Richard Dean

"It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief, as though sorrow would be made less by baldness."

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

Sitting on the balcony at the Cliff, watching to hilltops gradually emerge from the receding low ceilings. It's peak summer up here, so even in the midst of the June gloom there are the annoyances of a jet skier who keeps whizzing back and forth down on the lake, and a neighbor's child loudly demanding attention in his own garbled way.

Or maybe I'm just testy on the day after my father's demise.

I spoke to Johnnie yesterday, and she seemed surprisingly okay on the first day of the rest of her life after 45 years of marriage. She wanted to describe to me the experience of finding him dead in bed, cold. Of calling 911 and dealing with cops and paramedics over the body. Of the EMT (or paramedic--Peg tells me there's a difference, but it's lost on me) giving her the chance to tell him goodbye before they wheeled him off the wherever one takes a dead body. "I love you Dickey. Goodbye." And that was that.

As for me, I'm still processing. Life hasn't slowed down a bit in the midst of all this, which seems to trivialize what's just happened in the unceasing flurry of deadlines and client demands. But Dad was always about making money, and probably would respect my billing a few hours even as I start to navigate life as a sixty-something-year-old orphan. But I'm not really without a parent--Johnnie's been family since I was in my mid-teens, taught me to drive a stick-shift, always made sure there were french onion dip and Ruffles at the house when I came to visit, because I liked those things when I was 16. I still do, but the snack demands a little Prilosec to endure now.

Richard Dean Dickey was born on October 19, 1939, on a farm a couple miles north of Water Valley, Mississippi, the youngest of eight. Let me see--8? There was James, Mary Alice, Billy Mac, Wayne, Hilda, Donald, Bobby Joe, and finally Dad. Yep, eight.

Dad was the baby, and generally seen around town as the nicest of the Dickey boys, who seemed to constantly find trouble. He played halfback for the Water Valley Blue Devils at 135 pounds. He left Yalobusha County right after high school to join his brothers working at the Kaiser Steel mill right outside of Chicago.

That apparently didn't last long, given that he would've been 18 or 19 when the Eisenhower Recession hit and he was laid off at the mill. While he was standing in line for unemployment, he saw one of those posters with tearaway phone number tabs inviting applicants for the management program at Howard Johnson's, then on its way to becoming one of the largest restaurant chains in the country. He called the number, was accepted, and the rest is history.

Somewhere in there he got married the first time, a fact of which I was not aware until well into adulthood. Apparently this first wife accompanied him to his first big management assignment in Topeka, Kansas, where my mom was taking a semester off from KU and waitressing. Things happened at his 24th birthday party, it seems, and with an intervening shotgun wedding I came along nine months later.

I never heard what became of the first wife. There was always an inference that perhaps the marriage to Mom was clouded by bigamy.

The company wanted to fire him over all that, but his boss recognized his ability and transferred him to Joplin, where I was born, and then to Springfield, Missouri, where he managed to pack the restaurant and start earning big money for HoJo. So we moved to Kansas City and an area manager gig, which I suppose was the site of the first manifestation of the drinking problem that ended up coloring the rest of his life. I had heard he drove a car through the front of a Howard Johnson's before that, supposedly defending Mom's honor, but that tale was probably apocryphal.

But in Kansas City he was overserved and punched a coworker at a company party, and we ended up in Moline where my sister was born.

But Moline was too small for a very ambitious young man from Water Valley, and soon we embarked on a nomad's journey. Kansas City. Louisville. Key Biscayne. Marietta. Roswell. During that last period, in 1974, Dad was promoted to division manager of HoJo's sprawling western region, which encompassed every store west of the Mississippi. It was such a big deal he even made the Restaurant News, an industry journal I read assiduously when Dad brought it home to show I was interested in how Shakey's Pizza was holding down the cost of dough, or the nuances of things like site selection for new stores at which Dad was something of a prodigy.

He's fixing to turn 35 in that shot. Dig the muttonchop sideburns.

So we moved to Southern California, and hated it. I don't think he much enjoyed being right down the road from his in-laws, my grandparents. Taking a huge risk, Dad then left Howard Johnson's in 1976 to serve as vice president of operations for Whataburger as that company embarked on a huge expansion throughout the South.

We rarely saw Dad when he was running the west for HoJo, and the same held true during our Whataburger years in Corpus Christi. He was gone three or four days a week, every week, and when he was home he mostly sat in the kitchen until all hours smoking cigarettes and killing a bottle of J&B or Cutty Sark, with Charlie Rich or Tom T. Hall playing on the turntable. There was always a point in the evening when we knew to stay away--you never knew if you were going to get the Huggy Dad in his cups, or the other one who was prone to violent outbursts. Some nights, if you were particularly unlucky, you got both in a weepy mix.

Dad thought Whataburger was horribly mismanaged by a bunch of provincials, which it was back then, and the executive team at HoJo offered him back the western region, this time to run out of Dallas. So he left us down in Corpus to finish out the fall semester and moved to temporary quarters up there, where he hired Johnnie as his secretary.

I won't belabor what happened next. Mom had become sort of a lefty, hanging out with the grad school ladies and not terribly interested in being the spouse of an up-and-coming restaurant executive. He'd buy her a new Fleetwood, and she'd trade it for a rattly little Audi. Her dress became more bohemian as he became quite the dandy, making what would be close to seven figures in current dollars and living around the block from Roger Staubach.

So they divorced, with the arrangement becoming final in 1980. He and Johnnie married the same year, and in the transaction I gained two wonderful stepsisters. And Mom never spoke ill of Johnnie, and Johnnie never spoke ill of Mom. That bit of classiness made my life a lot easier.

I moved to California to live with my grandparents not long after, and Dad moved the headquarters out there a year later. A couple years after that HoJo was acquired by a British venture capital company and all of the top executive team was terminated, including poor Dad. He moved back to Atlanta where he's bought the HoJo across from Six Flags, but running one store left him restless and he accepted a job as VP of Ops for Sbarro's Pizza, another company in expansion mode. The clan moved to Chicago (I was long out of the house by that time), where he stayed until he tried to open his own chain, Edwardo's Pizza, only to have the venture fail when his business partner, a longtime colleague and friend from him Howard Johnson days, embezzled the company dry.

At that point Dad and John moved back to Mississippi in 1992, where he figured he'd retire, but after a while he remembered why he left the Magnolia State in the first place, and right around the same time Johnnie's mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, so they moved back to Dallas and into the house where he died yesterday.

This reads like Dad was his job. Maybe that's a defense mechanism on my part. I was always proud of Dad and his accomplishments, but I never once came to him for advice. It never even occurred to me to do so. And the smoking and drinking hobby became such a feature for him that visits to his house became an endurance exercise of sitting in the kitchen in a fog of cigarette smoke, waiting for all hell to break loose, which it usually did. And the things he'd say in those moments . . . I don't know how my sister and steps were able to handle that.

And like most families, ours was pushed further apart by Fox News and the right-wing hate machine. Dad was never a Trumper, but he watched that stuff whenever he was awake during the last years of his life, drinking televised poison he'd spew out at me as his "liberal, rich, lawyer son". That sounds like a compliment I know, but trust me he didn't mean it that way.

There was never a rapprochement, which is something I'll always regret. Most of my adult life I'd call on Sundays to check on the two of them, and in the last few months he could still speak I'd end up hanging up on him in mid-rant.

Finally he couldn't really speak, might've weighed 100 pounds, and sat contracted in his wheelchair or on the couch in front of the television, calling for Johnnie every few minutes to bring food or something to drink (nonalcoholic--life had forced him onto the wagon by then) or to change him. When we came to visit, he bitterly resented her sitting on the porch with Peg and the girls, laughing and getting a precious break from her 24 hour shift, seven days a week, attending to him when he'd long ago lost the ability to get out of his chair.

And that's where it all ended yesterday.

I'm defending a Zoom deposition, two actually, in about an hour, and then trying to catch up on files while Peg works down at Arnot. It's feeling like a lazy weekend, with an inch of rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Life marches on.