***I Hear My Father's Voice....I hear an early morning front door slam

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the Guadalcanal Campaign, a campaign my father participated in, during World War II.

Al Johnson, Class Of 1964, comment:

This was originally posted in June 2008.

In honor of Preston Johnson. , 1920-1985, PFC United States Marine Corps, World War II, and, perhaps, other North Quincy fathers.

Some of you, I am sure, are warm-heartedly preparing to put some little gift together for the 'greatest dad in the world'. Others of you are preparing to do that same task for dear old dad, although with your teeth grinding. In this writer's family we never even got that far and so today the subject is a little cyberspace message in honor of a man who, as it turns out, deeply formed who I am- for the better. We had been estranged for many years. I do not want to go into the details of that fact, just call them ugly, as this is not about my trials and tribulations in the world, but his.

He was a man who came out of the foothills of Kentucky- Hazard, Harlan County, coal mining country famous in story and song- the poorest of the poor of white Appalachia-the 'hillbillies'. At the start of World War II he joined the Marines, fought his fair share of battles and by the vagaries of fate eventually was stationed in Hingham. While stationed there he met my mother (NQHS Class of 1943), married, had three sons and the rest is history. Well, not quite. He was also a man who never drew a break, not at work, not through his sons, not in anything.

My father was a good man, he was a hard working man when he had work, and he was a devoted family man. But go back to that last paragraph about where he was from. He was also an uneducated man with no skills for the Boston labor market. There was no call for a coal miner's skills in Boston after World War II so he was reduced to unskilled, last hired, first fired jobs. This is not a pretty fate for a man with hungry mouths to feed. And stuck in the old Germantown housing project, to boot. To get out from under my mother also worked, scraped a few pennies together to buy an old, small rundown house, on the wrong side of the tracks, on Walnut Street and we thus came back to the North Quincy of her youth. But who knows what toll that inability to be the sole breadwinner (no big deal now- but important for a man of his generation) took on the man's pride.

And it never really got better from there as his three boys grew to manhood and caused him more than his fair share of heartache. He never said much about it though. Why? Damn, they were his boys and although they broke his heart they were his boys. That is all that mattered to him and so that, in the end, is how I know he must have forgiven us.

To go on in this vain would be rather maudlin. The old Marine Corps slogan held true in his case though- Semper Fi- "always faithful". Yes, that is a good way to end. Except to say something that should have been shouted from the rooftops long ago- thanks Dad, you did the best you could.