100 Years Ago Today

On February 5, 1916, my dad Marion Reasoner was born in the community of Indian Creek, Texas. Like most rural Texans at the time, he and his family had a pretty hardscrabble existence. As a young man, he helped on the family farm, worked as a cowboy, and eventually became the manager of a bowling alley in nearby Brownwood. He was one of the top amateur bowlers in the country at the time. Later, after marrying my mother, he worked as an aircraft mechanic, first as a civilian employee at Randolph Field in San Antonio during World War II and then later at Convair/General Dynamics in Fort Worth. In between those two stints, he served in the U.S. Army and was in the Signal Corps, going overseas to Austria right after V-E Day. As he put it years later, he strung telephone wire all over Austria and developed a lifelong affection for the country. He always wanted to go back and visit, but he never did.

While working at Convair in Fort Worth in the early Fifties, he took a correspondence course that taught him how to repair televisions and radios. This was in the early days of TV, of course, so he was in almost on the ground floor of the TV repair business. This became his second job for many years, and he worked at it full-time after he retired from General Dynamics in the mid-Seventies, opening a business that sold and serviced TVs and appliances. (This is the shop where I worked for five years.) After closing that shop he continued to work on TVs part-time for his old customers for several years, before finally retiring to devote his time to gardening, his grandkids, and volunteer work such as delivering Meals on Wheels. He decided to put in a garden at my house, and I can still see him in my mind’s eye, 85 years old, wearing khakis and a long-sleeved shirt and a battered old hat, wrestling with a gas tiller out there in that garden in the middle of summer.

As a kid, my dad loved to read, but as an adult he devoted most of his time to working, as many in his generation did, and didn’t read much for many years. But when he got older and slowed down some, he began to read again and went through hundreds of books, mostly Westerns and historical novels, but really, he would read almost anything he could put his hands on. The fact that I was a writer had something to do with his renewed interest in reading, I’m sure, and he became a fan of my books and a great salesman for them. He would carry around copies of them when he was making his TV service calls and sell them to his customers. Often when he’d stop by our house, he would take a $20 bill out of his pocket and give it to me, saying, “Sold some books.” Actually, I suspect he gave away a lot of them and just used that as an excuse to feed me a little extra cash, since he knew we were struggling financially a lot of that time and had two kids. That’s exactly the sort of guy he was.

He loved telling stories and jokes, watching baseball on TV, and whistling along with gospel music. He could whistle a version of “Amazing Grace” that would make chills go up and down your spine, it was so beautiful. His favorite TV shows were Westerns. Saturday night in our house meant HAVE GUN – WILL TRAVEL and GUNSMOKE, and Sunday night was BONANZA, if we got home from church in time. He could spend hours in his back yard pulling weeds and “dopin’ them red ant beds”. He hated weeds and red ants with equal passion.

His health began to deteriorate as he entered his late 80s. Eventually he had to move into a nursing home, which he hated worse than weeds and red ants. The last time I visited, when I started to leave I commented that I had some pages to get written. He said, “Better get your work done.” Those were his last words to me. They summed up his life pretty well. He was a man who believed folks better get their work done.

His passing wasn’t unexpected, but it still left a hole in the lives of everyone who knew him. For several years after that, almost every day I had the urge to ask him about something or other, before catching myself and realizing I couldn’t. Even now, more than a decade later, that still happens every now and then. The ones who’ve passed on are still supposed to be there, damn it, so that when we think, “Oh, I’ll just ask him; he’ll know”, we’re not left with that sudden feeling of loss.

A few years after he died, the phone rang at my house one day, and when I answered, the caller said, “Is this the TV man?” I used to get those calls all the time, people looking for him, while he was in the business and after he retired, too. That was the first such call I’d gotten in a long time, though. Even though I had to say, “No, I’m sorry, that was my dad and he passed away,” I had a smile on my face, glad that people still remembered him. I have to suspect I won’t get any more such calls. Too much time has passed, and anyway, TVs are throwaway items now. If it doesn’t work, chunk it, go down to Wal-Mart, and buy another one. But if the phone does happen to ring someday and somebody says, “Is this the TV man?”, I won’t be totally surprised, either.

This is a bit disjointed and probably a little too maudlin, but right now I’d give a lot to be able to stand out in my driveway with him, leaning on his car, talking for hours about everything under the sun like we used to. I still have a lot of questions I’d like to ask him. But there are pages to be written, and like he said . . .

I’d better get my work done.