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My dad, Lloyd (known to all as Bus), boating on Cassadaga Lake in the 1950s. |
My Dad was a complicated man. Child of the Depression who had to go to work at 15 when his father died while plowing the fields after lunch one day.
An early member of the SWOC (Steelworkers Organizing Committee), precursor of the mighty CIO steelworkers' union, he later become a staunch Reaganite.
He was a SeaBee during WWII.
He worked as a welder in the ALCO locomotive factory and later as a welding methods inventor in the labs of the Olin Corporation.
He married my mother after getting her pregnant, a marriage that lasted for over a decade. But he was also a ladies' man, with girlfriends in every town where the Greyhound bus he drove whenever the mill was on strike stopped.
He married three times and fathered five children. His third wife, Annie, was the love of his life and settled him down.
The last decades of his life, in Arizona and Florida, were perhaps his most creative, where he spent time making craft pieces of welded found objects and served as a Deputy Sheriff.
A complicated man, a member of the Greatest Generation, who never dreamed of leaving home but went far in life.
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