Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my dad. He would have been nine-two this year.

And to all the other dad's out there, Happy Father's Day!

Thursday's thirteen: My Dad

Johnnie B Seagraves 1922-1982

Photo taken at the Salton Sea (dad's last fishing trip)

(the pretty lady on the left is my mom, Jeannetta.)

It's almost Father's day and I find myself thinking about my dad. He's been gone for nearly thirty years, but I still miss him.

1. My dad, Johnnie B Seagraves, was born in 1922 in Mount Pleasant,Tennessee. But was raised on a farm near Pulaski.

2. My dad was raised on a farm and rode a horse before he could walk, but all his life he disliked horses.

3. My dad and his family came to Madera, California in 1936, when my dad was fourteen.

4. My dad learned to skate in an old barn, where he had nailed down ten can lids over the knot holes in the floor. He leaned to be a good skater, so he could skate with the girls at the roller rink that we still have in town.

5. He was drafted into the Army and served his tour in Hawaii as a ambulance driver and later a medic, taking care of the boys hurt in the war.

6. After the war when he came home, he used his Vet benefits to learned to be a Body and Fender man (that's someone who hammers out the dents and paints cars). According to his good friend Harmon Henderson, my dad was the best Body and Fender man in Madera.

7. In 1960, my dad met and married my mom, Jeannetta.

8. In 1961, I was born. :) In 1962 my sister Deanna was born.

9. My dad loved to fish and was very good at it too.

10. One time my dad went deep sea fishing and caught a shark. After wrestling with the thing for what seemed like hours (and may have been), he finally got it on board and decided to keep it. He took it home and cut it up. Soon all his friends found out Johnnie had a shark and came over to ask for a steak so they can try shark. My dad's good nature was his undoing, he gave everyone who asked a shark steak, until he realized he had given it all away.

11. Dad taught me how to fish, but I'm not very good at it on my own and don't fish anymore.

12. In 1980 my dad found out he had colon cancer.

13. In 1982, my dad passed away in the Veteran's hospital in Fresno. He was 60 years old. I was twenty-one. It was a very wet year and it seemed like the very skies wept.

Thursday's thirteen: Happy Father's day

I don't usually do a Father's day Thursday thirteen, mostly because I lost my father nearly thirty years ago. I still miss him.

So here to you dad. Happy Father's day.

1. He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland


2. My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys." ~Harmon Killebrew


3. One father is more than a hundred Schoolemasters. ~George Herbert, Outlandish Proverbs, 1640


4. Fatherhood is pretending the present you love most is soap-on-a-rope. ~Bill Cosby


5. Father! - to God himself we cannot give a holier name. ~William Wordsworth


6. Henry James once defined life as that predicament which precedes death, and certainly nobody owes you a debt of honor or gratitude for getting him into that predicament. But a child does owe his father a debt, if Dad, having gotten him into this peck of trouble, takes off his coat and buckles down to the job of showing his son how best to crash through it. ~Clarence Budington Kelland


7. A father is always making his baby into a little woman. And when she is a woman he turns her back again. ~Enid Bagnold


8. Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father! ~Lydia M. Child, Philothea: A Romance, 1836


9. It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons. ~Johann Schiller


10. A father carries pictures where his money used to be. ~Author Unknown


11. When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. ~Author unknown, commonly attributed to Mark Twain but no evidence has yet been found for this (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


12. Dad, you're someone to look up to no matter how tall I've grown. ~Author Unknown


13. My first word was Daddy. ~Janice Seagraves

John Seagraves (he loved to fish)