Driving with Dad

It was September of 1980. Mom and Dad had brought me down from Ohio to South Carolina to start college, and once again Dad was getting on my nerves.

A lot of things that Dad did irritated me. His staunch standards and inflexible beliefs. The way he made us boys work on our property whether we wanted to or not. (Oh, those dreaded words on a Friday night: “We’re going to drag some brush tomorrow, boys.”) Even the way he came into my bedroom every Sunday morning at eight and put his hand gently in the middle of my back and said, “Time to get up.”

And now here I was, eighteen years old and more than ready to be on my own, free from the responsibilities and frustrations of home, and he seemed determined to get on my nerves one more time.

Anyone who’s lived in the dorms (nowadays “residence halls”) at a university knows the importance of arriving early each semester to claim your storage space and bunk. I had arrived after only one other roommate had arrived, so the pickings were still pretty good for me. I decided which drawers I wanted, and Dad started pulling my clothes out of the suitcase and putting them away. It was still quite warm in South Carolina, yet here he was, putting my winter clothes on top. I knew I would have to rearrange everything after he left. He kept unpacking until everything was put away completely wrong. I was starting college, for crying out loud! Didn’t he know I was fully capable of unpacking and organizing my own clothes?

Sometime after that he and Mom drove me over to the dining hall to drop me off. I remember how nervous yet excited I was. I had felt ready for this break for at least a year, and now it was here! Yes, it was intimidating to walk into that huge facility not knowing anyone, but I knew that that would change. I got out of the car, said my good-byes to my parents, and confidently walked off—not without a lump in my throat.

Years later Mom and Dad told me they both cried for many miles as they headed back to the Buckeye State. I was their oldest, the first to leave home, and they knew—although it hadn’t occurred to me—that our family life would never be the same. They were feeling for the first time the wrenching pain a parent feels when the inevitable happens and the child walks away.

Family Dynamics

Parents experience a unique kind of love for their children. It hits you full force when you hold that helpless, naked infant in your arms and suddenly realize the immense responsibility you have just taken on. And you think in your heart, “You are perfect! I will never let anything bad happen to you.” And your eyes tear up because you are so full of joy and because you are also so astounded at the emotions you are feeling.

But to the child, from his earliest memories, Mom and Dad are always just “there.” They had no beginning, and their end—well, that’s a long, long, long way off, and we’re not going to think about it. So the child’s love for them, while deep, is no match for the love coming his direction in a well-balanced home. He doesn’t know that their feelings for him are stronger than his for them.

I suspect most people, my children included, consider their relationship with their father to be complex at best and conflicted at worst. Don’t get me wrong, Dad and I didn’t have what would be considered a “rocky relationship.” I respected—and feared—him too much to openly defy him. But he wasn’t perfect, and there were times in life when I could have told you exactly what each of his failings was.

Boy from the Mountain State

Nyle Stanley Skaggs was born in West Virginia in 1936. His childhood consisted of country life—running barefoot on roads paved with red dog, helping his daddy with the chores, going to school, eating excellent meals prepared by his stepmother, riding bikes with friends—until he was seventeen years old and it was time for him to make the break that I would make in 1980. He left home and moved to Ohio to live with his brother and sister-in-law, Eddie and Shirley, good salt-of-the-earth, loving people. At some point after the move, he decided he’d go back home again, but his parents stood firm. No, you can’t come back.

That may sound heartless, but it wasn’t. They knew if they let him move back, his wings would be forever stunted, and he might never fly.

He met my mom when she was still in high school; he joined the Navy and was stationed in Pensacola, Florida. He and Mom married, and she was eventually able to join him in Pensacola.

After Dad’s stint in the Navy, they came back to Mom’s hometown, Fredericksburg, Ohio. Dad worked various jobs—I believe he delivered furniture for Sears for a while, where he made himself unpopular with his boss because the boss told Dad to tell people what they wanted to hear. “If they want the furniture delivered Friday, tell them it will be there Friday—even if you know it won’t be there till Tuesday.” Dad refused to lie to people.

Mom told me a story that I find shameful to this day—when I was a preschooler and Dad would come home from work, I would hear him at the door and shout, “Someone’s here!” and go running to the door. Then, realizing who “someone” was, I would pout, “Oh, it’s only Daddy.” And turn and walk away.

Do children ever fully realize that their parents are human beings exactly like they are, with feelings that can be acutely hurt? It’s a question worth pondering, especially if there’s a rift between you and your parents.

The Milk Route

Also around that time Dad helped my mom’s father run his seven-day-a-week milk route. Dad would take the route for him on Saturdays to make some money and to give his father-in-law a day off. I remember the thrill of riding along with Dad on the route when I was very small. It was a tank truck, and after we arrived at each farm, Dad would run a large hose through a tiny door into the milkhouse where the farmer had already collected the milk in a large stainless-steel container. Dad would hook the hose up to the container and start pumping the milk into the truck.

I would stand and watch the milk get lower and lower. The change seemed imperceptible until it got low enough to reveal the fan-like blades, which served to keep the milk circulating, whirling slowly in the bottom of the tank. More and more of each blade would be revealed until you could see the bottom of the tank and you could hear a huge gurgling, sucking sound. Then the job was done, and we would go on to our next farm.

I remember climbing up the seemingly impossibly high steps into the truck’s cab. I remember the smell of fresh milk—with a hint of sourness behind it, from milk that had been sloshed somewhere and not cleaned up. I remember the big rubber boots Dad wore. I remember looking out the windshield of the great big truck, leaning forward with my hands on the dash—because there were no seat belts. And I remember that the last stop was the dairy, where ruddy-faced men pumped out the truck’s contents and then washed the tank out with high-pressure, scalding water.

It was one night when Dad and I were driving somewhere—not on the milk route—when he pulled back the curtain on the secret of where babies come from. I suspect Mom had put him up to it because I kept asking her questions about the whole process. It must have been terribly awkward for him, but he did it. I was very young, but his explanation made sense and stayed with me—even though the whole thing sounded pretty weird.

On another trip somewhere I asked Dad how old Jesus was when He died. I remember Dad’s response: “He was thirty-three, the same age I am now.” That would have been 1969.

Driving Test

When I was sixteen and it was time to get my license, Dad took me to the Ohio DMV. While Dad waited in the office, a uniformed state patrolman got in the car with me, and off we went. I was completely intimidated and almost shaking with fear. He kept making marks on the paper on his clipboard. Was that good or bad? When we finished the road test, he said, “Well, you passed. Barely. But you passed.”

I figured out then that when the state highway patrolman makes marks on his paper during the road test, it is not a good thing.

The road test was followed by the parallel parking exam, which I had worked on assiduously. Under the grim visage of my state highway patrolman, the parking lines somehow moved into awkward angles when they should have been straight, and the curb was determined to insert itself under my wheel!

I failed. I was completely humiliated and emotionally crushed. I wasn’t used to failure in any sphere. While driving me home afterwards, Dad said something in an attempt to comfort me, and I snapped back angrily, “Well, I didn’t try to fail!” Normally the punishment for such disrespect would have been swift and firm. Instead he replied quietly, “I know, I know.” That response humbled me more than an angry one would have.

In 1975 Mom and Dad started building “the house on the hill” at the south end of Fredericksburg. Jack Scott dug the basement, and an Amishman, Ivan Weaver, and his crew did the framing and plastering. But we—Dad and his sons—did a lot of the other work. What a great experience that was! I don’t remember resenting those jobs, because they were fun and because we were all so excited to have a new house. We helped insulate it by wrapping it in huge sheets of reflective foil, and after that we helped side it with real wood siding. I was a freshman in high school, and my youngest brother, Joel, had just been born. That was a good time for our family.

A Proper Tail

I suspect that when I was very young I wasn’t exactly what Dad would have expected in a son. I wasn’t interested in sports—not in watching them and certainly not in playing them. He taught me to throw a baseball and a football, but I was only minimally good at those. He also taught us boys to fly a kite. No, wait. He tried to teach us boys to fly a kite.

He’d stand, holding the cheap little plastic-and-balsa wood contraption with Spider-Man on it above his head and tell us to run away as the string in our hands spooled out behind us. Ostensibly at the perfect moment he would pitch the kite up into the air to catch the wind and soar away. But what happened time and time again was that it would soar heavenward for a foot or two and then dive violently for the ground as though it were scared to death of leaving the earth behind.

“Stop! Stop!” This, to keep us from dragging the incorrigible non-dirigible through the grass and ruining it. After several more tries we would all retreat to the house, Dad hot and bothered, and we boys sobered and quiet.

Sometime later I realized what the problem was. Our kites never had tails. And, as Mrs. Banks wisely says in Mary Poppins, “A proper kite needs a proper tail, don’t you think?”

In my teenage years I loved to play the piano and the cornet. I loved singing in school and church choirs and participating in high school stage productions. I loved marching band and football games in the fall. I loved being with my friends—I was firmly ensconced in a clique that, looking back, might have been called “the academics.” We weren’t the jocks, we weren’t the hoods, and we weren’t the nerds. We were smart—and we knew it—and we were funny—and we knew it. The class of 1980: unquestionably, irrefutably the best class ever to go through Waynedale High School!

A Changing World

Looking back now, I realize that the world I was growing up in—the world I took for granted as being “normal”—was vastly different from the world Dad grew up in. Dad’s generation had smoked cigarettes. This generation smoked pot. (At least the hoods did—not us academics!) Dad’s generation had crewcuts and pompadours. This generation had long hair—I mean, long hair!

Dad could not stand hippies. One Saturday we boys were watching The Monkees TV show—four young guys in a band that was a knockoff of the Beatles—and they were singing their catchy little theme song. We were having a fine time till Dad walked through the room: “Huh! They look like a bunch of monkeys, with all that hair!”

And on another occasion, we were driving down the road and passed a hippie standing by a large trash dumpster, probably waiting to cross the road. “Why don’t you just jump right on in there, buddy?” Dad asked. The car’s windows were down (no automobile air-conditioning), and I was mortified that the guy might have heard Dad.

Another time we were riding in the car with another family that had daughters. Dad reached into the back seat and tugged on the hair on the back of my head and said, “You need a haircut! You’re starting to look like a girl!”

Those kinds of statements were humiliating enough when spoken in the privacy of our home. But to have them said in front of others, and in front of girls to boot—was extremely embarrassing. And besides, I was just a kid! It’s not like I could drive myself to the barber! Looking back, I really can’t imagine why he would have said something like that except to be at least a little mean to me.

Another time there was a catalog lying on the dining room table. On the back cover it showed a pair of hip-hugger jeans. I was a preteen, not interested yet in clothes or girls. I just happened to be looking at the picture as Dad walked by. “I’ll tell you one thing—we’re not having any of those in this house!” I recall looking up at him and thinking, “What’d I do?”

Anyway, my point is that the world Dad was raising his sons in was vastly different from the world in which he had been raised. But that’s true for most dads. And overall, I’d say Dad made a find job of it.

I think it might have been hard for him to learn to be proud of the son he had, not the son he expected.

I’ve thought back many times on that day in the dorm when Dad put my clothes in the drawer. Never before in my life had he done such a thing. Why was he fussing around? It was so uncharacteristic of him. It was only later, when my children were leaving home, that I realized the pain that was in his heart and the effort it took for him to think of something, something to say or to do—when all he really wanted to do was cry.

A very young Nyle Skaggs and his parents,
Lorena (“Buddy”) and Weston Skaggs

Dad and his Navy company. Dad is third from the right
on the next-to-last row.

Back row: Dad's older brother, Leo; Dad
Front row: Unnamed relative; Dad's dad, Weston Skaggs

Clockwise around the table starting at 7:00:
Dad; his brother Leo; Leo's sons Jerry and Kevin; Mom.
This was taken in 2018; Dad would die later that year.
Mom would die unexpectedly in 2020. Leo passed away in 2021.

From 1974 to 1977, every time we visited Grandpa Skaggs
in West Virginia, Dad would take us to check out the
progress on the construction of the New River Gorge
Bridge, which was near Dad's childhood home. It
was the world's longest single-span arch bridge when
finished, and it cut the time from driving from one side of the
gorge to the other from 45 minutes to 45 seconds!
Left to right: Grandpa Skaggs, me, Dad, my brother Keith, ca. 1975.

Dad and Keith years later, same location.

Dad, Mom, me, Keith, Eric, and Joel (in utero).
Ca. 1975. Goodness, but I was a snappy dresser!

Copyright 2022 Steven N. Skaggs

All family photos courtesy of Eric Skaggs. Check out his excellent family history blog "Stories from Skagend."