For some years from now I have thought about writing short reflections on my father’s life. Much of what I can be proud of in my life, he and my mother taught me to be. But my father was a man of sayings. Many of them echo in my head to this day, and I have been writing them down, first on slips of paper and then in computer files, and I believe that the time has come to get started on putting them in order.
This will not be a regular column, since I am still more than fully employed in family, church, and work activities. But at the same time I hope that you will feel free to share your thoughts in the comments sections to amplify the effect of these recollections. For they are but recollections, shaded by time, emotion, and the possible inaccuracy of my sources, and therefore begging for comment.
From time to time I will give such biographical details as are important to the story, but up front I should give some basic life details.
Carl Adolphe Leonard was born September 3, 1913, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the oldest (of four) children of Zadeth Dutcher Leonard and Carl VanEvery (sp?) Leonard. Dad always went by Adolphe (or C.A. for formal documents) because his dad was “Carl.” He was born and lived in the house built by his grandfather when the family moved to Oklahoma shortly after statehood in 1907. They came from a “Pennsylvania Dutch” community in Big Pond, Pennsylvania, not far south of Erie, NY where the Leonards had settled in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The family spoke German, and Carl and Zadeth met in the German-speaking Methodist church only a couple of blocks south of my father’s first home. The church is still there, although no one there speaks German anymore so far as I know. My father never spoke German, so far as I know [I started teaching myself German in high school and he never offered to help] and I never heard his parents speak it either. Many German-speaking Americans completely abandoned the language after the United States entered World War I in 1917.
Years later my father sent us boys a couple of paragraphs about his life, and in it was one that is especially relevant to the intersection of world history and biography. “Only one time during the Second World War did anyone asking why I didn’t change my name. A competitor, Bill Hubbard, and I were in front of a grocery store [when he asked]. I asked him [why he hadn’t] changed [his name] during World War I when he was in France fighting Kaiser Bill? That ended the conversation. You make your own name and [besides] Hitler’s name was spelled Adolf, mine Adolphe.”
My grandfather was trained as a lawyer but he went to work as secretary to a prominent El Reno business man, moving the family there in about 1916. (I thought for a long time that Dad had been born in El Reno.) A few years later (anyone know when?) the family moved again, this time to Chickasha, Oklahoma. Pop’s (my dad’s name for his father; we called him Papa) employer had bought three bankrupt Bake-Rite (?) wholesale bakeries, and he sent Pop to Chickasha to manage the bakery and turn it around. Pop was so successful that he bought out his employer’s interest and managed it until about 1947, when he sold it and went into early retirement. [Pop was so bored with retirement that he started a second career and was so successful at it that when he died, at about age 75, he was on a visit to a customer.]
Dad went to the work for Papa at about age 14, working as a bakery employee. Dad learned the baking trade from the other men in the shop, and during high school he would go in at about 2 a.m., help with the baking, do early morning deliveries in a bakery step van, then go to high school. After school he would do his homework, go to sleep for a few hours, and repeat the exercise. On Saturdays he didn’t have school, but he still did his bakery route.
When he graduated from high school in about 1930, Dad commuted one semester to the University of Oklahoma in Norman where he planned to major in food chemistry. However, he said that he looked around and saw fellows with Masters degrees driving cabs and realized that he had a much better job than they did, so he gave up on his studies. (Although he never quit reading and studying.) A year or two later my mother, Emma Lee Godbey, came to Chickasha to attend the Oklahoma College for Women (now The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma). They met at an Epworth League (Methodist) social and dated until she left to do her junior and senior year at the University of Texas in Austin. She finished a degree in Sociology, and shortly thereafter they were married. The lived in Chickasha in rented housing until they were able to design and built their own home just a couple of blocks from my grandparents’ home. My first memory (at age two, just as WWII was ending) is of staring out the back screen porch door at a pen where my folks were fattening a turkey and a goose. Later on a man came by to purchase them, and my brothers and I got war stamps for the purchase. I found out years later that we ate the goose that year; my parents didn’t want to upset us because we (I in particular?) had become so attached to them.
When Papa sold the bakery, Dad got on at a wholesale shop in Muskogee, Oklahoma [yes, I am an Okie from Muskogee], but three months later he was able to borrow the money from his brother Leroy to buy the equipment and goodwill in the Tasty Bakery in Ponca City. I was born in 1943 at the Chickasha General Hospital (as were my brothers in 1940 and 1944), and we moved to Ponca City. In 1967, for reasons I will save for later, my parents moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where they lived until about 1997. (I need some help on dates here). At that point Mom’s dementia and Dad’s health had declined to the point he realized that he needed to institutionalize her. They moved to Guthrie where my brother Joe had helped him find an excellent care facility and she died February 17, 2001, at age 85 and he died August 30 of the same year at age 88 (actually 87, but that’s another story).
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