The Skate Board

After news got out about Dad's unexpected death emails came pouring in from everyone who had ever knew him. We are pretty sure his address book was in the van with him, so it was lost in the accident. I had emailed and called everyone I could but asked others to contact anyone they could and published my email with the obituaries that I had run in Oregon and Idaho. Over the following weeks and months I was contacted by many who had known and loved Dad. While it was very overwhelming and emotional for me to be a receiver of so much grief from all who contacted me, there was some joy in it as well. People I had either never met, some even knew of, contacted me to say such nice things about my father and shared some touching or just plain incredible stories.

One of my favorites was from one of Dad's teenage girlfriends, Valerie. Here is a portion of her email to me:

"Steve was my first boyfriend. I moved to Huntington around 1968. My Dad worked for the UP RR. Shelley, Paula, Steve and I were like the (4) musketeers. When I met your Dad is when skate boarding was popular. Oh how I thought he was the coolest guy around. He gave me a ring and we went steady. I think I still have the ring. As I was telling Shelley the other day now that skate boarding is popular again I can't see one of these young men with their long hair and tight skinny pants with out thinking of your Dad."

The Shelley mentioned in the message from Valerie also emailed me and later sent me a picture of Dad on the skateboard mentioned and had this to say:

"I'm sending you a picture of your Dad I took years ago, 1965 and he was 13 years old. He was VERY good on a Skateboard back in those days. We all had a grand time together. He also had a hair style at the time like the Beatles (which at that time was ALL the Rage) . Every time I see a kid on a board I'll think of him."

In time I will share other pictures that friends of Dad sent me but this was one of the first that came in and when it first hit me that there was so much about my father I still did not know...and so many memories of him I had yet to learn. I had felt this way over the years about my mother, but the notion of it seemed less surprising to me since she had died when I was only 15, basically a child, so I never was able to have an adult relationship with her. However, I was very close with Dad and felt like we had shared a lot of ourselves over the years. But like with anyone, any relationship, you never completely know someone...there is always more to discover and learn. I had seen lots of pictures of Dad in his full fledged hippy days when he and my mother were first married. Thinking of Dad as a skater boy, it just seemed to punk rock to me! I so wish I could talk to him and tease him about it.

Later when we were going through Dad's things it made finding the actual skateboard mentioned in these two women's messages mean more to me. I could put it in context. It also made me laugh, because of COURSE he had kept it!