Funny how the most memorable punishments I endured came at the hands/commands of my father. As the youngest of eight kids, I know I was one of the apples of his eye. I was his chauffeur from the time I was 12 or 13 years old, long before I had a driver’s license. I was driving him from Billings to Hardin (a fifty mile drive on the old two lane highway) when I got my first driving ticket and had to follow the cop to the courthouse and sit before a judge. I remember Daddy winking at me as I was being chastised by the judge. I don’t recall what the fine was, or even if there was a fine. It was one of the last times I passed on a solid yellow line.

I drove him around because he liked to be the passenger. My mom drove most of the time when they were together. By the time I was a teen, he was in his fifties, and I think he had a major mid-life crisis. He began having health problems, primarily high blood pressure, and I became his hands and mobility. I recall listening to him lament with his cronies how old he was and how damning it was to grow old. He was only in his fifties. It didn’t stop him from making social visits to his friends at their businesses. I learned most of what I know about dealing with businessmen by sitting in on their conversations.

One of his best friends was Bud Brown. Bud owned a Rambler automobile dealership and while I was a kid Rambler came out with a cool fastback model called the Marlin. It competed with the Plymouth Barracuda. My dad got us kids a Marlin as our car, and as my siblings graduated and left home, I inherited the Marlin. It was one cool car.

As he bemoaned his life as being over halfway done, he began turning the farm over to my three brothers. The boys, as we referred to them even as they entered their twenties and thirties, were more than competent. My dad had groomed them from birth to take over. Consequently, Daddy worked himself out of a job.

But he had me to accompany him. Since he didn’t have meaningful work to do on the farm, he created work. I remember picking up rocks–not like in Iowa where rock picking is a farm chore to keep the big rocks that surfaced from the spring thaw–but picking rocks for a rock garden. We’d go to the Big Horn River and literally pick up rocks that would look good on his Ko-Yama, translated “little mountain” that he was building in the yard.

When the rock picking was done (it was never really done) he decided we had to pull and hoe weeds along a fence line at the river farm. The boys had built a temporary fence along a field to keep the sheep out of the row crops. While a cultivator and sprayer kept the weeds at bay in the crop, the fence row was thick with weeds. It was hot, dry, tedious work. Most of the work fell on me, and I made it clear I didn’t like pulling weeds. It seemed like a pointless, make-work task. I didn’t have anything else to do, but I was sure in my mind I COULD have been doing something else. Eery day I drove us to the field and we finished weeding that fence row. While I took little pride in it weeding, I had to admit that the field looked better than before.

I had a license and a car until I graduated at left for college. The summer after pulling weeds, I went to Finland as an exchange student. Like when I went off to college, I really didn’t ask to go. I applied, got accepted, the community paid for it and I went.

I see now how emasculating that must have been for a father who wielded control most of his life. I came back my senior year, and like the years before, I took the keys for the Marlin from the rack and drove to school. After a few weeks of that, one day the keys weren’t on the rack. I was always running late in the mornings, and I frantically asked my mom where the keys were. She didn’t say much, only that Daddy had taken them.

He was long gone, being a morning person, and mom wouldn’t take me to school. I was stuck. So I started walking to school. I was mad, and hurt, and humbled. We lived about a mile out of town. Today I would think nothing of walking a mile or two–sometimes I do it just for the exercise–but back in those days, NOBODY walked if they didn’t have to. I could have caught a bus if I woke early enough, but I had a cool car. I couldn’t ride a bus. Cool kids didn’t ride the bus.

As I trudged to school, holding back tears of anger and shame, Donna Dorn stopped and gave me a ride. She was in my class and lived further north in the valley. I was so embarrassed but grateful that first day to not be late.

That evening, I probably got the lecture on being thankful and appreciative for all I had. The “people are starving across the ocean” speech. Of course he was right. I did have a gifted life. I was sixteen and had been to Japan with my folks and had just spent a summer in Finland. I had college in my sights. And while I thought it was all due to me and my accomplishments, I know now that those “accomplishments” couldn’t have happened without my parents’ support. Even pulling weeds made me stronger, physically and mentally.

The next day, I woke earlier and walked to school. Several people stopped to give me a ride, but I wanted to walk. A mile walk only takes 20 minutes. It was a cool fall day.

Then one day the keys were on the rack, and the Rambler Marlin was parked out front. I drove to school that day, and every day after. My dad had exerted his authority, I had learned my lesson, and the rest is history.

By the way, Thanks, Donna Dorn. I have never forgotten your kindness.