Dad memory I could share with my son, Jared, at his 50th birthday. He and Ernie shared the same birthday, April 8th, and so a special memory would be priceless to Jared. So I made that call.

And Jan proceeded to tell me of the time when she was in college, protesting against the Vietnam War and  sharing her outrage about the American soldiers there and their dirty deeds. Dad immediately stopped her in her belligerent tracks and dressed her down. "How dare you! Don't you EVER judge a soldier! You have no idea of what they have seen, of what they have gone through, what they face! You have no business presuming anything about it at all!" 

I was astonished when she shared that; it was as if they had traded personalities at that point, he, the easy going, don't-take-anything-too-seriously gentleman, in a flash transformed into his own intense counterpoint. And Jan, who was so sure of herself and often strident, grew silent and began to listen.

Then he told her of the time when he was in France, his unit had captured some German soldiers towards the end of the war and they were taking them back to a defeated Germany. Apparently there were just too many prisoners to handle on that kind of a journey, so his Commanding Officer came over to him one morning and told him to take two of them out of the way and shoot them. Instantly, Ernie refused the order. Another soldier immediately jumped up and said he would do it. I am so humbled and proud at the same time of his courage to make that choice then and there. I know they still died, but not at his hands. Whenever I think of this moment in time that was hidden from me during his lifetime, my heart and soul are warmed by this knowledge. I didn't think I could love this man anymore than I did. But I do.

He didn't bring past burdens into our young lives at home. Daddy had a way of turning everything into fun and games. A little trick he used for himself even at work. Not such a bad approach to life maybe....

Staying up late at night can be pretty cool. Guess we weren't too cool. But I wouldn't trade my early bedtimes from long ago, because I had a Dad with a twinkle in his eye and love in his heart. It doesn't get any better than that. Really.

This good man was not only a gentleman, he was a truly gentle man. Kind, soft spoken. Low key. No drama. Never a bad word left his lips. Full of corny Dad jokes. Always, always smiling.


He never let on that he might have wanted even one son to toss a ball with, seemed delighted with four daughters. Still, he was always an athlete at heart, playing in an amateur baseball league for a while. He took sports to heart. In fact his dream of all dreams was to be a sportscaster. 

TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME...

We were all born Cubs fans, of course, so the DNA was basically solid. But. Once in a while he'd take us in the backyard to play a little and I would stand there as he got ready to pitch me the ball.

I was like a deer in the headlights and would drop the bat and run the other way while he was winding up for the pitch. I was terrified of being hit by a ball! (Guess who was always the last one to be chosen to play on a team when we divided up in class for any sport?) He would softly tell me to go back and try again, and he would do it all in such slo mo. I felt a little less impotent. Because he was right there in front of me, should I fail.

When we would go on hikes, say to the Forest Preserve, he would defer to shy little me as the leader as we climbed up steep trails. I felt omnipotent. Because he was right there behind me, should I fall.

Besides his silly side, there was a practical common sense part of him that steadied the ship at home. One time there was a wild electrical storm raging outside, lightning all over the place all at once. I was used to lightning and thunder with rainstorms, but this time there was no rain. Just the amplified violence of angry skies. I thought God really was done with us and it was the end of the world. My dad found me sobbing hysterically at the window upstairs. "What's wrong?" he asked. "It's THE END OF THE WORLD!" I wailed. "Oh," he said, "so what are you going do about that?" In a flash I realized there was absolutely nothing I could do about it at all, it wasn't my responsibility, and I became instantly calm. Ever since I have been able to be absolutely calm whenever there's a real crisis and it has enabled me to help others who have had to deal with some heavy storms. Thanks, Daddy!

From day one I was a Daddy's girl.




And





I. ALWAYS. WILL. BE.