No child can really know their parent. We just live with them for 18 years and then go off to college and visit a few times a year. But despite this intense early experience, clouded by an immature mind and a failing memory decades later, there are lasting impressions. I have four such impressions of my father.
First, he was incredibly adventuresome. Perhaps this stemmed from his experience in WWII when, as a 21 year old from the UP of Michigan, he found himself in the Battle of the Bulge, followed by several months in Austria, which he found immensely beautiful (he returned many times in later life). His U.S. substitute for Austria was Estes Park, CO where we vacationed many times, starting in the early 1970s. A good example of his adventuresome spirit was our many family canoe outings, beginning shortly after we built a wooden canoe from a kit he purchased in the late 1950s. It was put together in our garage on 50th Place in Greenfield, WI with a lot of elbow grease by all four of us (Bob, Ellen, Jim, Dick) and still exists as a testament to our careful hole-drilling and glueing. The canoe was more fun in a river than on a lake, but most of our river trips were either frightening because of narrow rapids (a memorable trek through the Wisconsin Dells) or the absence of water (another memorable trek along the Rock River, consisting of dragging the canoe through 2 inches of water for miles).
Second, he was a sports fan. One of my first memories of television in the late 1950s was watching Green Bay Packers games on Sunday in black and white. Although he loved all sports, his favorite was golf. He knew all the professional players, men and women, and followed the tour with a passion. He taught me how to swing a club when I was about 10 years old, nurtured golf as a way to get some exercise and practice a craft, and enrolled me in lessons at the local George Hansen gold course (par 3) where we played hundreds of rounds. In high school, he joined the Wayne golf club near Glen Ellyn and we played almost every weekend. He bought me a set of refurbished woods (yes, not metal ones) in 1969 and I treasured how professional they looked (even if my accuracy was poor). We always golfed when I visited him in Milwaukee or Tucson until he had to give up the sport as his mobility deteriorated. I think that loss of the ability to swing a golf club and hobble around the course, despite having a golf cart, was one of the saddest parts of his getting old.
Third, he was a problem solver. Perhaps it was the "MacGiver" nature of being in WWII or his upbringing in Calumet in the 1920s and 1930s, but there was no construction challenge he shied away from. His set of tools was amazing and he was a pack rat in keeping little jars of every imaginable nail, screw, or gadget. You never knew when one of those items would come in handy. This problem-solving ability was also exhibited in his interests outside the home. He loved to become engaged in "public works" projects, whether it was helping to design a new high school in Greenfield, to working on the water reclamation project in Tucson to help restore the aquafers, or taking photos of "the big dig" in Elm Grove to deal with spring flooding. His management skills and attention to detail were impressive, and all these projects kept him busy and engaged in retirement. Another domain within which he practiced his problem-solving skills was working as a medical consultant: he had business cards printed up with "Dr. Quack" as his moniker. He loved to do research on his computer (he got a Mac in the early 1980s) and help friends diagnose their illness and seek the best treatment. He himself was the beneficiary of this passion for medical knowledge: he had dozens of treatments for his various ailments (heart, leg, balance) and was a pitbull in seeking to be enrolled in clinical trials (never the control group). There is no question that from his first serious medical incident at age 64 (a pacemaker) until his death, he lived much longer as an active consumer of the health-care system than most passive recipients of medical care would have lived. He had an incredible will to survive even up to the very end, despite suffering from dementia.
Fourth and perhaps most relevant to my career in academia, he was incredibly curious. He read volumniously and widely: fiction, non-fiction, travel, news. He loved to learn about new things, the latest technology (his favorite was innovative medical devices), and the complexities of politics and history. He was also a pretty smart guy, not just in the sense of being academically talented (which he was, with a masters degree in metalurgy), but also having a lot of common sense. I remember him saying that when he hired people to work for him, he was not so impressed by grades, but more by how the candidate went about solving problems and dealing with people. He was a master at both, so it's perhaps not surprising that he valued those skills.
These four characteristics of my dad are just the most salient as I reflect back on my 65 years of experience with him. Again, it's a small sample, dimmed by failing memory on my part, but nevertheless a testament to someone I loved and respected.