Today is Father's Day. It also happens to be Juneteenth. My dad, though no longer with us, would appreciate this. Despite his conservative appearance and, often, dour professional demeanor--he was, after all, a small-town school superintendent (starting out) in 1960's Oklahoma--Dad was actually very progressive and extremely well-educated, quietly championing the plight of the poor and oppressed while working within a biased educational system. In a state (and community) steeped in virulent racism and religious superstition, my dad identified with those on society's margins. One of ten children, he was five years old when his own father died in the mid-1930's. The family found themselves homeless and penniless in the epicenter of the Dust Bowl at the height of the Great Depression. After his father's more fortunate brothers loaded up the family and their few belongings in a truck, they drove them to Boise City, Oklahoma, where the uncles had selected a former chicken coop--one room with a dirt floor--to house my grandmother and her many children. Thereafter, whenever anything in town was vandalized, when property was stolen, when a potential crime might be in the making, the local police paid a visit to the Wells Boys. Apparently, with no African Americans around to blame, the Wells Boys, of the poorest family in town, were the next best target. While this went on, each of the older sons was taken, in turn, by the military to serve overseas in WWII. By the time my dad was drafted in the 1950's, WWII had ended, but he was sent to Germany all the same. 

When I was growing up, we weren't close; Dad went off to Germany to fulfill his military obligations when I was a few days old and I didn't see him again until I was 2. In the meantime, Mom (who had just recently turned 20) and I lived with her parents and brothers in a small town in the Texas Panhandle. Naturally, I became attached to my grandmother and to my mom's younger brother. I must have been shocked by the sudden arrival one day of this stranger who proceeded to take my mom and me away from the loving embrace of the only family I'd known thus far. I am quite certain that he was appalled by the spoiled, sissified little boy who shrank in horror at his touch. He was a high school athlete, college football player and a Golden Gloves champ while serving in the army, and was on the verge of becoming a high school football coach. We didn't mesh well. Happily, a couple of years later, my mom presented him with a daughter who gave him the parental love I couldn't. 

I've heard people make negative comments about football coaches going back to school to get their PhD so they can become school administrators. Not a good lot, they seem to imply. Well, that may be true in some cases. But Dad worked as hard as anyone ever did to get his PhD. He spent the summer of 1965 working on his Doctor's Degree at UC Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the summer of the Watts Riots, which spread like wildfire up and down the West Coast. Even before those riots, my dad had already involved himself in the protest movements of the time, including the Civil Rights Movement and the United Farm Worker's Movement. He had an insatiable curiosity about people, and a strong desire to help alleviate hunger, homelessness and racial hatred in whatever humble way he could. 

Aside from his stint in California, Dad also traveled to the East Coast, sometimes with my mom, sometimes not. A lot of folks would be surprised at who he met during his travels and their effects on his worldview. His service in the military and experiences during the sixties, combined with a natural empathy for others, and the crushing poverty of his childhood, informed my dad's intellect in a way that even he may never have thought possible. 

Later in life, Dad and I finally bonded. I was nearing 30 by then, and I think he just needed someone outside his small-town sphere to confide in, to talk to about his past, about his concerns over our family, about my own future, and the future of the country. AIDS had reared its ugly head by then so, without putting it in so many words, he indicated that I should take heed of what was happening on the coasts (it would be awhile before AIDS surfaced in Oklahoma City, which is where I lived then). He knew that I was gay, of course, how could he not? Since that first time he'd seen me after returning home from the army, he knew. It was the unspoken elephant in the room every time I went home and my Southern Baptist mom pretended that my girl friends were girlfriends and my "roommates" were roommates. It was always the unspoken thing. Always. That's just how it was back then. 

"Life is what you make it," my dad often said to me, and as he aged, he repeatedly told me how happy he was that I'd met C, that I had someone to share my life with as I got older. He was a good man, my dad, and while our relationship was never of the traditional father-son variety, we became closer after he began confiding in me, first as a friend, and then as a parent, when he finally learned to relax and let life happen (something I'm still no good at). Once my sister began having children, the whole world changed for my parents. I think that was the biggest blessing they ever could have hoped for. That saved their marriage and made my dad more emotionally accessible; whatever unhappiness and disappointment he'd stored up over the years seemed to melt away at the sight of his grandchildren. 

Later, as the grandkids grew up and left home one by one, my parents slowly retreated into their own private worlds of dementia and Alzheimer's. I admire my dad more than I can say. At the end of his life, if he'd been able to speak, he'd almost certainly have expressed no regrets. It may not have turned out as he'd expected, but my dad's life is an inspiring example of someone overcoming daunting odds--including poverty and depression--to make something of himself, to be the best husband and father he knew how to be, and to expand his mind and grow as a human being. What saddens me is that most people will never know how amazing he was. It took me a lifetime to realize it.