Daddy

Today we’ll climb up the branches of the Lite family tree to a stout limb labeled Daddy. Bocephus Buford Lite, or Bo Lite to his family and friends, came into this life in 1923. He was born on a farm with seven siblings, four boys and four girls in all. He was the baby boy, and by all accounts, spoiled rotten. He was clever and funny and used his talents to avoid as many chores as he could. Though he grew up during the Depression, when everyone was supposed to pull their weight, Aunts and Uncles relate that Daddy did the minimal required to avoid a switchin’ to pursue his own interests.

When the CCC came to our area, Daddy took a job to earn a little money. In addition to the much-needed cash, he learned some journeyman skills in construction. His CCC experience would come in handy when he was drafted in WWII. He went into the Navy and was placed in the Seabees.

Prior to leaving for the war, Daddy married Mom. He was eighteen and she was fourteen. Fourteen was young even by mountain standards, and they had to go over to South Carolina where it was legal. Daddy used to say, “we were going to Greenville, but got to Aiken and had to stop.” I was older before I got the joke, but it was a joke that played out as a tragedy for all of us.

Everyone is changed by war, and Daddy was no exception. Daddy brought back a vice from the war, and a constant reminder of where he had been. The vice was gambling; the reminder was a full torso tattoo of Buddha with Buddha and Daddy sharing the same belly button. I don’t know how long that tattoo took, but it was done while the Seabees were tasked with building infrastructure outside of Hiroshima.

There were scientists assigned to measure the effectiveness of the Atomic bomb. The Seabees were tasked to build Quonset huts for them to live and work in. There’s no telling how many rads of radiation Daddy got while he was stationed there. While I’m curious about exposing so many of our own servicemen to a known painful death sentence, I’m equally curious about what Daddy was saying by the Buddha tattoo.

Daddy wouldn’t talk about it, and maybe he was drunk the whole time and doesn’t remember. It does seem to me like he could have gotten a smaller tat and maybe bought a little Buddha statue for the mantle. Anyway, Bo Lite came back home, and brought with him two constant reminders of WWII. The tattoo that prompted some folks to call him Buddha behind his back and an addiction to gambling. Both signs that the boy, was not “right”, when he came back home.

Daddy returned home along with tens of thousands of men all looking for jobs at the same time. As stated before, Daddy’s interests never fell towards manual labor, and even though he was able to make a nice living as a heavy equipment operator, he was always looking for better odds. During this time, Daddy contracted with Mr. A.C. Down to clear the land for what would become the TackyToo Trailer Park. Mr. Down was well on his way to becoming the Donald Trump of trailer parks. Shortly after the land for the park was cleared, and the homes started to be drug into place, Daddy made a life decision. After a particularly hot summer’s day, and an excruciatingly devastating bout with the hemorrhoids, Daddy climbed down out of the cab of the bulldozer to never return. During this lull in employment he created his greatest work, me.

Daddy could sell, his quick wit, good humor, and desire to be well liked made his transition to the insurance business as slick as grass through a goose. He could add a column of three figures as easy as you or I recite our phone numbers. He could tell hundreds of jokes and was, as Mom said, “as funny as Herb Shriner”. Whoever that was. We prospered to the point that they added my little brother Jackson in the early 50’s. We bought a Cadillac, unheard of in our community. Mom bought a boarding house to run as her enterprise. Times were good, right up to when the wheels came off.

Daddy was an insurance man, and a gambler, he was a father of three, and a gambler, he was a Deacon in the church, and a gambler. Whoever Daddy was, part of him was always a gambler. If I view the situation from 50,000 feet, and use the cloudy lens of time, I can see how the War could have shaped someone who wanted the big score without the big effort. Groups of men confined to groups of men, all under high stress, are going to find their ways to deal with that stress. My Daddy’s personality and math skills pointed him to gambling.

Daddy’s willingness to have it all, and lose it all, were proof of his addiction as surely as my belief that I can take just one drink. You know that the only way to stop the pain of the addiction is to quit cold, but until Mom threatened to leave, Daddy didn’t know the pain. Once the pain started, it never stopped. With but a few minor victories, one of which was winning the deed to Tackytoo in a card game, Daddy had peaked at thirty-four. The next forty-four years were spent in brief ups and downs on the bottom rung of life.

Daddy was still a young man when he and Mom parted company. He was still very interested in the fair sex. If I had a stick of gum for every time I heard Daddy ask some lady if she wanted to “rub Buddha for luck”, I’d own Wrigley field. He had the gift of gab and could tell who to approach and exactly how to approach them. The older he got, the more he looked for women of means, as opposed to “lookers”. He loved to brag on the tokens he received from his girlfriends.

I left “home” at sixteen. Contact between Daddy and me through the years was sporadic. There were no Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthday celebrations. Like two islands in the Philippines, we might both be Philippine islands, but we were thousands of miles apart. Daddy died in 2001 at 78. He left me TackyToo in a protected estate with a bunch of clauses. I guess he didn’t want me to gamble it away.

Like they say, “Pain makes you stronger, tears make you braver, heartbreak makes you wiser, and alcohol makes you forget all of that crap.”

I’m going to call my sponsor now. I hate to wake him up, but it beats the alternative.