My Dad.
Today would have been my dad’s 66th birthday but he passed away on April 7th of this year. As I remember him on this day, I wanted to share with you all some words I wrote down a week before he passed as I tried to comprehend what was going on and became some of the words I’d later share at his funeral ten days later. I hope you can take something from these words, whether it being remembering my dad yourself, helping you remember a loved one of your own or maybe even taking away from some of the wisdom he left behind with me. Without any more delay, here’s some words about my dad. When I got the news a week ago that my dad, who had spent the last few weeks in the hospital, was being moved to hospice care, I suddenly had emotions flooding in from all over and I couldn’t just get my thoughts together so I done the one thing he taught me to do at an early age, I began to write. Now when I say he taught me to write, it wasn’t because of his great love for literature as my dad loved to tell a good story more than read one anyday. He taught me how to write because it became fairly obvious to him at an early age that his oldest son learned the love of “talking junk” like his old man and if he didn’t teach me to learn to write soon that the twenty minute homework assignment of putting ten words into a sentence would turn into tomorrow’s homework very quickly. So at that early age my dad knew the one way to focus my attention was to make the stories about sports and especially at that young of an age it had to be about either the Braves or Dale Earnhardt. I can even remember one assignment that used the word “fast” and he basically just said to me, “Jamie, Dale Earnhardt went really ______ at the Daytona 500 this past week” and when it finally clicked as a sentence in my head he almost celebrated like he had won the Daytona 500 himself. He continued to help me with my writing into my elementary school years to the point that I was once named to the Young Writer’s Association in fourth grade, which my mother once jokingly congratulated him on his award. Throughout the years, my father continued to encourage me to write and do my video productions that I have since won multiple awards for and for anyone that reads the Boiling Springs Sports Journal, you can thank him because he encouraged me to start the website and even came up with that name when I was debating on names years ago. I talked about my dad loving to “talk junk” and honestly if you’ve ever been around him for more than five minutes, you know that phrase is true. My dad loved to talk with people and had a great ability to know if people needed a hug and a good word or if they just needed someone to ‘talk junk’ with them to get whatever was going on in their life off their mind for a little while. He was also great at knowing if someone was sincere or as he would often reference ‘full of it’. If you’ve ever talked with my dad for long there are some things that he always made sure that people knew about him and it was things he was proud of the most in his life. One of the first things he would let you know is that he was raised in his early days in Una, SC. I even once told him that he spent less time in Una than in the Inman/Boiling Springs area but he quickly corrected me that he spent the time that mattered the most there, as a young child. He spoke fondly of his time there, talking about how my grandparents would listen to the songs of Hank Williams on the radio in the kitchen over breakfast before heading for work or school. He even used to laugh at a tale of his neighbor Wanda Toney, who later became my eighth grade math teacher, where she once told on him that he didn’t drink his milk when stars were being handed out for rewards at school but later said that he actually did have milk in his coffee. He was proud of the people that he met there and grew up with and when people spoke about it he didn’t want them to see it for the negative light that the area had gotten known for at one time. He wanted people to remember that a lot of good people were from there and still lived there. I even remember him later on encouraging a friend of his at the airport to visit Una on his vacation. While it wasn’t exactly Una, he also talk how much he loved, missed, and learned from the people he grew up and around in the neighborhood of Riverdale. He talked fondly of growing up around the Arrington’s, and if you mentioned anyone was a better athlete at Boiling Springs (behind Wally Mathis) than Jimmy Arrington you better be ready for a long discussion. He talked about how much he loved camping and running around with the Camp brothers and would always brag whenever he saw their success around town. While he was at it he'd also talk about spending time with family as a kid, whether it was everyone having to search for his brother Keith who had gotten lost in the Oglesby families' woods or eating all of the eggs that his aunt Mary Lou had bought at the grocery store while spending a weekend down there. He'd talk about memories of the Threadgill reunions or spending time with his grandma McBee in Glendale. Another thing he was proud of was his time playing athletics for Boiling Springs High School and if you ever asked any of his family what number he was it was easy for us to tell you number 61, because no matter what game we watched he pulled for the player wearing number 61 because he said “anyone that wears 61 isn’t scared to put a hit on you.” He always talked about how much he loved playing for Coach Tom McIntyre and Coach Jim Black as both of them seemed to be two coaches that could always get the best out of him. He’d also always love to talk about how strong of a pairing that he and Robert Duncan were along the offensive line. And for his family in Cowpens, he always made it a point that he never lost to Cowpens High School despite what Joel may try to say. He loved to talk about his days at Boiling Springs outside of sports as well as he used to love to talk about pranks and antics that Greg, Curtis, Ronnie, and himself would get into whether that was dropping an alien off at the local radio station, to sneaking people into drive-in movies, or pulling pranks downtown that may or may not have been newsworthy. He also talked after every reunion about how he was so happy to see so many people that he had many great memories with and was always excited to see them. Something else that he was proud of was his time in the US Army as part of the 502nd MP Corp in Fort Hood, TX. Any time he would talk about his time in the Army he always wanted people to know he was a MP (Military Policeman) and was also a part of the 2nd Armored Division, aka the group named “Hell On Wheels,” that he often reminded was commanded by the son of the great George S. Patton. He talked about how many great friends that he met there from McRae to Petrillo and always joked he met people that were like brothers there that he never knew he needed until he went into the armed services. He also was proud of his time in basic training at Fort Jackson and his MP training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. As much as he was proud of his service in the US Army, he was also proud of the time that he spent as a South Carolina Highway Patrolman. While he loved the work, like anything else it was the people that my dad was around that he enjoyed the most and some of those names were Terry Bryson and Scott Hicks. He loved to tell a story about going on his off time to capture an escaped prisoner, that he left my mom at home to get in on the chase, but mom would quickly reply, had you just stayed home you’d probably caught him in the backyard. Once I was born, my dad had two jobs either at Michelin or TSA, and as a kid I remember hearing stories about Douie and Louis along with Pat, Penny, Allen, Todd, and many others like they were characters in a kids book that he was reading to me from Michelin or in later years he would keep me laughing about stories between himself, Brian, Carol, and many others at TSA. My dad loved his friends and loved to tell the stories that he had with them, and if you’ve never heard the one about him having to talk Tyler and Douie out of throwing Coke cans at Marshall fans after a Clemson game, you should really hear that one. The only thing that my dad loved more than his friends was his family. He loved his family more than life itself and would have done anything he could to make this world a better place for them. I remember him talking about my mom and telling me that she was the best thing that ever happened to him. If you ever wondered how much he loved her this should explain it to anyone in South Carolina or Georgia, as he used to drive I-20 from Columbia to Atlanta on the most boring part of road God ever created to see her every time he was off while she was in college at Emory. I learned a lot about love from watching him with my mom and one story has always stuck out to me. I remember him telling me one time as we were dropping mom off at work after lunch, when he was off one day, I started driving off before she walked in the door and he immediately told me to stop the car and said, “I told your grandfather when I married her, I’d never let someone hurt her, so you never leave someone you love until you see they’re safely inside the place where they’re going.” It was his inner cop working along with a promise he made over forty years ago along with teaching his son a lesson, you always make sure the ones you love the most are safe. As sons, it makes it hard for us to always see the love a dad has for us because at the end of the day, a father’s job is to make you a good man. While he had to discipline us at times, like the time we knew we’d messed up by driving our grandma crazy pretending to be Sting and Ric Flair in a wrestling match, my brother and I knew we were loved because he took so much time showing it to us. Whether it was playing cowboys and indians with us as kids in the living room or coaching our little league teams just to be around us a little bit more despite working crazy swing shifts at work. Being Steve’s son as players wasn’t always easy though but in the end he was teaching us life lessons. I can remember him coaching Tyler in soccer asking him “Are you going to play today or do you just want to sit on the bench?” to which Tyler responded to the challenge by scoring the two winning goals, on a day we later found out he had pneumonia. With myself, he once took me out of a basketball game for the first time all-season when he filled in as my head coach in a basketball game, in a game I had 15 points in at the time. I remember asking him “I’m out?” to which he replied “Yeah, that’s right.” I asked him about those situations not long ago and I remember him saying, “I took you out of that game because all those kids on that team had worked hard to play and I needed you to understand that as the best player that if someone works as hard as you they deserve an opportunity as well. With your brother though he was young and smaller than a lot of those kids, I wanted to make sure he fought and didn’t give up because the situation was bigger than him,” a lesson which has served him well with as successful as he has become in life. I can remember one-time having a ‘poor me party’ as my dad liked to call them and asked me what was wrong. I remember telling him I felt like I had been a disappointment to him and my mom to which he looked at me and said, “Are you kidding me? I couldn’t be prouder of you and your brother. You two have done so many things to make me proud and I love talking to people and telling them about everything both of you are doing. What do you think I’m talking to most of those people I talk to about?” My dad loved his family but he missed a lot of his family that had passed on before him as well, as I can remember him often saying he looked forward to one day seeing my grandfathers again, my grandmothers, his brothers, his cousins, his Uncle Fred, his aunts (particularly Ann), his grandpa Wink, and his grandmothers. He often talked about how he couldn't wait to sit around a cookout headed by Hoyt and Edmond again or how much he missed his brothers and his cousins Bobbi and David. The last thing I want to say is that my dad loved his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I remember him telling me how he wanted to get back into church once he got to feeling better since he hadn’t found a new church since the pandemic. He always believed in the Lord but had his faith renewed a few years ago, through a simple act of a ham sandwich. If you ever want to know more about that I’d be happy to oblige you because he loved that story. While my dad taught me years ago to write, I never thought it would take me to where it has, or on this day be as therapeutic as it has been. This story will never take away the hurt of my dad not being around but I do know each time I start to write anything that he’s right there with me. So I guess at the end of the day, I just want to say “Thanks Dad, I love you.” |