Editor’s note: This is another repost with some reworking of one of the pieces lost in the restore.
The picture at the top says so much about my life, both in what it does and doesn’t say.
I don’t know when it was taken, although I think I can narrow it down to the late 1930s. The person in the picture was born in 1928, although I have no idea when in the year it happened. So I would guess from the probable age and the way young boys dressed up for portraits that it was in the last years before the U.S. entered World War II.
He was a Southern boy, born three counties up from where I live now in Georgia. His dad was a salesman, a job that could still yield a good living back in the day. I have no idea what he sold. His mother was six years older than his father, and she was already 40 years old when he was born. I’m pretty sure he was an only child.
His parents divorced when he was young, and most of his education came in military school, at Missouri Military Academy in Mexico, Missouri. He went from there to Northwestern University in the Chicago area, where part of his extended family lived.
I don’t know much about his college years, although I know he wooed and won the hand of an Ohio girl who graduated summa cum laude, second in her class in 1949. They married on May 26 of that year. Her parents were at the wedding, both of his were deceased.
They honeymooned in Hawaii, and settled in San Diego, where he still owed the Navy some service. They had a child, and in 1951 they moved back to Chicago. They had a second child in 1952, and somehow I think having a wife and two children by age 24 made him feel like the walls were closing in.
Late that Fall, he gave up and took off for the territories. No one ever saw or heard from him again.
His name was Wesley Kenneth Whitcomb and he was my father.
The small amount of information presented so far is essentially everything I know about him.
His generation was the last one where people could pretty much disappear and then start fresh somewhere else under a different name. It wasn’t even difficult to get a new Social Security number in 1952.
My grandfather was a small-town chief of police, and he wrote to the Departments of Motor Vehicles in every one of the 48 states asking if Wes had taken out a driver’s license, but the only responses he got back were negative.
The only memory I have of him is so vague I’m not 100 percent sure it’s even real. It’s from the night he left. I was standing in a playpen in the living room, not quite 3 years old.He said goodbye to me, told me to take care of my mother and left, never to be seen again.
My mother divorced him for desertion and remarried in 1956 to the man who turned out to be the love of her life. Norman Rappaport, the man I called my Dad, was with her till he died after nearly 52 years of marriage. By all accounts, the man who stayed was a much better man than the one who left.
And of course, then we have the effects of nature vs. nurture.
Nature was my father, the outgoing, good-looking guy who when the going got tough, he couldn’t handle it. A good-time guy who didn’t have the greatest work ethic.
Nurture was my dad, a big part of my life from age 6 on. He taught me what mattered and what didn’t, and I didn’t always get it. That was my fault, not his.
I remember once when I was a kid of 10 or 11, we were visiting our Ohio grandparents. I got into a dispute with my dad about something and I ran off to a distant part of the house. A few minutes later, my grandfather came and asked me what was wrong. I don’t remember any of the details of what it was about, but I remember being so angry that I said for the only time, “Someday my real father will come back and take me away with him.”
My grandfather looked at me and said, “If your real father ever came back, they would throw him in jail.”
That was the day I started to learn one of the most important lessons about being a man.
The men who matter are the ones who stay.
The ones who don’t stay, don’t matter.