E S S A Y
MY OTHER FATHER ROBERT JOE STOUT
I
grew up with two very different fathers. The one who came home just after five was wellorganized but distant. He didn’t drink; he seldom missed work; he seldom interfered in anything I did. He was well-read and could recite Wordsworth, Shelley, and Tennyson that he’d learned from his year of college, but I only remember seeing him read newspapers or magazines like Life and Collier’s. Often in the evenings he sat listening to the radio and playing Solitaire, but during the summer and on weekends he filled most of the daylight hours working in the garden, or digging a root cellar, or mixing and pouring concrete for a sidewalk. Often he had me help, but I don’t remember that he insisted on it or assigned me specific chores. I can’t recall him hugging or punishing me physically in any way. He was who he was, a daily presence, mildly affectionate, determinedly opinionated, dedicated to routine. He wasn’t at all like my other father—the one I truly admired and wished to emulate. Every boy would want a father like my other father. He had climbed
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the Great Pyramids, hunted leopards in Ceylon, smuggled himself across the Rhine hidden beneath gunny sacks. He had been a college running back, a soldier, a ventriloquist, a used car salesman. He had supped in Marseilles and photographed Maori dancers in New Zealand and crossed the International Date Line through raging seas that made everybody on shipboard sick except him. He was a friend of the great Cap Gudmundson, who’d defied the Bolsheviks and who had thawed and eaten the flesh of Siberian mammoths, and of Drew Pearson, who wrote for all the papers and went on national lecture tours that thousands of people paid money to attend. He had traveled throughout the United States with opera
