Ssssh....

Don't tell anyone but this is how my father really looked, Without all the wigs and make-up. Of course, when I "met" him he was older than this. Less hair, more wrinkled and more tired. His career had dwindled after talkies arrived and the jobs were fewer and farther between. He was married and needed to have a regular income to support his growing family. He was a very smart, very astute and very charming man. He was also a self educated one because in the days when he was growing up and living and traveling all over the country with a family of actors there wasn't much chance to get a formal education. Regular jobs after the war were not easy to find for an uneducated man. By the time I came along he worked as a Night Watchman at a wood processing plant. I never saw him in anything but a tie, suit jacket, pleated slacks and most all of the time, a hat that he could sweep off to greet people. He was a character - with character and having him pat his lap so you could cuddle up and have him read the Sunday comics with all those fantastic voices he used for each different character took you off to other worlds and instilled a love of reading in all of his children, which has been passed down to them through us and so on. His legacy lives on in many ways.

He had come down in the world but he never let the world get him down. He was interested in everything and made everything he talked about interesting to us.
My mother had come from a very well-to-do family who lost all of there money in the crash and she lost both of her parents at the age of fifteen, I believe and had to go live with relatives. When she met my dad I'm sure she had stars in her eyes and I know he promised her the moon. I know things did not work out the way they had dreamed about but they both worked very hard, not to give us the moon but to give us a good foundation, to provide for us under difficult circumstances, to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. My sisters and I didn't have a lot but we had strong, interesting role models and that was the best gift they could give us.