Happy 100th Birthday, Dad!

Today my father, Paul, would have turned 100. He lived to be 89 and had a full, mostly happy life as far as I could tell. If he were alive, I'm sure we'd celebrate by getting the whole extended family together for a duck or salmon dinner with pie for dessert and play the old Edison record player that his parents got in the early 1900's. His favorite song was "Mrs. Murphy's Chowder". I always liked "Over There" from the record collection and would also play that. We would give him Blue Nun wine to drink and he probably would start talking about the old days, meaning his youth before I was born. He often mentioned the Spanish Influenza flu epidemic of 1918 and how many of his friends at Garfield Elementary School died from it. He sometimes talked about Nov. 11 and how he got out of school early to celebrate Armistice Day, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month--the end of the War to End All Wars. He sometimes would look at his old photo album of his trip up Glacier Peak with his friends after he graduated from Everett High School. Before heading for the wilderness, the group of buddies stopped at Birch Bay. It was there that he met his first love, Josephine, who lived in Bellingham. She died a few years later of rheumatic fever. Dad was proud of his scaling Glacier Peak and referred to it often as we were growing up. He kept his ice pick and some hiking sticks from that trip until he died. He came back from that trip to face life in the Great Depression. He talked about some of the struggles of making mortgage payments on the family business. He took a job for Mr. Metzger, a business man, and chauffered him around the area. Later, when he married my mother, they spent time in Los Angeles while he worked for Metzger. Dad also liked to talk about his time at the shipyard in Everett during WWII. He gave me a "thousand dollar" bracelet that he made there. Apparently, they weren't always busy and he made it to have something to do. It always seemed to me that those war years were happy ones for my parents. They lived with my mother's parents and all seemed to get along. I don't remember Dad talking about being scared during the war or losing friend in battle. I'm sure that he must have experienced those things. He just never talked about them. Family gatherings were always the highpoints of his life. He would have enjoyed the party we would have given him!