A Father's Day Tribute to Doc

As Father's Day approaches, my thoughts turn naturally to my father, Earl Linville. Not that I don't think of him every day, because I do. If my dad were still with us, today, June 18, would be his 100^th birthday. Sadly, we lost him 12 years ago.

If you still have your dad with you, please tell him today that you love him. You may never get another chance.

I'm sure most of us think our dads are or were special, and my case is no exception. My dad was hard-working, loyal, loving, good, funny and smart. I started to include "kind," but I'm sure there were times when some might dispute that. Especially if they ever took a lawn mower with a Tecumseh engine to him to be repaired. He really hated those engines, and didn't hesitate to say so. You never had to wonder where he stood on any subject.

Daddy had been an auto mechanic all my life. At today's costs for auto repair, he could be wealthy, considering the long hours he put in and how good he was at what he did. But he would never have made more than an adequate living because he "didn't believe in robbing people." Often, his customers would pay him extra because they knew he didn't charge enough.

At the age of 55, he became disabled with crippling rheumatoid arthritis and thought he was down for the count. His hands would swell until he couldn't close them, and his knees and other joints were so inflamed that he could hardly creep about. All the known medications failed to help him, and even a stay in the Levi Memorial hospital that specialized in his problems failed to give him much relief. Eventually, his doctor tried cortisone, and he eventually recovered enough to do some lawn mower repair work at home.

He said he knew cortisone would shorten his life, but it would be worth it if it would enable him to get out of bed. Working on those mowers made his life bearable. He never had a hobby. He loved to work and said that was his hobby.

The main reason he liked to work on mowers was that it gave him the opportunity to visit with people who brought their mowers to him for repair. He was quite the talker. But he also knew how to listen.

Daddy's father died when Daddy was four. That fall, Daddy was out in the cotton fields dragging a heavy cotton sack, picking cotton. He, his mother and brother lived a hand-to-mouth existence from then on. I never heard Daddy complain about anything in his childhood, but heard about it from other family members.

At 13, Daddy was cooking for a road-construction crew. He always worked at whatever he could find. He married at 20 and worked for a few years as a sharecropper. He later cut logs, worked in building construction, and started his life as a mechanic around the time I was born. I was the fifth of six children born alive to my parents.

Many people said he was the best mechanic they had ever known. Fortunately, he wasn't in the business at the time mechanic work required owning all the expensive computerized equipment. He would have said that took all the fun out of it.

Daddy wanted to be a doctor, but he never had the opportunity. He had to work to survive, and school was a luxury he couldn't afford. Although he was able to attend school only a part of one year, he loved to read, had beautiful penmanship, and could work math problems in his head faster than most people can work them on a calculator.

He was always ready to suggest a treatment for any medical problem that came up in the family. Sometimes his remedy worked, and sometimes not, but then that's the case with real medical doctors as well. He also practiced his skills on animals. I remember one of our hens whose craw was stopped up. I can't describe the symptoms, aside from the fact that her breast became hugely enlarged. Daddy took a sharp razor blade and sliced open the affected part, cleaned it out, and sewed her back up. She not only thrived, but became a family pet.

His dream was for one of his sons to become a doctor, and he said he would find a way to pay for their education if they so desired. They didn't. I've often wished I had been given that opportunity, but never asked for it because in my part of the country at that time, women doctors were few and far between, and I felt my parents wouldn't go for the idea.

Daddy could be a riot. He had a streak of mischief in him that few people knew about. I remember how angry he made me when he was teaching me to play checkers. He would say, "Move there," and when I did, he would jump me. Hopefully, I didn't fall for that many times.

He came up with some strange forms of entertainment. When my oldest nephew was about 5 or 6, Daddy discovered that you could thump bumblebees in flight and knock them down. My mother always had plenty of flowers and they always seemed to attract lots of bees. He taught Ron to thump bumblebees, and the two of them had great fun for a few minutes, until Ron tried to thump the wrong bee and it beat him to the punch.

He ran in the house crying. When he was feeling better he came back out and Daddy asked him if he was ready to thump some more bumblebees. He said he was, with one condition: "Papaw, you thump the first one." That was a joke between them from then on.

On the rare occasions when he had time, Daddy would play baseball with us and other kids in the neighborhood. He was actually a pretty good player for the amount of practice he put in. His father, who died young, was said to have had a reputation as a very good player.

Daddy's mother had mental problems and apparently seldom knew or cared what her boys were doing. Daddy started smoking tobacco scraps before he reached his teens, and drank some as well. Thankfully, he gave up both habits early on.

Daddy told of things he did when he was growing up that confirmed my belief that he had little supervision. One story that was funny to him was of the time he and a friend were going 'coon hunting at night. Two girls heard about it and asked to go with them, apparently not knowing what they were getting into. These were not girl friends, just acquaintances.

Once in the woods, these girls became frightened and didn't want the boys to get out of their sight. After a while, however, they told the boys, "You stay right here till we get back. Don't move." Then the girls moved out of their sight, and soon the boys heard one of them singing at the top of her voice and stomping around loudly in the brush. After a pause of a few seconds, the other girl started singing and stomping the brush. Their purpose was obvious, and Daddy thought it was hilarious.

Daddy quit drinking right after he married my mother, because she didn't like his drinking. He said, "Well, if it bothers you, I'll quit. Nobody ever cared before." If he ever took another drink, she never knew it.

He became a Christian a few years later and in my eyes, he lived it. He never failed to help anyone who needed help. Although he never worked on Sunday, sometimes the local police would call him and tell him that strangers passing through town were having car trouble. Daddy would go repair the car, and he never took any pay except for the parts he used, explaining that he didn't work on the Lord's day except to help someone in need.

In his later years, as long as he could walk at all, he made the rounds every morning to check on neighbors who were worse off than he was. Unfortunately, by the time he was unable to go anymore, most of his peers had already passed away, so he had few visitors.

A few years earlier, a widowed neighbor had hired a man to remodel her bathroom. He took her money and left without completing the job. Daddy finished the job for her and of course would take no pay. He always said, "I figure the Good Lord put us here to help one another," and he lived up to that conviction.

When my siblings and I were growing up, Daddy worked such long hours that we didn't see much of him. But after becoming disabled, he lavished attention on the grandkids. Our son, Jim, was especially fond of Daddy, and vice versa.

Jim liked to hang around him when he was working on mowers, and picked up some pointers. One day when Jim was about four, Daddy came in the house laughing. He said someone had brought a mower to be worked on and was describing the symptoms. Jim promptly removed the cap from the gas tank and looked in. "Might have water in the gas," he said. As I recall, that turned out to be the right diagnosis.

Once Daddy said that Jim went out to visit him as he worked and said, "Papaw, did you know you're plumb out of ice cream?" Daddy quit what he was doing, washed his hands, and went to town to buy ice cream. His own kids should have been so lucky!

My husband and I lived in an old house and worked on it for 35 years. Some of my best memories are of the times Daddy would come up and help me with some remodeling project while my husband was at work. He loved carpentry work but never felt he could make a living at it.

One day when he was working on some remodeling job at our house, both of his hands were busy, so Jim started feeding him chocolate chips from the bag. We had bought a tube of bathroom caulk and in the blister-seal package was a drop of hardened caulk, which, except for the color, looked exactly like a chocolate chip. Jim fed that to him along with the chocolate chips. Daddy chewed and chewed and finally pulled that caulk chip from his mouth. "You little rascal," he said, and laughed. He always appreciated a good joke, even if it was on him.

Daddy was always there for any of us who had problems. My sisters always had financial problems, and he supported them and their kids for varying periods of time, although he had nothing to spare. Several times he co-signed a note for a son-in-law for a vehicle, knowing all the time he would have to pay the note off. (My husband and I never asked him to sign one for us.)

When my husband and I were first married, he was working at whatever he could find to do till his part-time work at the post office became a full-time job. One of the things he did to fill in the gaps was mowing lawns. He kept up about 30 lawns for two years. Whenever his mower broke down, he took it to Daddy to get it fixed. At this time, Daddy's main work was on cars, so mower work was just a sideline to help people out. Daddy taught him to repair his mowers, and after that he repaired mowers rather than mowing lawns. Even after his post office job became full time, he kept his mower repair business going to pay for extras for the family. My husband always said Daddy was one of his two best friends, and the feeling was mutual.

Regardless of what apparently unsolvable problem came up in whatever he was doing, Daddy could figure out what to do. My husband always said Daddy was the best he ever saw at basic problem solving. I thought of him as the original McGiver. One of his friends who had the same opinion of him nicknamed him "Doc" and it stuck. I think he liked it.

One thing that always impressed me about Daddy was that in spite of how little he had, he never considered himself any better or any worse than anyone else. He seemed as comfortable with anybody on the upper end of the social scale as he did with anyone on the lower end, and he had friends from both. He treated them all the same.

Daddy loved to eat, and missed as few meals as possible. Once he was to have some medical tests run the next day and was instructed not to eat or drink anything after midnight. While my brother was driving him up for the tests the next day, Daddy told him that he had gotten up at 11:30 p.m., baked a pan of canned biscuits, made coffee, and fried some eggs. He finished eating just before midnight and was proud of himself for having beaten the system. "At least I didn't have to miss breakfast," he said.

My mother's first symptoms of Alzheimer's started many years before she died. She came to hate Daddy as much as she had previously loved him. She became verbally and physically abusive to him and we worried about it. My brother removed Daddy's only gun and all the knives from the house for fear of what Mother might do.

The rest of Daddy's life was torture for him, but he never quit loving my mother. When Mother died in 1994, he promptly forgot that she had ever mistreated him, and would tell people that they had been married for 65 years and "were never separated for a single day."

After he became too helpless for us to care for and he had to go to a nursing home, he still maintained his sense of humor. That was about all he had left.

He was almost blind, almost deaf, and in constant pain. But he could tease the nurses and workers at the nursing home and often had a funny story to tell me when I went to see him on my lunch hour every day.

Daddy lived to be 87 in spite of the damage done to his body by rheumatoid arthritis and 20 years of cortisone. Giving him up was one of the hardest things I ever did, but I know he's enjoying his new pain-free body now.

I have no doubt that he's in Heaven, chumming with Jesus, loving my mother and the three daughters they lost, helping his neighbors, and telling funny stories. I miss him every day and am so looking forward to seeing him again someday.