Happy Father's Day

Happy Father’s Day to all fathers out there. 

Father’s Day reminds me that this will be the twenty-fourth Father’s Day since my father, Robert Bruce McClendon Jr., died. 

He was a great man and, yes, he had his faults, too. Paul Overstreet’s song, “Seeing My Father in Me” makes me think a lot of my father. 

I am not my father or even a good shadow of the man he was. That is both a good and a bad thing. I did learn a lot from the man.

In our earlier days he took me fishing and camping. Those times were few and far between, but he did try to do this. 

I remember several times, although again not many, he took me to Braves games. He would try to explain what was going on to a kid who was not really into sports.

There were times he took me out and tried to teach me to play baseball and football. I am sure I was a big disappointment because I couldn’t catch what he was throwing. I could throw it back pretty well. 

My father was more of a ‘do it and forget the rules’ kind of person. I was a ‘read the directions and try to get it right the first time’ kind of person. Ultimately, it worked out. 

When I worked with him at our Western Auto Store, he sold, which he could do well, and I organized the parts room and reset the inventory. All of this was really starting to come together when he died. I miss him.

One of the bad things about growing up in a small town is everyone minds everyone else’s business. 

One of the great things about growing up in a small town is you have literally hundreds of mothers and fathers. I will miss a few here and for that I apologize. But I will make an attempt to mention a few.

The first of these would have to be my Uncle Carl. Carl was the kind of cool uncle you just have to love. He rarely got mad at me. 

My father and Uncle Carl were a rare team together. One year for Christmas I got a Cox gas powered airplane. I am sure that it really could fly. I got to open the package. 

Soon after the package was opened, my father and my Uncle Carl broke it. 

The next year I got this great Cox gas powered dragster. I took it out, read the directions, got it started, and got ready to take it out for a test run. 

There was a guide string you had to set up so that the dragster would stay on the track and, when it reached the end of the track, a parachute would deploy and stop the car. 

I turned around to get my car and found that my father and my Uncle Carl had it. They started it up and it went down the street into the creek and broke.

I remember once my Uncle Carl took me to a Braves Game. We went with my cousin Carl Junior’s scout troop. It was great.

When we moved to Iva, Uncle Carl came to work at the Western Auto Store. For a while he worked part time. There was a point where he was there full time. 

During the full time part he changed from being Uncle Carl to just Carl. He decided that the Uncle was just too much. 

He said we were family and friends. I remember there were many times the store would have a need to go out and use a tow rope to bring a car back to the store to be worked on. 

Sometimes my father would go with me, but I really preferred it when Carl went. It was like we knew what each other was going to do before we did it. Those times were great.

My Uncle Franklin was another one of these. For some reason he was always just Franklin. We never referred to him as Uncle Franklin. 

He took me fishing a couple of times, swimming a lot of times, and he is the only person who ever took me hunting. We went squirrel hunting. We didn’t get anything, but that was okay.

As I said earlier, in a small town everyone knows everyone else’s business. It seems that in a small town the parents of your friends become parents to you, too. I think the lead position on this would have to go to Doyle Madden. 

Doyle was the father of my good friend Roger Madden and he was the best scout leader I ever had. He was one that would take me aside and talk to me just like a father and set me straight. There were times I really needed that.

Jesse Harris, the father of Tim and Steve Harris, good friends of mine, would talk to me man to man and help keep me headed in the right direction. He was a pillar of great advice. He was quite a character, too. 

I spent a great deal of time observing him and his wife Merle in their convenience store, Flat Rock Pantry, and they are part of the reason I know as much as I do about convenience stores.

Eugene “Booger” Williams was my first aid and CPR instructor and also one of the people in charge of the Junior Iva Rescue Squad. 

He and I had several heart-to-heart talks about life and careers and the medical field. He was a great inspiration to me and a truly great man. And yes, he would talk to me like a father and tell me what I needed to hear.

Ray Partain, father of Russell Partain, would often tell me like it is. I remember I drove him nuts when I made a sandwich. 

I had this habit of eating the part of a tomato where the stem attaches. It isn’t bad and it beats having to find the trash can when you are making a sandwich. 

He would often say, “Bird, if you want more tomatoes, just get you more tomatoes. You don’t have to eat the whole thing.”  

I started eating this part just to get him to say something. We had a few chats, mostly about finances. He was a truly well-grounded man.

One man I have very fond memories of is James Southerland. He was more like a grandfather than a father. Both of my own grandfathers had passed away before James and I became friends. 

James was retired and bored with retirement. He would come by the store and we would just stand around and shoot the breeze. He always had some great stories. He was really fun to listen to. 

There are so many others out there and I am sorry that I have missed any of them. If I were to write even just a little bit about each one of them I could fill several books.

 So, for all you men out there who have been a part of the me I have become, thank you.

And a very special thank you to Jim Gunter who, on 3 November 1984, stood before Bobby Smith and gave me his daughter, Suzanne, to be my child bride. 

And thank you to Bobby Smith who was there for us, too. And I have to round this out with a special Happy Father’s Day to Earl Moore who was the first male of Suzanne’s extended family to welcome me into the family. 

Happy Father’s Day.