By Emory Jones
This is a Father’s Day column.
I know it’s late, but that’s not because I forgot. Some memories ask for a quieter corner of the calendar. For me and lots of others, Father’s Day long ago became one of those quieter corner days.
In 1949, my father, Dennis Jones, bought an airplane—not a Gulfstream or a Learjet, but a little J-3 Cub. A J-3 is to airplanes what a Model-T is to cars. Neither is fast. In fact, they say a J-3 doesn’t take off; it just gently loses interest in the ground.
When my dad, whose roots run deep in Banks County, started courting a girl from nearby White County named Wirtha Meaders, he did lots of his courting from that little airplane. He would fly low and slow in front of her house and signal to ask if she was free Saturday night. Then he’d circle back for her answer.
That aerial dating technique worked, and the two of them married in 1949. I came along a year later.
On April 10, 1951, when I was just 11 months old, he died at age 33. He and his friend, coworker, and neighbor, Bill Griffin, were digging a well in the backyard of our house. In those days, country folks dug their own wells.
On the way home from where both men worked at a Gainesville lumberyard, they’d stopped to borrow one of the county’s air compressors.
They hadn’t struck water yet, but they had hit rock, and that afternoon, they planned to blast those rocks with dynamite and use the compressor to blow out the dust and smoke. When Bill Griffin went down to shovel the debris into a bucket, he quickly slumped to a sitting position.
They assumed he’d blacked out from lack of oxygen. My father had someone—no one remembers who—lower him down in the big bucket. After pulling the rope around his friend’s chest, he looked up and asked, “How do you think I should tie this?”
Those were his last words.
Car horns summoned neighbors—the two men needed fresh air, they thought, so they kept that hose blowing at their faces. But a misplaced piece of tin was causing the compressor to send down carbon monoxide, not fresh air.
No one knew that, but no one dared go down after them despite Mother’s pleading.
I was too young to have any real memories of him, but my brain believes it does. That same brain even believes it can recall his dark, curly hair and a khaki shirt that smelled like sawdust, but that’s probably because I heard so much about him when I was young that it all just feels like a memory.
It seems like I can recall him laughing as I pulled at his hair in the yard. However, Mother had an old picture of that, so I know the memory comes from the photograph, not the occasion. Either way, I treasure it.
I was blessed to have had a slew of uncles on both sides of the family who kept me from feeling his absence too much. You might say my cousins let me borrow a little bit of their fathers.
But even so, and even after all these years, whenever I see a dark-haired man in khaki, I can’t help but wonder what having a “real” dad is like.
If your dad is still around, treasure the time. If you got to know him at all, God bless you. If all you have is a memory, hold it close.
Even after all these years, I would give anything to know what it feels like to call somebody “Daddy.”
Emory Jones is a White County author, humorist, and historian.