Front Porch: A conversation with Dad might help make sense of the country today

I don’t think of my father very often anymore. He died more than 50 years ago, so it’s been a long time, and so much else has transpired during the intervening years.

I married right out of college and moved to Spokane, with many trips back to Miami to see my parents. They visited us in Spokane only once in the few years my father lived beyond my wedding, so I have no particular association with him in this city where I’ve made my home and raised my family for more than half a century. My children, who never met their grandfather, are now middle-age men.

He was a good dad, so it’s not antipathy. Just the passage of time.

He’s been on my mind a lot in recent years, however, and most certainly the past several months. And if you’d ask me if there was any person in history, living or dead, famous or not, that I could have a talk with today, it would be my father.

In America, there are pretty much two political factions these days – the MAGA folks and those who aren’t. For those of us who aren’t, there is great concern about the future of this country as the successful-though-imperfect republic it has been, open to different ideas, respecting the law and the Constitution and generally kind to strangers.

Some of the things that are going on now have parallels in history, some flickering out or circumvented or squelched – but some ripening into gargoyle regimes doing a lot of harm. Comparisons are being made today with the changes Germany was undergoing in the 1930s, which could have gone a couple of different ways.

Please don’t sharpen your rhetorical knives over these observations. I’m not shouting “Nazi” from the treetops, but I am seeing cause for concern, and I’d really like to talk to someone who really knows … or knew. Like my father, whose name was Werner.

He was born in 1908 in Germany. His father, Reinholt, was in the German army in WWI and, I have been told, came home with war wounds that eventually took his life. Werner was 9 at the time.

I do know he went through bread lines and tried to do what he could to help his mother, Luise, and younger sister, Erika. Sometime in the 1920s he came to America (he was 18, I think). A few aunts and uncles had come earlier, so at first he lived with one of them and went to work, sending home what money he could.

He never talked about any of that. What I did learn I mostly came to know when I was older, and from my mother. Germany split politically after the Great War, some moving right and some left, my father being one of the latter.

One of the things I did hear a little about when I was a child was that he and other expat German friends had infiltrated Nazi rallies held in the Brownsville section of New York City back in the 1930s. They would sneak in, and when those gathered started singing the Nazi rallying anthem, the Horst Wessel song, he and his friends would break out singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Omitted from that story were accounts of what happened next, and, being a kid with little understanding of potential consequences for such actions, I didn’t ask.

Later on, my mother told me that he also had received mail from cousins, close friends and neighbors in Germany urging him to support the Nazi cause and talk up Adolph Hitler in the city. My father apparently tried reasoning with some of them, but eventually, and with sadness, he began just sending back their letters unopened

I only knew smatterings of this background when I was a child. Passions swing left and they swing right, and I think they just wanted to keep their child safe from any and all of it.

It was already difficult enough for them having to explain why their American-born child (me) spoke German as her first language. That was because after his sister died, my father managed to bring his mother to America. She didn’t speak English, and took care of me while my parents worked. I understood English but didn’t speak it until I went to school.

This was especially awkward when some of their Jewish friends came over to the house. This was in New York City, not long after the end of WWII, I should mention.

I would like to add here that my father was proud to have become a U.S. citizen – an American of German birth, not a German living in America. He voted and always put the American flag out on national holidays.

And he knew things about Germany in the 1930s.

After he was gone, my mother, Julia – who was born in America to immigrant parents – shared some more of these stories with me and in more detail, which gave me some perspective.

I do have a particularly clear memory of a conversation I overheard as a child, when (during the McCarthy Hearings, I believe) my father opined that he felt no fear that America would ever fall to communism, and he listed some reasons for that (which I have long since forgotten), but he was convinced America was vulnerable to fascism and strong-man rule. I have no idea why he believed that.

I didn’t even understand what that all meant when I was listening from the next room, but even though it’s been such a long time, the tenor of his words, if not the actual words themselves, remain so strong in my mind.

I sure would like to have an expanded version of that conversation today. So much to learn from our fathers, if only we understood it sooner or they lived long enough for us to realize all the knowledge and life experience they hold within them.

That’s what’s on my mind as we head into this Father’s Day weekend.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net