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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 3:36 PM, dcbc said:

They set up a table and a phone at a trade fair and landed their first contract. That little project grew into a large petroleum engineering firm that built all sorts of oil and gas infrastructure all over Texas and parts of South America.  Among those was a pipeline in Buenos Aires. 

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If that was the main gas line from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Buenos Aires....my dad ended up running that company and pipeline.  Because this world is smaller than we often think.

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 3:42 PM, Brisketexan said:

If that was the main gas line from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Buenos Aires....my dad ended up running that company and pipeline.  Because this world is smaller than we often think.

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Well, I know what I'm going to try to figure out this weekend.

 

 

 

Posted

I am going to need to sit down and write a lot of what I want to say and edit it over time before I post any more of it here. My hope is that this encourages a lot of you to do the same and share with us all.

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:15 PM, InkaUtexas said:

Dad is still alive. How I have no idea. I will sit back, enjoy this thread and dread the day I join.

Thank you all for posting this.

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The fathers don't need to be gone. Writing about him while he is still with you could spark lots of good conversations now. Do it anyway because I don't know how much time I have left and I want to read about it.

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:15 PM, InkaUtexas said:

Dad is still alive. How I have no idea. I will sit back, enjoy this thread and dread the day I join.

Thank you all for posting this.

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Yep.  My kids spent time with my dad, even recording him telling them stories about his life.  Obviously....they did that before he died (our Ouija board is broken).  We shouldn't wait till people are gone to tell their stories.

Just like we shouldn't wait to tell the people we love that we love them.

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:24 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  My kids spent time with my dad, even recording him telling them stories about his life.  Obviously....they did that before he died (our Ouija board is broken).  We shouldn't wait till people are gone to tell their stories.

Just like we shouldn't wait to tell the people we love that we love them.

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it is always interesting to ask those older people the very first thing in their memory.  Or in my case, I would ask them if their parents or grandparents ever told them their first memories.  When I asked my mother that, she told me her grandmother‘s first memory was being a young child in a sleigh in Sweden with her father being terrified and using his whip against wolves, who were chasing the sleigh - probably wanting to eat some horses.   Her other memory was playing at serving tea to her doll, using acorns as teacups.     I never met my Swedish great-grandmother, but weirdly I have information about what she was doing in the 1860s

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:06 PM, Brisketexan said:
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Here's what I found.  It doesn't appear to be the same ones in that link.

 

"In 1957, the [company] went international by constructing an 1100-mile natural gas pipeline in South America from the Bolivian border to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The Argentina pipeline led to another . . . project, which was the engineering and construction of an Argentine petrochemical complex.  This complex used the new raw materials brought by the pipeline for the first synthetic rubber plant in South America in a cooperative undertaking called PASA."

Posted

One of my great  grandads was shooting at Confederates during the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.

The other one was probably filling his diaper (if he even wore one).

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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:18 PM, Shoxthemonkey said:

The fathers don't need to be gone. Writing about him while he is still with you could spark lots of good conversations now. Do it anyway because I don't know how much time I have left and I want to read about it.

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We talk a few times a week, long talks when we can.

I get on my sons ass. "Look Inka Junior, you live 30 minutes away. Go see him a few times a month. Shut up, listen, and enjoy that bad ass lunch he will buy you. Another round at Top Golf can wait."

 

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Posted (edited)
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:40 PM, dcbc said:

Here's what I found.  It doesn't appear to be the same ones in that link.

 

"In 1957, the [company] went international by constructing an 1100-mile natural gas pipeline in South America from the Bolivian border to Buenos Aires, Argentina.  The Argentina pipeline led to another . . . project, which was the engineering and construction of an Argentine petrochemical complex.  This complex used the new raw materials brought by the pipeline for the first synthetic rubber plant in South America in a cooperative undertaking called PASA."

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Looks like no.  But...they surely shared experiences of great bife de chorizo, many glasses of Malbec, and sharing endless cups of mate with strangers and friends alike.  Also, sent you a DM.

Edited by Brisketexan
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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:24 PM, Brisketexan said:

Yep.  My kids spent time with my dad, even recording him telling them stories about his life.  Obviously....they did that before he died (our Ouija board is broken).  We shouldn't wait till people are gone to tell their stories.

Just like we shouldn't wait to tell the people we love that we love them.

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My dad had a favorite joke.  He used to tell it with some regularity.  My mom always rolled her eyes, but he loved it and kind of liked that she was sick of hearing it.  When I was a kid, I asked him to tell it and recorded him on an old Panasonic tape recorder.  I wish like hell I still had that tape.  I've got one old video where you can hear his voice.  I swear, the man gargled with gravel. 

 

Fast forward (no pun intended).  My mom remarried in the early 2000s.  During their marriage, her then-husband finished and self-published his autobiography for his family and loved ones.  It was so interesting and helped me get to know him better.  A few years later, my mom wrote and published her own, and it is priceless, not only for her story, but for part of my dad's as well.  I've only read it once---I read it once to my older son a little each night at bedtime.  I barely made it through the part about my dad's passing.  I tried to get her to make an audiobook so I could have a recording of her voice.  But the voicemails I saved will have to do as her health started to deteriorate around that time.

 

Anyway, I really came to appreciate that joke over the years.  I'm of the mind that everyone should know two jokes, a dirty one, and a clean one.  I don't know if he had a dirty one, thought he used to have a bunch of inappropriate diddies he'd sing from time to time.  I've adopted his joke as my clean one.  It goes

 

There's this fellow.  He's on a business trip.  He checks into the hotel.  As he's checking in, he asks, where can a man get a drink around here.  The maître d' tells him, "Oh, the hotel has a beautiful rooftop bar.  Just take the elevator to the top floor.  So the man goes to his room, unpacks, and heads up to the roof to see this bar.  He gets off the elevator and this bar is really something; you can see the whole city.  He goes up to the bar, pulls up next to the only other guy there, and orders a drink. 

As he sips his drink, he looks around and asks the bartender, "Say, anybody ever have a few too many and stumble over the side. 

The other guy at the bar pipes up, "It's really something, there's and air-vent system that can sense when someone falls over the side, and if that happens, it'll kick on and pop 'em right back on the roof."

"Get out of here," the businessman replies.

"No, really, I'll show you," the man says as he walks toward the edge of the rooftop.  Then, he steps off the side, and a second later, like magic, he pops right back up onto the rooftop, and ambles back over to the bar.

"I've got to try this!" the businessman explains as he hurries over to the edge.  He steps off the roof, and plummets to his death.

The bartender takes his drink and begins wiping off the bar with a towel.  He looks at the man sitting at the bar, shaking his head, and says, "Superman, what do you do those kinds of things?"

 

And that, is my dad's "Superman Joke."

 

 

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Posted (edited)
  On 1/31/2025 at 4:53 PM, Brisketexan said:

Looks like no.  But...they surely shared experiences of great bife de chorizo, many glasses of Malbec, and sharing endless cups of mate with strangers and friends alike.  Also, sent you a DM.

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It's on my bucket list.  He loved Buenos Aires.  Here's a picture on one of his stops on the way down.  The kids in town were all in for the photo-op.

curt-with-plane-in-argentina.jpg

Edited by dcbc
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Posted

Awesome thread about a bunch of awesome Dads.

My Dad is still living and making memories with us.  One thing about my Dad is that he is big joker, and nearly every joke starts off as a serious story that eventually goes off the rails.  He's polished this type of delivery into a fine art.  It's such a common schtick though, that he can no longer pull it off with family members, as they immediately sense that there is a punchline coming.  It's no surprise that my Dad is very outgoing and gregarious.  In my opinion, he is continually on a search for an unsuspecting audience.

Growing up, I though my Dad was the funniest person on the planet.  He had a funny song for nearly any situation.  It wasn't until I was in my 20's and actually heard a Smothers Brothers album that I realized my Dad had stolen every single bit from them.

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Posted (edited)

Well, it slowed down a little bit, so I'll add something. 

 

So I've mentioned that my dad was an accomplished, private pilot.  He did not serve in the military.  He wanted to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but his business partners convinced him he could do more good building pipelines and refineries in the US than he could getting shot down over the Pacific.  So he stayed stateside and spent a lot of weekends flying officers from base to base.  When he finally hung it up, he had over 10,000 hours.  His last flight was in the early 80s.  He was flying back from Eagle, CO.  One of my half-brothers and the rest of the hunting buddies were in the cabin getting loaded.  Toward the end of the flight, my brother yells toward the cockpit, "C.B., when are you gonna start riding back here and enjoying the good life with the rest of us?"  As my dad told the rest of the story, "So after that, I greased the runway at Andrau one last time, and I hung it up."  Just as well, probably.  The O&G market went to crap a few years later, and the company sold the plane. 

But I got curious a couple of years ago about that plane.  Turns out, its last recorded flight (with a repower and a new livery over the years) departed from Switzerland in 2002).  I eventually found it mothballed in Egypt.  The apparent lesson is don't break down in Cairo. It was a cool plane.

 

in the late 70s.  Pueblo, CO.  We look like a Wes Anderson movie.  I have his parka still.  It's the best.

1602256883851-dc4a6c32-febf-490d-8019-0b

 

Switzerland 2002

AP1-Gcz-Ptq-Lj-Bu-BC0-MFi-Yq-BAv-VJGEIj-

Cairo

AP1-Gcz-N6-EWJs-Vl-YQpcsnk-ASHz3l6e-LYn-

 

Edited by dcbc
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Posted

I think it’s really cool that we have this thread now. Hell, I’ve got a lot of stories - both about and from my old man. He worked in the oil patch all over the world, including stints as one of the govt safety engineers in the Alaska pipeline. I’ll drop em in here later.
And shit, not all of the stories are great or flattering. We’re all human, and our fathers are/were too. Even the good ones. But if we’re doing it right, we learn from both the good and bad. And maybe we even learn to forgive ourselves when we fail. I’m definitely on the bottom of the grade curve on that particular lesson.

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Posted

Y'all are fucking killing me in here. Ken burns could make a documentary called Our Fathers just from this thread and it would be the best thing he ever did. 

This group of assholes is the best corner of the internet and it isn't close.

I'm not ready to write my dad's story just yet. I wish I knew enough to write my grandpa's story.  He was a fucking G. 

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Posted
  On 2/1/2025 at 7:14 PM, Helobious said:

Always had a complex relationship with my dad. My parents divorced young, and he was in and out growing up, was not really affectionate much, had problems keeping jobs, and he suffered and still struggles with some mental health issues. He still would do things with us and for us sometimes, and my mom always told us he was a good man but he just didn’t know how to love. He was definitely very reclusive and would isolate himself a lot. He was a child of Mexican immigrants, grew up a migrant farm worker, and was a standout athlete in HS in the RGV. I got my love of UT and sports in general from him, especially baseball. He definitely instilled a pride in our heritage that I appreciate now as an adult. 
 

One thing I will never ever forget is my sophomore year of college. He happened to be living not too far from me in a pretty shitty apartment. No one I knew liked college football much, so every Saturday morning I would drive over to his place and watch college football with him. Literally all day long. Didn’t matter if it was Northeast Vermont State vs Cleveland Tech. We would watch it. If UT was playing a night game I would usually leave after. I can vividly remember getting ready to go once and him saying “there’s some good PAC 12 games about to start I think”. So I stayed and watched. I think he just didn’t want me to go. He lives far from me now and I don’t see him a lot, but when I remember those saturdays I just want to cry. 

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God damnit Helo.... Don't make me like you!  Fucker. 

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Posted (edited)

Nobody say a damned, untoward word about South Austin's HOT mom on this thread. 

 

@South Austin Did you fish with your kids?  I grew up fishing with my dad, but I wasn't very good at it.  My wife's dad instilled a love of fishing in my kids, and I've fished with them occasionally, but even though I kept my dad's rods and his tackle box, I really don't do it anymore and I think my father-in-law was a perfectly suitable fishing-mentor for them.  And despite the fact that I grew up hunting with my dad, and it was a great way to bond with him, I don't hunt anymore.  My wife remarked yesterday that our kids have never been hunting, which was so different than both she and I, who grew up doing it.  My kids' high school has a bass-fishing team, and my son is losing his tennis doubles partner to it next year.  I guess that one inherited a love of tennis, and the other one got my love of music.

I may have had a point when I started writing that, but I lost my way. 

 

Edited by dcbc
Posted
  On 2/1/2025 at 6:33 PM, Brisketexan said:

I think it’s really cool that we have this thread now. Hell, I’ve got a lot of stories - both about and from my old man. He worked in the oil patch all over the world, including stints as one of the govt safety engineers in the Alaska pipeline. I’ll drop em in here later.
And shit, not all of the stories are great or flattering. We’re all human, and our fathers are/were too. Even the good ones. But if we’re doing it right, we learn from both the good and bad. And maybe we even learn to forgive ourselves when we fail. I’m definitely on the bottom of the grade curve on that particular lesson.

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I try to do all the things that my dad did right, and not do the things he did wrong. Some days are better than others. 

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Posted (edited)
  On 2/2/2025 at 12:47 AM, dcbc said:

I may have had a point when I started writing that, but I lost my way. 

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image.gif.6ae3ab1f3f170f9ebeb8c3465db3444c.gif
 

Edit: I will answer your post. At a dinner party and only have time for a pithy gif.

Edited by South Austin
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Posted
  On 1/31/2025 at 3:22 PM, jdhorn92 said:

Dad was a United States Secret Service agent and was on protective duty for the last year of Ford and 1st year of Carter. 

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No doubt he knew my uncle, who had that duty for Nixon and then started moving up into management roles after Nixon resigned.

Posted
  On 2/1/2025 at 2:54 PM, Dendox said:

My dad is a recovering addict and drunk. 
My dad was a stand out high school football player who played for Texas as a freshman and went on the obtain a degree from UT and MD from Southwestern. 

My mom left him when I was very young because he wasn’t a great role model. I have zero memories of living in a house with them together. I honestly have very few memories of my dad when I was young. 

My dad taught me love for UT football/baseball/basketball. He took me to as many games as he could starting around age 6. It was great. 

He moved from his town to my town to be closer to me (or run away from hospital administration that was on to him and his addictions). He was around until I was age 13 - and poof - he was gone again. 

I saw him very sporadically until age 20 when we coincidentally lived in the same town.  Prior to living in the same town - every time I saw him he was drunk or looking for drugs.  Quite an impression that left.  After living in the same town - the memories are similar. 

When I had my son 18 years ago dad and I  were on speaking terms. He was around and part of my life. I told him he had 1 chance. I don’t have a choice to have him around as a kid - but I had a choice to have him around my kids. For the first time in his life - sobriety really mattered. He got his 17 year chip last month.  He earned it. 
 

My dad is the kindest human I know. He has nothing. Literally. But would give you half if you need it. He finds a way to help provide medical care to the indigent in the interior of Mexico several times a year. He works food banks. He donates his time. He is present. He is patient. He is a great listener with good advice. The kind that can likely only come from fucking up for 30 years in your prime. 
 

He is hokey. Too hokey for his own good. Makes my wife and kids embarrassed around non-family, which is painful because he craves our love and attention. 
 

there isn’t a person that I run into that knew my dad before he went off the rails that doesn’t think he is the best doctor and person they ever met. It’s hard to reconcile those stories with the man I knew for a significant part of my childhood. 
 

The takeaway - he taught me how to be a fucking great dad. How to be caring and compassionate with those you love and those you don’t know. He also taught me how to fuck up the dad/kid relationship- which has created the drive for me to be the best, most present, helpful, loving, sober (not to be read as never drinking) dad I can be. 
 

I love him dearly. I despise many of his decisions. I will miss him when he’s gone. 
 

PS - my mom is a freaking saint that deserves a statue. 

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Very glad he recovered and you could rekindle your relationship on a positive basis.  A whole lot of drunks and addicts are at their core great people if recovery can just unleash them.

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Posted
  On 2/2/2025 at 3:17 PM, jimmyjazz said:

My Dad was a civil engineering professor; specifically, steel and concrete structures.  He was born in 1922 and raised in the Depression-era slums of St. Louis.  His mom was an angel and his dad was an alcoholic bum -- they divorced when my Dad was 2 years old.  Dad only saw him one more time.  He (wisely) included the guy in his will, leaving him $1.

Dad was a good athlete who sprinted for his HS track team and actually made it through the Olympic weightlifiting trials to land a spot on the team.  He turned that spot down to continue working towards his doctorate at Washington University.  When he finished his Bachelor's degree he interrupted his studies to enlist in the Navy (WW2), and was sent to Annapolis for officer training.  He suffered a near fatal asthma attack and was bounced 4F.  Rather than going back to school, he took a job at Curtis Wright in St. Louis designing military wing structures.  After the war, he finished his doctorate and started teaching.  He also consulted on the design and construction of the St. Louis Arch, one of the locks on the Mississippi River, and the post mortem of the Hyatt Regency structural collapse in Kansas City.

He was exceptionally kind with an impish sense of humor.  Everyone loved him.  He won "best professor" awards anually, and was a lay leader and teacher in the Presbyterian Church.  He was incredibly organized and hard-working.  My sister and I benefitted greatly from his and Mom's absolute devotion to us.  We would sponsor foreign students at the university every year -- I grew up around people from India, Viet Nam, Iran, parts of Africa, you name it.  It was an incredibly eye-opening and valuable experience for a WASPy white kid from a small town in rural Missouri.

He was a lousy fisherman, a trait he passed on to me.  He was an OK bowler, but I got better.  He had no musical training but could peck out a melody on a piano and had a nice natural voice.  He adored the St. Louis Cardinals, as did Mom.  My Dad's mother did the books for Stan Musial's restaurant.  (Mom grew up in a duplex next door to Dizzy Dean.)

He developed glioblastoma multiforme (brain cancer) at 86 years old and passed within 6 months.  I miss him every day.

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Now I know that you and @dcbc are around my age yet have fathers old enough to have served in WWII.

 

 

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Posted
  On 2/3/2025 at 1:52 AM, TwiceHorn said:

Now I know that you and @dcbc are around my age yet have fathers old enough to have served in WWII.

 

 

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He was 63 when I was born.  My sister and I talk about how we (11 years apart) got different versions of both of our parents.  He was definitely around more when I was a kid than with any of my siblings who got him while in full career mode.

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