father and son
Thursday, January 3, 2013 at 1:11PM Most people who have known both my father and me for any length of time would say that we are not much alike. And to look at us and see the contrast between our personalities, it would be easy to accept that observation. My dad avoids controversy, goes about the business of his life quietly and modestly, and as far as I knew had no great ambition or passion about a career. At family gatherings, he rarely converses with anyone or shows much emotion, seeming content to passively watch and listen to the antics of the rest of us. Sometimes it seems like he almost isn’t there. He is like a deep pool, quiet and unknowable, but in a placid rather than mysterious way.
U.S. Marine PFC Theodore R. Stultz
By contrast, I tend to be vocal, articulate, and often fiery, and I have to work to tone myself down. My excitement, inner turmoil, and competitive drive often come through loudly and colorfully in frequent outbursts that can be both invigorating and exhausting to people around me. I work frenetically or not at all. I am intense and stormy, and for better or worse, difficult to ignore. Friends and colleagues who enjoy me appreciate my passion. I suspect few of them would say that I’m easy to be with. I wear people out.
cyclist Scott A. Stultz, 1959
When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time with my father. He was nothing if not a patient teacher; I was eager to learn and do things with him. Dad taught me how to care for bees and farm animals. To hunt, fish, and trap. He showed me the proper way to hold, use and care for hand tools, how to measure and build things well. Under his tutelage I became a very good skier at an early age, and when I became interested in art, his own considerable talent and skill became apparent as he helped me get started.
But as I got into my teenage years, my strong inclination towards intellectual and academic pursuits pulled me outside the orbit of my father’s mundane sphere of influence, and we began to grow apart. He was proud and encouraged me in every way he could, but as I became emphatically interested in the larger world of art, literature, and ideas, he was less able to effectively mentor me. We both felt that the commonality between us was shrinking. Or so I thought.
Recently, I had the rare opportunity to spend some time alone with Dad on the Friday after Christmas. My wife was visiting her family a couple of hours east in Oneonta, my son had stayed behind in Lancaster county to be with friends, and my daughters had stayed the night with their cousin at my sister’s house in Syracuse. I wanted to smoke a pipe and get out of the house, and Dad suggested that we go out past the barn to the workshop where he could light a fire in the wood burning stove, and I could light up a bowl of tobacco.
Both of us like to be occupied, so it wasn’t long before he mentioned that he might bring a few boxes of books in from the piles in the barn needing to be sorted and either sold or given away. I offered to help carry them through the snow. My father is still in good shape, but he’s eighty and not as strong as he once was, so he was happy to accept. He was glad for my company without the awkward need to grope for things to talk about.
As I dug through the first couple of moldering cardboard boxes, brushing away dead flies and dust, I came across an unfamiliar manila envelope, fragile with age, from the American Institute of Baking in Chicago. Carefully, I opened it and pulled out several pieces of correspondence between my father and the school, along with literature on the curriculum, letters of recommendation from his commanding officer in the Marines from which he had completed his four year enlistment, and a letter of acceptance from 1954. I showed them to Dad, and he said with some energy in his voice, “Oh yeah, I almost went there after I got out of the Marines, when I came back from Japan the first time.”
As he paged through the crumbling sheets, he told me how he had decided he wanted to go to the Institute and find a career in the commercial baking industry. After dropping a 300 pound block of ice on his big toe and not able to do more athletically demanding service for a few months, he had worked in the bakery during his enlistment and found he was interested and had an aptitude for it. He had passed the competitive entrance requirements to go to what was the best school of its kind at the time, and was all set to go.
Ted and Michiko, Japan, 1954
“Then I found out that your mother was pregnant back in Japan. I wasn’t going to leave a child behind without a father like a lot of guys in the service did back then, so I went back and married your mom. But the baby wasn’t you.” He choked up a little.
I’d heard bits and pieces of this story from my mother. I’d been told by her just a few years back that he gave up his opportunity for a career that he wanted. I knew that she had a late term miscarriage, of the son who would have been my older brother. I knew that my father’s uncle had died in World War II, and that my grandfather had served and been wounded on a Coast Guard boat in the Pacific.
Marriages between Japanese brides and American soldiers were considered scandalous and shameful by many, on both sides of the ocean. My great grandmother Stultz had been outraged, saying to my grandfather, “How could you let Ted marry one of the enemy?” But my father was resolute. He wrote to my mother, who, knowing no English, had to have his letter read to her by an interpreter. In it, my father instructed her that he would be in Tokyo, on a certain day, at a particular time and place. If she was willing to marry him and return to America, she should meet him as the letter prescribed. He would take it as a negative decision if he didn’t find her there, and would turn around and return to the U.S. alone. Against the strong disapproval of her father, my mother left the world she knew to give birth to me and my siblings, and became an American citizen. And my father, if he ever had any regrets about sacrificing his career, never mentioned it. Then or now.
father and son, 1956
After we’d looked through a few more boxes, Dad closed the damper on the stove, straightened up the shop, and we went back to the house for a hot lunch. The rest of the weekend was busy with family gatherings and other distractions, then the girls and I made the five hour drive home from snow country on Sunday.
Two days later, back here in Pennsylvania, my vision swam and the breath went out of me for a long moment. The top of my head tingled. The parallel between my father’s choice and my decision nearly forty years later to abandon my long held aspirations for a career in architecture, in the face of sudden parenthood, suddenly became clear.
When my children’s mother telephoned me twenty years ago while I was at my parents’ house on a snowy Christmas eve to tell me that she was pregnant, my scheduled admission to complete a half finished Master of Architecture degree at the University of Virginia suddenly seemed unimportant. I remember how easily I was able to let it go. And like my father, I’ve never regretted it.
Nora, Noble and me at my parents' farm, 1994
My father and I have followed very different interests and pursued dissimilar paths. Our lives are worlds apart, and our views rarely intersect. For decades, I've missed the connection we had when I was a boy. Yet, beyond knowing or understanding, in ways that have mattered most, I am my father’s son.
Reader Comments (2)
That was incredible Scott. Oh, and by the way, you have not worn me out. You are still as interesting as the day I met you all those years ago.
Scott - I cried when I read this --- I knew most of it except for your part at the end I am proud of both of you and I love you both very much. I am not good with words but I hope you understand what I am trying to say -- even tho this made me cry I had a very warm feeling in my heart. I love you!!