SubscribeThis post is for Father’s Day and has absolutely nothing to do with disciple making, churches or anything that this blog is about at all.
Captain Forrest L. McAdams
Yet…as I remember my dad, it’s important to me that I post this article about him.
If no one reads this or comments, that’s OK. This is a tribute to my father who died one year ago today. Yes…on Father’s Day. Dad always had a way of entering or exiting with some sort of command.
The word “command” is to the reason I write these words. You see…my father commanded men as a Captain in the United States Army. Captain Forrest L. McAdams lived just shy of nine decades by 7 months when he passed on the morning of Father’s Day, 2009. His was a soft-spoken man with a dry sense of humor that had very little to say, but when he spoke it seemed to be important.
I desperately wanted to be close to our father and no matter how hard any of us kids tried, he held us at an arms distance. It wasn’t his fault; he was a product of being raised during the depression and was the sort of father that his father (who died very young) modeled for him. Dad loved us he just didn’t know how to show it very well.
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I could remember seeing an outward sign of emotion or affection. From what I learned from his siblings and my grandmother it was common in his family.
As a young boy I used to see my dad leaving the house in full uniform with those silver bars shinning brightly on his shoulders and though neither myself, my sister Helen or my brother Joe were real close to dad, there was still an overwhelming sense of pride that he was a soldier that welled up inside of me. I recall how it made me smile inside when I would see enlisted men salute him and call him “sir”.
In so many ways, I wanted to be like my dad and join the Army…but that never happened. To me he was a hero and I felt that way my entire life. He was a man of pride and dignity and always carried himself as with the honor becoming an officer. I am so grateful to my sister that honored him by taking care of him in elder days, always protecting his dignity as a man.
Dad loved going to the VFW for a beer and to be around others that also laid their lives on the line on some foreign soil somewhere in the world, even if they weren’t sure why they were there. All they knew was, “it was for their country, the flag and freedom for family as well as everyone else” and that was all that mattered. Those soldiers of yesteryear seldom talked about their days of battle…probably because it was painful for many of them. They just wanted the comradely again from those who had been there and understood and were able to come home.
Even though our father served well over 25 years in the Army and fought in two wars, he never stormed a hill to win some medal for valor. He never rescued comrades from an enemy POW camp and he certainly didn’t have a movie made about his heroic battlefield accomplishments. But to me…he was and always will be a hero and I thank God everyday for the part he played in keeping this country safe.
I recall standing with tears running down my cheeks looking at his flag covered casket that was soon to lowered into the ground, then the guns of military salute were fired into the air and the distant sound of “Taps” that came from the bugler, while those family members in attendance that had also served saluted him with respect, love and honor. Speechlessly I accepted the folded flag with great pride for my dad the solider, while an Army officer on behalf the president and a grateful nation, thanked me for dad’s service. I wanted to sob, but held it all in, probably because that’s the way dad would have wanted it. Today that flag is in a glass case in my office with his Captain’s Bars on it and each time I look at it, I recall my father the military man and thank him for being my our dad in the best way that he knew how.
So why am I writing and posting this? Because on this day as my mind wondered to him, I decided to do something that we all do from time to time when we want to find out something about someone. I “googled” his name and to my disappointment…nothing came up. How can a man that gave much of his life to his country, family and life in general go out of this world and into eternity without any permanent memory of him? It’s not right!
So now…due to his son the preacher’s blog, if anyone anywhere from this time on would happen to type his name into the high-speed information network we call the Internet, his name will appear. His name is now immortal beyond a headstone in a cemetery.
I love you dad and I will never forget you.
Andy
Please feel free to use the comment section of this post to leave a tribute to your own father.
Jennifer W
/ June 19, 2010My dad, too, is from the WWII generation. Like Andy’s dad, he doesn’t feel that his military service was unique or heroic; it was just what people did. He applied for a special training program in radar which accepted him; he treasures the recommendations he received from his school principal and teachers who commended him for his scholarship and ability. He was oldest in a large family that weathered the Depression. What he and his siblings remember along with the difficulty is the family’s joy, the cooking, the soft, Finnish-language, tenor-range lullaby by his own father at night for whoever was the baby in the family at the time, carving wood, the radio, extended family, churchgoing in Finnish and English, choir, relatives, people’s idiosyncracies, holidays, and the fun.
It is true that men did feel that the role centered on supporting the family financially and lacked the current call for men to be tender and involved alongside the toughness. I wish he knew how much the simple things matter; I don’t know how much to call out to him for things he doesn’t know how to supply and how much to surrender to who he is and how he acts.
A number of deaths and trials he bore with strength, patience, and (to me) practically invisible emotional response. His quietness and stability makes perfectly memorable the few times he waxed eloquent or displayed frustration. Yet even in his expressed frustration he could be really funny. He painted the wildest cartoony word picture in my mind when he muttered under his breath one day as he worked the long series of necessary steps to do some simple servicing on my mom’s car that other makes had built far more conveniently into the vehicle for just that reason–home servicing.
Once he was interviewed about his work with a community group by a reporter for a paper and described himself as one of the folks singing in the chorus while other actors and singers carried the story more visibly forward. He doesn’t require a lot of attention and praise; he feels comfortable just knowing that he himself is doing what is right.
He shies away from a full expression of the demands and delight of the gospel as I hear the Bible describe it, but he is involved in church as a community organization which is healthier and more joyful for the participation and gifts of all who attend and share what each offers. He sees God’s hand in little blessings, and he knows that there is a Creator who designed the earth and used evolution to bring it all about. In one of the few remarks he made on faith to my question about the ocean (which makes it all the more significant and weighty as input to me, then a youngster) was that God was responsible for that greatness and rhythmic tide I saw on the cold, huge, empty Massachusetts beach.
I know that he derives great satisfaction and a feeling of connectedness to others by his service to others in need. How much I wish he knew more about God’s grace and that our goodness and community spirit are only good as far as they go in this life. I seek appropriate ways consistent with our way of relating to testify what I know of faith. Yet I must also be consistent with the commands of God Whom I must not disappoint, either. How much I feel the inadequacy of my understanding and performance of God’s grace when I think of trying to convey it to my dad and the scrutiny of his logic and his questions! How I feel the need of a tongue that is as Psalms says always singing before the world not only in the congregation of the greatness and goodness of the Lord, giving thanks, testifying before others of His acts and personal intervention that I ought to see daily. Then I would fear no question or application of logic–I’d be merely telling of God’s hand in my life. Somehow I am tongue-tied and find it terrifically difficult to know what to say about God to my dad when it’s so hard for my dull spiritual eyes to trace out what He does and why.
I am thankful for the good ways in which I am like my father even though I take more after my mother, good and bad points of hers. I am glad I have his example in many memories. I’m glad that though he doesn’t like probing old memories and talking about his youth and war experience on command he is still sharing with me stuff that will help me understand him and his generation. My kids have less interaction than I’d like with him, but he’s geographically distant and caring for the woman he had to leave in order to enter the service when that training program called him up at junior college mid-semester in April of 1942. Each of them in fact married someone else, but now that they have both lost their spouses, they have resumed their relationship begun in high school.
I’m pleased with the current call for men to be tough AND tender, but I certainly see how faithfully the men of his generation bore what they had to in the face of opposition, the daily grind, and temptation. Such is not the case any longer except among those who grasp faith and commitment with real character and can keep a focus on the end all through the journey.
May I be as good a daughter and believer as he was a son, solder, husband, and father.
Allen Dale Golding, D.Min.
/ June 19, 2010I enjoyed reading your reminiscenes about your Dad, Pastor Andy. In contrast to your Dad, my Dad was a farmer, who worked exceedingly hard to care for his family of 8 children. During the war years Dad worked in a defense plant in St. Louis, MO. He suffered an injury, losing the ends of two fingers on his left hand, and was retired from the defense plant following the injury. He came back to the farm and took up where he left off.
Dad was well read, had a great sense of humor, and was spiritually motivated, especially in his later years. My favorite memories of my Dad have to do with working in the timber, as we maintained a wood supply for the cook stove and the potbellied heating stove. In my 17th year Dad and I cut logs, which he later had sawed into lumber and built a barn. I was away working elsewhere, but my younger brothers and sister helped some building the barn. Unless it has been demolished in the last 10 years, Dad’s barn is still standing.
Dad was a loving, devoted husband and father. He never said much about his love for us, but he demonstrated it in many ways. I have fond memories of a hard working farmer, skilled in many aspects of farming, Including tearing the tractor engine down and putting it back together. I always wondered how he knew all that stuff.
I salute my Dad, who lived for his wife and family. I loved him then and still do.
Byron Smith
/ June 19, 2010Hey, Andy,
I appreciate your posting your remembrances of your father, especially on this day that commemorates his parting from your earthly life. I know that you loved him. I appreciate your continuing to honor him and to give him credit for his strength of character and his gifts of service to us and our nation that live beyond his ability to express himself verbally.
My father was cut from some similar cloth–difficult childhood, extensive WWII duty, quiet in speech but strong in character and service. I, like you, thank the Lord for my father’s contribution to the man I have become.
Special memories and Happy Father’s Day,
Byron