Week 43: Quite the Character
This was meant to be for the week of October 21 to 27 so I am going to play catch up for the next few days. I've been looking at Ancestry's DNA results and going down a few rabbit trails from there but mostly I've been taking care of our elderly dog, going to Seattle once a week for detailed lessons on the sewing machine I bought just as the pandemic hit (literally), and trying to keep up with laundry and other cleaning. Last week we sent out our annual letter which usually goes at Christmas but we decided that the way this year was going, it might be a good idea to just send it out before anything else could happen. I notice that the asteroid missed us at least.
There are a number of characters on the family tree, on both sides. I will say right here that my dad, Cecil Prewitt, was a character and a half. He was a teller of tall tales, and then you'd find out that there was at least a kernel of truth and maybe more than a kernel to these unlikely stories about his life. Things I had some confirmation for:
He graduated from Olympia High School (still in existence) in about 1933, in an era when many did not graduate. He played high school basketball and retained a love for the game at that level though he also loved college and professional level play too: he just thought they were slightly different games. When he finished high school, he joined the circus. Yes, he joined the Al G. Barnes circus which toured the U.S. and Canada at the height of the Depression and was apparently the most successful (or maybe the only successful) touring circus of the day. He was a roustabout, not a performer, and I think this was formative experience for him as he retained a love of travel for the rest of his life. His next work experience was as a stage hand for a third rate opera company (though Dad claimed they had some excellent singers). Truthfully, I don't know where this opera company was located and I always thought it was an unlikely story, until the day I heard a music critic discussing a sub-par Metropolitan Opera performance and describing it as reminiscent of the bad old days of the San Carlo Opera Company. Alrighty then. That certainly jibed with Dad's description of their performances.
By this time he must have been about 20. At some point in the next year he enlisted in the Navy, served several years (including an emergency appendectomy at sea that came back to haunt him 30 years later), got out, then got back in when it became clear the U.S. would end up joining the war. He married my mother in July of 1941 and was fortunately in San Diego when Pearl Harbor was bombed. He spent the war in the Pacific, including a lot of time in the Aleutians and participating in the battle of Attu. He loved being in the Navy but my mother did not love all of the time he was away so even though he already had 12 years total of service including post-war Reserve duty, he left the Navy.
So what my father did for a living was work on Very Large Machines as a mechanic. This meant over the years that he worked on dam construction, logging, open pit mining, a mineral extraction project on the Dead Sea, missile silos for NATO, freeways and aqueducts from Washington to California. In the course of these jobs overseas, he accidentally wandered into East Berlin in 1964 as part of a tour that he hadn't meant to join, and into the Gaza strip when it was still patrolled by U.N. peacekeepers. .
After my mother's death he was adrift for several years. Eventually though he decided he would like to see Thailand, and so he spent a month travelling the country and enjoying himself thoroughly. By the end of that year it was clear that something was going wrong with his health, and eventually he was diagnosed with lung cancer (unfiltered cigarettes for 40 years will do that) and died a couple of months later, in April of 1989 at the age of 74.
Yes, quite the character really. He was kind and funny and smart and loved to read, although I suspect that he was dyslexic and maybe had a touch of Attention Deficit Disorder. He always carried a notebook and pencil in his pocket, a habit I carry on with a notebook and a pen in my purse wherever I go. Thanks Dad!
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