heroes

I’m thinking of heroes. Not the heroes of popular culture or history. I’m thinking of the heroes of my life—the people who have inspired me to live hopefully and courageously even when the chips are down. The heroic qualities of these people are often hidden from the general public. And yet their lives and stories have the power to inspire and empower others. They may never know that they have given others the courage and inspiration to live lives of purpose and meaning. They have often been called “unsung heroes”. Unsung that is, until we speak their names and stories.

So I am speaking today of the inspiration I have received from my father who died too young and lived unfulfilled dream, who stood by a wife with emotional issues and raised two daughters to adulthood. His work was that of a time gone by. He was a tailor as was his father before him. He was also a member of what Tom Brokaw calls “the great generation”. He left his apprenticeship to his father to fight in WWII. There was no time to finish the many year course of a master trade with apprenticeship and journeyman to become a master tailor when he returned from the war. There was no time because my grandfather, Dad’s dad, died shortly after my father returned. I’m sure there was a period of sowing some oats instead of sewing coats immediately after the life threatening and altering experience, but by the time he settled down in married life and I was born my grandfather had succumbed to cancer. The master was gone. My father tried to make a go of made-to-measure tailoring, but we lived in the midwest in the midst of farm country. Needless to say there was very little call for tailor made clothing. My father often felt like a failure because he couldn’t make a living at tailoring as his father had. He regretted that he had not learned all he could from his father like how to make patterns. He did make me some coats and helped when sewing frustrated me as a teenager. Eventually he found a master tailor in a neighboring city and completed his apprenticeship. By the time this was done even wealthier people passed by tailor made clothing for the efficiency of mass produced, ever available clothes off the rack. My dad tailored for a large department store making alterations to ready-made clothing sold in the store until he too succumbed to cancer at age 63.

Today would have been my dad’s birthday. I’ve often wished he could have seen the bigger picture enough to understand that it was not his inadequacy as a tailor so much as a change in the culture and market that diminished almost all trades and crafts, including tailoring, in our society. This hero of mine fought valiantly to hold onto a craft that has become obsolete. To sit for hours and learn the feel of the needle and thread, to train one’s eye and touch to understand the weave and drape of material, this is art of a different age and time. But heroes can be like that. They not so much champion lost causes as they stand for the undervalued qualities that make life and work more a product of the best human effort.

So here’s to you, Dad, for offering your best effort to support your family and believing that work could and should feed the soul.