May 17th 1964

There were four of us in the park that day, but I am the only witness left.

It would be easy to tell the story as, “We went to a dog show and my dad died of a heart attack.”  It would be easy and….so… incomplete.  That is the end of the story, but not what happened.  Does what happened that day matter, when we know the end of the story?  I have lived for 56 years with what happened.  I have told the story only a few times.  I was 10 the day it happened.  I was 40 before I could tell the story.

Sunday outings were common with my parents in the early sixties.  Sometimes we visited friends, sometimes we had picnics or flew kites and sometimes we just took a drive in the afternoon.  We would have a big breakfast after Mass at St Paschal’s and at some point in the next hour or so, as my parents were reading the Sunday papers, my father would say to my mother, “Want to take a ride?”   And it would begin…another Sunday adventure. 

The previous year had been tough, Daddy had a heart attack on May 2, 1963 and both my parents had been on edge ever since.  They had several big arguments that year...a result of serious stress…my mother was convinced my father was not caring for himself very well, working too hard and spending too much time in the office.  My dad was bored blind by the limitations the doctors had placed on him.  They were both scared to death.

One of my father’s new and doctor-approved hobbies was the German Shepherd puppy that had come into our life the summer after his heart attack.  “Rocky” (AKC: Sir Rocko’s Black Knight) was a gift from one of my father’s customers and our entire family embraced this much larger-than-normal puppy as the new baby in the family.  For my dad, training and playing with the puppy was one of the few things he got to do that made him feel like himself…like himself before we ever had heard the words coronary thrombosis.

Rocky’s lineage was pure-bred-show-dogs and while his breeder had warned us that our puppy was clearly going to be too big of a dog to ever compete, my dad liked the affiliation with the other owners, so we went to a few dog shows that year.

On this Sunday there was a dog show in Palo Alto.  But, when my dad said, “Want to take a ride?” my mom did not jump up and pack a lunch.  She did not want to go.  She hesitated…and pointed out that they had been out with friends the night before and maybe dad should “rest” on this afternoon.  My dad pouted.  There is no other word for it…my dad was a world-class pouter.  Mom got cranky, but relented and as we prepped for the outing it was tense in the house. 

My brother Tom was 18 and off with friends.  My brother Don was 12 and had been invited to go fishing with some buddies.  So that left 6-year-old Sammy and me in the backseat of the station wagon with the puppy in the “wayback” to head across the Bay Bridge from Oakland and down the peninsula to Palo Alto.

As we pulled out of the driveway, my dad stopped the car in the middle of the street and ran back into the house.  When he climbed back into the car, my mother, who was still in a bad mood, said, “What did you forget?”  “Nitroglycerin,” was the response.

My father loved the San Francisco Bay Area and a drive across the Bay Bridge (which he did every day, his office was in San Francisco) was seeing the world anew for him.  And, my mother was recovering from her crankiness, so Daddy was using all of his charm on that trip.  That is all I remember of the car ride…thinking, “ok, they are happy again.”

The park in Palo Alto was at Embarcadero and Middlefield Rds.  The place was mobbed with dog owners and hundreds of German Shepherds.  There was a festival feeling to the event with sign-in tables under some trees and a few tents with folks selling dog-related product and a voice over a loudspeaker directing the festivities and announcing events.  People were spreading picnic blankets out a few hundred feet from where the show-rings had been staked off.  We spread our sand colored picnic blanket (two old Navy blankets my mother had stitched together) out under a huge tree on the Embarcadero side of the park…farther away from the show-rings.

My father instantly struck up a conversation with folks around us.  My father might have been the most profound extrovert ever put on the planet.  He admired their dogs, asked about their involvement in the show, asked for interpretation of the event and offered them whatever refreshment we had on hand…he found common ground and then made them laugh…my father made everyone laugh.  In a short time Daddy was the center of a small crowd entertaining them and joking around.

One of the men from a neighboring picnic mentioned that they had not closed the registry for the 1-year-old puppies.  He encouraged Daddy to sign-up Rocky and show the puppy, “just for fun.”  Daddy thought that was a great idea and took the dog off in search of the registration table while Mom, Sam and I looked around.

Dad returned quickly and explained that the puppies were “on” right now…so we made our way to the show-ring and tried to find a place to watch.  It was crowded and Sam and I could not see well.  I remember seeing my dad trot by with Rocky on a leash, I caught just a glimpse of his brown pants and white shirt.   I could not see his face.  Rocky was eliminated on the first rotation….and daddy and the puppy came walking out of the ring…both a little winded.  Dad was flushed.  We walked back to our blanket.

“Are you ok?” my mother asked my father.  “Sure, I am just going to sit here a minute,” replied Daddy, “I’m fine.”  Rocky was already asleep in the grass next to the blanket.

She hesitated a minute and then said, “I am going to watch the rest of the puppies,” as she took Sam’s hand and turned away.

I started after my mom, but paused and I said to my dad, “Maybe I should have run around the circle with Rocky?” 

“Don’t be silly, honey,” were my father’s last words.

I was about ten feet away from our blanket when a woman touched my arm, pointed and said, “Look!”

My father was lying face down with his arms under him…his fists at his face. 

I turned for my mother…I had to run a few steps and grab her hand….all I could say was, “Get….daddy!”  And I ran back to the blanket.

Mom called out, “Bob! Bob! Bob!”  As we both knelt down next to him.

“Help me turn him!” she said to me and together we rolled my father over.

His fists were still at his face his arms close to his chest.  His face was purple and grey.

She kept calling, “Bob!”

“His medicine!”  she said…”in his pocket..”

I climbed over my father’s stomach and patted his right pocket…no pills…I reached back to his left side and worked my hand into his pocket and found the pills.  Opening the little, square, flat container with the tiny Nitroglycerin pills inside.  I took one and Mom said, “Under his tongue, it has to go under his tongue.”

And then she fainted.  Mom stood straight up next to my father and then fell backward like a tree. 

I just looked at her for a second and then went back to trying to get the pill under his tongue.  I could get his lips apart, but his teeth were clenched shut.  I could not open them.

I heard my mother stirring and looked over at her.  I had entirely lost track of Sammy….”Bob!” she cried as she regained consciousness….”Noooooo!” she wailed, “I cannot live without him!”  My mother crawled next to me. 

“I cannot get his teeth apart….” I said….

“Pry them apart!” 

And then mom knelt upright and fainted sideways alongside my father. 

I went back to his pockets and found his comb…I placed the back of his comb between his teeth and started prying his teeth apart…I was kneeling next to his head and could not get any leverage….I moved to straddle his chest….I got the comb between his teeth and just as I thought I had succeeded the comb broke and half of it went flying into the crowd that had gathered….

That was when I was first aware of the crowd.  I have no idea how much time had passed since that woman had touched my arm…2 minutes?  2 hours?  But enough time for a crowd to gather.

I looked up at the people who had gathered around us.  The broken comb in my hand, my mother unconscious next to my obviously dying father…there were so many of them watching us.

I heard a woman’s voice softly say, “Oh, please, someone help her.” 

And then things started moving at a faster rate of speed.  Two hands took me by the shoulders and lifted me up off of my father and into the air.  When I was set down on the ground, I saw Sammy.  He was standing about 25 feet away holding the hand of a beatnik.  A man dressed all in black with a black beret and a black goatee.  He was simply standing there watching, holding Sammy’s hand.

A group of men closed in around my father.  Some others were attending to my mother.  I heard her voice…”No! No! NOOO!”  She stood up and again fainted dead away like a tree.

The men worked on daddy.  Uselessly.  We were all useless that day.  They were pumping his legs and moving his arms about (this was 10 months before Asmund Laerdal invented CPR).  Useless.

I heard the ambulance sirens.  Two.  One for Dad and one for Mom.  Mom was conscious again, sitting in a chair someone had brought to her…with her head down.  When the ambulance attendants tried to put her in the ambulance without my father she refused and I can still see her climbing into the back of the ambulance with Daddy…her slip was showing and it was dirty from where she had fallen.  She never looked back at us.  And then the ambulances were gone.

And Sammy and I were left in the park. 

For the next two hours Sammy and I sat alone on a swing-set in the park at the corner of Embarcadero and Middlefield Rd in Palo Alto, California waiting for our lives to come back to us.

A teenaged girl, daughter of one of the men my father had charmed just a few hours ago, came to check on us every 15 minutes or so.  I realize now that none of the adults came to check on us, because they knew we would ask questions they did not want to answer.  At one point she told me that her father had driven over to the hospital and there was a red-headed man sitting with my mother in the waiting room.  I assumed it was my Uncle, Tom Naddy, who lived not far from Palo Alto in San Carlos.

One of the other families that had shared pleasantries with us earlier, had Rocky staked to their picnic blanket and had given him a bowl of water.

Every few minutes during the second hour, over the loudspeaker, a voice would ask, “Tom Householder, Please come to the registry desk.”

I explained to the teenager that Tom was not with us…and she promised to tell whoever was in charge.  But the request for Tom continued until the dog show was over.

And the dog show had ended…the park had cleared out.  These two families remained in place…one watching our puppy up-close and one watching two small children from afar.

The teenager returned and said, “Your mother’s back.  She is in the parking lot.”  And she led the way for Sammy and me.

It turned out that it was a red-headed stranger not my uncle Tom with my mother.  When I approached her in the parking lot he was standing next to her with his arm around her shoulders.  I was confused by this, but I did not ask her about it for several years.  It turned out he was just a guy that realized she was alone and followed her to the hospital.

The two families were deep in discussion figuring out a way to drive us back to Oakland.  They settled on Mom, Sam and me in the back of one car, the dog in another and one of the adults from these two never-having-met-before good Samaritans following in our car.  Mom was participating in the discussion and smiling at all involved.  Perfectly calm.

I listened to all of these arrangements for several minutes before getting my mother’s attention.  “How is daddy?”  I asked.

“Oh, honey, daddy died.”  My mother said.  And then she wrapped me in her arms and swayed back and forth for a while.

“My father went to a dog show and died of a heart attack.”   That description has always tormented me.  It is accurate for my siblings who were not there that day, but it is not the comprehensive.

We went to a dog show on May 17^th 1964 and everything about our life changed. 

I changed forever that day.  When I saw daddy’s face, I changed.  When my mom fainted, I changed.   When I dug in his pockets for pills and a comb, I changed.  While waiting in that park with Sammy, I changed.

I am the black sheep sister in a family.  I became the black sheep fifty-six years ago in a park in Palo Alto.  I am not sure Mom ever forgave me for failing to get the medicine to daddy in time.  I am not sure my older siblings have ever forgiven me for being there when they weren’t.   None of them have ever asked to hear the story of that day.  And who can blame them, it is not pleasant.

But, we went to a dog show one day and my father charmed the crowd, showed his adored puppy and had a heart attack; my mother became hysterical, could not remain conscious of the events and left a ten year old to manage it, then, ultimately in her fear and grief forgot she had two small children with her and climbed into an ambulance without ever looking over her shoulder at them. 

Strangers came to our rescue, watering the dog, minding the children, following her to the hospital to assure she was not alone, waiting long after they needed to be there and then driving us a long way home to the Oakland hills.  So far out of their way as it turns out, that one family did not get home until long after midnight that night.

That is what happened on May 17^th 1964.

The rest is the end.

In Memory of Kleemo 5/30/10

Five years into their marriage, my parents had an argument and my hot-tempered-drama-prone-mother packed up my sister Joy and my brother Jim and went home to her mother.  She was seriously contemplating divorce.  It was late 1942.

My father, not to be out-done on the drama front, immediately enlisted in the US Navy.  It was war-time and federal laws made it tough to divorce absent servicemen, so he figured that this was the best course of action while my mother's temper cooled. 

The fact that their original fight was over his desire to enlist was an ironic piece of family trivia that I have always enjoyed.  As the father of two, my dad was exempt from the draft.  But he was also only 27 years old and like George Bailey he somehow felt he was both shirking a responsibility and missing the biggest event in history. 

He wanted to go.  She did not want him to go.  She threatened to divorce him if he went.  He said he was going.  She left to divorce him.  He went, and by going kept her from divorcing him.  If you cast their doppelgangers: Frank Sinatra as my father and Roz Russell as my mother...you'd have a 1940's romantic hit.

And thus it was that my father became a WWII vet.

James Robert (Bob) Householder served aboard the  USS Cebu as a Machinist Mate in the Pacific Theater.  He fixed engines and built clocks; helping the Navy to both propel forward and navigate their journey (clocks were a navigation tool). 

Bob was 28 years old when he stepped aboard his ship, discovered he was 9 years older than the average sailor in the Pacific, and was immediately given the nickname "Pops."  Pops at 28.

Most of the Cebu's primary activity was focused upon repairing other ships that had been damaged by air attacks, including kamikaze missions.  When things were slow they built clocks, when things were really slow, they made jewelry, knives, and clocks for themselves and each other out of the excess stainless steel and acrylic.  My father was a stellar machinist and mechanic, but it was at some of these other endeavors that he really excelled.  A designer by nature, he could fashion artifacts of great beauty out of the left-overs from the true business of the ship.

Pops was a  cut-up with the confidence of a man rather than the uncertainty of a teenager.  He was popular among the young men around him.  They sought him out for advice, counsel and loans.  His letters home, when not trying to woo my mother back to him are filled with stories of these boys.  This one has a broken heart, that one drinks too much, another one has nightmares and calls out for his big brother in his sleep.  Pops took his nickname seriously and tried to help them, protect them and with some, educate them just a little bit.  Which brings me to Kleemo.

Kleemo was a very young sailor who served with Pops.  Kleemo was apparently not the sharpest tool in the shed.  When he was having some trouble with a calibration, my father exasperatedly asked him, "Kleemo, how many thousandths in an inch?" To which Kleemo replied, "Geez, Pops, there must be a million of those little sons-of-bitches in an inch!"  You get the picture.  Kleemo could not keep "righty-tighty-lefty-loosey" in mind and spent his service leaving things either ajar or so tight that a blow torch had to be put into service.  

Kleemo's mom had signed the papers for him to enlist at 16.  He was 18 or 19 at this point and had never raised in rank in the 2-3 years he'd been serving.  He was a klutz and a screw-up.

After my father returned from the war and reconciled with my mother he would call my oldest brother "Kleemo," whenever Jimmy screwed up.  Pretty soon, given Jim's habit of silly mistakes, the nickname became his for good.  By the time my brother was a teenager my family had forgotten about the young sailor who inspired the name, and just thought of Jim as Kleemo.  Jim HATED the nickname.  Who could blame him? 

In 1965 my mother and I were in an Ace Hardware store in the suburbs of Chicago. She was paying for her purchases with a check.  The man behind the counter looked at the check and then at my mother and said, "You wouldn't be related to a Bob Householder, would you?  A guy who served in the Pacific during the war?"

"My husband's name is Bob Householder, and he served on the USS Cebu during the war" she replied.

The man behind the counter gave out a "WHOO!" that filled the store.  He came around the counter pointing to himself and said, "I am Joe Kleemo!  We served together.  I cannot believe this.  How is Pops? We called him Pops!"

And my poor mother had to tell Joe Kleemo that her husband, my daddy and Kleemo's "Pops" had died the year before, two months shy of his 49th birthday.  My mother had yet to learn to speak of him in the past tense.

Joe Kleemo put his hand to his mouth and then he sat down on the floor.  My mother bent down to speak to him and when he looked up at her he was crying.

"I never would have made it through the war without Pops" he said.  "I was homesick and always in trouble and Pops took-up for me many times.  You know, I stayed in the Navy, I stayed for 20 years.  Pops taught me how to use tools, how to fix things.  I became a good mechanic because of Pops."

My mother sat down next to Kleemo on the floor of the Ace Hardware and the two of them cried together.  I was 11 and was mortified and horrified by this display.

In a couple of minutes they were laughing.  Kleemo was telling a story of mischief or mayhem that Pops had caused.  How he had teased and tormented the boys and the officers aboard that unsexy, unsung repair ship.

I was fascinated by the fact that there was a real person named Kleemo.  However, this person did not reconcile with the nickname for a screw-up that had plagued my big brother.

In the car on the way home I mentioned this dissonance to my mother.  It was always impossible to tell what would upset her in the years after my dad died, so I was a little nervous about whether I should have brought up my confusion.

"Honey," my mother said, "your daddy didn't call Jimmy "Kleemo" because he was making mistakes, he called Jimmy "Kleemo" when he was teaching him something.  Your daddy must have loved teaching that young man....he teased him, which he only did to those he loved.  He loved Kleemo, like he was a little brother.  And when he came home he called his own little boy by that lonely young sailor's name, every time he was teaching him."

I think of Kleemo every Memorial Day.  Every year since that day in 1965 I think about the lonely young men, far from home, some so young they turned the 28 year old's around them into father figures.  I think of Kleemo because he is my father's brother in arms and my brother in loss.

James Robert (Bob and Pops) Householder is buried in the National Cemetery in San Bruno California overlooking the San Francisco bay, my mother, Rita Naddy is with him there.  They are both buried under a single headstone that details his service in a war in which he was not obligated to serve and which threatened their relationship.

Today we remember all of those who served and all of those who begged them not to go.