Stories about my Father 2

June 21, 2022

My father was born nearly a century ago in Lynchburg, VA. 

The exact day was June 15, 1923. It was a Friday. That day Lou Gehrig made his major league baseball debut. That fact would probably not have meant any more to my dad than it does to me. The next day, however, rioting broke out in Brandenburg, Germany because hyperinflation was driving the cost of food and basic supplies far above the means of most of the population. That fact would have meant something to him.

The Russian Civil War also ended on that Saturday. On Monday, civil rights activist Marcus Garvey was found guilty of mail fraud for using the postal service to sell shares in a bankrupt company. He would be sentenced to five years in prison. An Afro-Jamaican, Garvey was a staunch believer in racial segregation. He envisioned a united Africa, free of white colonials, ruled by him. He was divided from other activists because he worked with the Ku Klux Klan believing that they had similar goals - maintaining racial purity and keeping the races segregated. The trial was thought to be a front to politically silence Garvey. Mt. Etna erupted in Sicily.

The Spanish Flu pandemic, which seems like ancient history to most of us, albeit a bit more familiar given our current fight with COVID-19, raged just four years before Dad was born. In the short term, birth rates declined after it given that so many young women died. Eventually, though, there was a rise, and within that rise, my father was included.

Giving birth in 1923 was a far more harrowing experience than it is today. “Twilight sleep” had just started being used as an anesthetic in 1921. I can’t imagine that it had trickled down to Lynchburg yet. The stethoscope was only invented the year before. I’m sure nobody in Lynchburg had one. A very famous Croatian composer named Dora Pejacevic died in childbirth that year in Munich. Many women did. The current day infant mortality rate is about 5.6 out of 1,000 births. In 1923, it was 77.1 births out of 1,000. There was nearly a 10% chance that your child would not survive.

As I am writing this, I am watching the latest installment of the January 6th Committee’s hearings. As with the previous three, the Committee is doing everything that it can possibly do to keep the events of January 6, 2021, from slipping into history. Never-before-seen footage of the rioting means that we are looking at some of this for the first time. The second we see it, though, it becomes history anyway.  The Republicans who are refusing to participate in this investigation are doing so because they believe that all of this is in the past and that we need to move on. “We need to move on,” has become the rallying cry for all of them. If the truth of that day can be made to seem archaic and without interest in regard to what is happening in the present, then they all escape without repercussions.

Say the word history, and our eyes glaze over. What immediately comes to mind is a wizened old scholar sitting alone in a cold dusty room pouring over old forgotten texts. We need to shake that image off. Our lives are the sum of everything that we’ve done up until this exact moment in time. They are built upon the lives of all who have come before us. The present is a flash - all our existence is accumulated history.

There is a direct line between the riots in Brandenburg nearly a hundred years ago and the hearings that are happening now. Those riots eventually lead to the rise of Fascism in Germany and the creation of the Third Reich. Those riots, the day after he was born, meant that my father would end up fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Our 45th President would use some of the strategies that the leader of the Third Reich used. The January 6th insurrection came directly out of those riots.

There is also a direct line from the arrival of Albert Sydney Hester II in 1923 down to me, here on the sofa trying to make sense of it all in 2022.

My dad’s last job was as a writer of a Genetic Technology Engineering newsletter. What he did was synthesize all the news of the moment in that field into one place. The newsletter would be sent out to various companies and people who were interested in the field. It was like the Broadway Briefing site that puts all the entertainment news headlines of the day in one place with links to follow whichever items are of interest. It’s what I tried to do with my writing during the pandemic.

As a famous director once told me, “If you’re going to steal something, steal from the best.” (He was, of course, referring to himself.)

He wrote and worked from home but when he retired, he still needed something to do. My sister and I convinced him to write down all the stories that he’d told us over the years. Stories about our family, stories about him growing up, stories about serving in World War II, stories about living and working in Europe and meeting my mother, and stories about everything else leading up to 9/11. When he died, he left behind several hundred pages of these memories. They are raw history. His history as well as my history and my sister’s. And her kids’ histories.

My father was a good writer. He had a wonderfully sly sense of humor. He was, not, however, much given to introspection. Reading about his life as he wrote it doesn’t necessarily get one closer to who he was. I still haven’t worked through all he’s written, but there is so much there that I think bears telling. My father loved a good story, as I do, though I’m not sure what he’d make of being the main character in the story.

Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it. Not knowing one’s history is just as bad as not remembering it. I plan to try and figure out mine.

When my grandmother and grandfather realized that they were pregnant it must have been a moment fraught with everything that young couples feel with that news now. How will we raise a child with the limited money we have? What will the birth be like? How painful will it be? Going through that with so much more against them than couples have today, seems almost inconceivable. And yet they did, and they had that much more going for them than their parents had. What was that like?

These January 6 Committee hearings must lead to action being taken against the perpetrators of this treason and sedition. It is by no means a given that some of the worst offenders will even be brought to trial. The testimony, whether from elected officials or from Ms. Shay the Georgia election worker who was publicly targeted by the ex-President and his lawyer, is harrowing and present. Whether it is enough to keep these events firmly in the now, is part of the story that is still ahead of us.

Dan Rather published a piece on June 19th titled, The Coup Continues: There is nothing past tense about January 6, 2021. In the first paragraph, he says, “There is nothing past tense about January 6, 2021, even though the date itself is about 18 months ago. The currents that exploded that day are, and will continue to be (with an emphasis on the present and future tenses), a direct threat to the continuation of the United States as a democratic republic.”

There is nothing past tense about any of our histories. Everything that has happened is a present and active component of what is happening now. That holds true for our country and for each of us individually.

Here goes.