Big Jim

By TAD BARTIMUS

He was always the skinny kid in the neighborhood who tagged along and never said much. Thirty years later, he talked:

"Your dad," he wrote, "was very special to me, someone I looked up to. He was 'bigger than life' in that old tattered flight suit he wore to mow the grassŠ His stories of all the places he'd visited entertained me a lot. He was a 'man's man' and yet he was gentle person as well... "

My father was a pilot; he didn't just go to work, he flew off into the wild blue yonder and returned laden with gifts and stories.

I'd never considered my father's impact on the pack of harmless hellions who'd raced in and out of our house from kindergarten through college. My parents had maintained an open-door policy; any young person was welcome any time. My friends took advantage of this good will; where else could they find limitless buttermilk chocolate cake, three telephone extensions and an extra plate at the dinner table?

It was natural I'd become a person shaped in large part by my parents' values and personalities, but I never dreamed my friends were being influenced, too. This new knowledge is a Father's Day gift handed to a daughter across a wide space.

When I was growing up pilots were like movie stars, glamorous and exotic. My father was a pilot; he didn't just go to work, he flew off into the wild blue yonder and returned laden with gifts and stories. Everybody knew when he returned because he buzzed the neighborhood in his big Air Force plane, waggling its wings over the backyard as we ran outside waving kitchen towels. Sure it was against regulations, but he'd been a World War II fighter pilot. They made up their own rules. His magic rubbed off on me. I got to feel special because he was special. I've built my life around this entitlement.

Dad's homecomings were EVENTS. Sometimes in his absence he forgot what a house full of teenagers was like and there was fallout. Like when he reached into the refrigerator for a Coke only to find, for the hundredth time, they were all gone. He installed a Coke machine in the garage; a fleet-fingered friend figured out how to jimmy it. Same thing with the pay phone. My dad pretended exasperation but was secretly pleased; he always admired enterprise. Then there was the day he came home to suburbia to find my country pal's new horse tied to his favorite tree, placidly eating it. Once he arrived at 3 a.m., to see the garage blinking on and off with orange lights. A passel of us had swiped several road construction signs as a prank, not realizing when we'd stashed them that they'd light up the neighborhood. The next day we had to return them with an apology and we all got grounded -- dad disciplined other people's kids just like his own, and they took it because they respected him.

Those were stand-up times. Not innocent, certainly; I came of age with Vietnam, Kennedy and King assassinations and Kent State. But the 60s and 70s forced us to choose sides, the lines were more sharply drawn. My dad was the quintessential warrior, part of the last of a breed who strapped on their airplanes and took off, like knights of old, to save the world. Yet when my friends got their draft notices he counseled them to take what he thought was the safest, if not the easiest, way out and three of my classmates became pilots. They survived to return in uniform and throw dad a snappy salute before they hugged him.

My father lived in the last generation before the women's movement. He didn't do dishes, his hand never touched a washing machine knob and the summer Mom was sick we lived off fried-egg sandwiches. But he knew who he was and what he stood for. He could fix and build things, grow blue-ribbon tomatoes, win at poker and put food on the table with a rifle. He was also a fisherman, a particular blessing. "Your dad (Big Jim to me) was the one that taught me how to tie a hook on a fishing line," wrote the now-grown man who, as that quiet little boy, had lost his own father to an early death. "I see him sitting there on the log, on the bank at the little blue cabin at the lake, and I hear his voice: 'Put it through the eye, twist it three times and run it back through the loop ...' It seems a rite of passage, as I have taught my kids to tie a fishing knot as he taught me. Each time I tie on a hook, I think of Big Jim ..."

I am strangely thrilled to realize that on this Father's Day my old friends are remembering my father with special affection and appreciation. I have lived long enough to know immortality lies in properly tied fish hooks, juicy tomatoes and showing children they can fly.

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