Taking the Risk To Provide

Celebrating family-changing gumption on Father's Day

An 18-year-old was hammering tacks in a new roof when he heard the voice of a man on the street saying a local hosiery mill was hiring. A day laborer, he took a chance and climbed off that roof — into a steady blue-collar job that empowered him to form and feed a family.

Forty-five years later, his son was trying college for the second time, attending accounting lectures all day while working full time in the plant on evening and midnight shift. He slept in his car between classes. When a storm knocked out the electricity, he removed the head light from his Volkswagen and hooked it up to a spare car battery at the kitchen table to study for final exams.

For Father’s Day this year, I probably will be celebrated by two teenagers in my house who’ve had every possible advantage growing up in affluent suburban America. But instead, I hope they will help me celebrate the risk-taking heroics of two men who changed our entire family’s trajectory.

I was just a toddler watching my dad trying to finish college, and the ingeniously rigged headlight is one of my first memories. His drive, and his hard-won degree, elevated him from an overnight computer operator up to middle management. Our family rose from living in a mobile home to affording expensive private colleges for my sister and me.

My grandfather was already old and retired by the time I was cognizant. But I’ve seen how remote the sandy-soil subsistence farm was where he was raised in the Cumberland mountains. Tennessee had gone from having 244 miles of state roads in 1923 to 4,000 in 1927. He had not even been to the local courthouse town until 1925, but the state road near his home was brand new when he turned 18, and I suspect that new asphalt ribbon inspired him to find out where it led.

The nearest factory town was 45 miles across the mountain – and that’s where he went. A slightly-built teenager with no connections, my grandfather picked peaches until the crop season ran out. He then scraped by on the few bucks he got doing construction, not knowing what work — if any — the next day would bring.

Climbing off that roof to take a chance on a hosiery mill job got “Papaw,” as we called him, well-situated just before disaster struck. The Great Depression was imminent — and just months before its onset, much of the mill town was wiped out in an historic flood. A well-liked and creative machine fixer willing to work night shift, my grandfather held on to his mill jobs through good times and bad.

He was third grade-educated, a devout church music leader, and was respected by neighbors of all economic strata. When he died, we discovered old letters in his desk indicating that for nine months one year, he paid an injured young co-worker’s mortgage, while not paying his own — with the blessing of the local banker, who knew he was good for it.

My grandfather’s top rung of economic success was merely affording a house close enough to the mill that he could walk to work. He gave my dad’s college ambition his endorsement, but he could not give him tuition. Dad hitchhiked to university anyway — but less than two years later, he dropped out and went to work splicing long-distance telephone cable. Once married, with a pregnant wife and a trailer to pay off, Dad gave college one more try — and professional doors began to open.

By the time I came to Capitol Hill as a young politico in Newt Gingrich’s revolution, my dad was at the peak of his Lockheed Martin career and making frequent business trips to Washington. He would stay at the old Key Bridge Marriott, just blocks from my apartment, and marvel at how far he, and I, professionally had come from that dirt farm of our roots.

For 150 years in the greatest country on earth, five generations of my ancestors tilled the ground and barely survived. Two men changed that – with ingenuity and grit.

My kids and I — and all progeny that may follow — will all live out the opportunities provided by the faithfulness and the risk-taking of those two men.

The will and determination to instill faith and provide is the story of fatherhood in my book, and I’ve got plenty to celebrate. I suspect you do, too. Happy Father’s Day.

This piece originally appeared June 17, 2023 in The Messenger, a publication that no longer exists and removed its archive from the internet.