Road Apples
June 15, 2009


The frugal father

By Tim Sanders

Father’s Day is almost here. My dad died in December 1988, and I think about him a lot, these days. You could never sum up Lloyd Sanders in a single column, or even in a novel. Herman Melville would have given himself a hernia just lifting the manuscript.

Dad was a Baptist minister. He was also an engineer, an auto mechanic, an electrician, a carpenter, a plumber, an avid hunter and fisherman, a gunsmith, a motorcyclist, a snowmobiler, a gardener, a beekeeper, and a machinist troubleshooter for Allied Chemical. Not necessarily in that order. Dad had his own way of doing things. He cared not a whit for appearances, and very little for public opinion. Those traits often made both Mom and several of his deacons a little uneasy. Dad was interested in practicality. Like many of his generation who’d survived the Great Depression, he was both self-sufficient and frugal. Really frugal.

Which, when I was a kid, drove me nuts. Sometimes I felt that my dad’s main purpose in life was to embarrass me.

Dad loved bargains. He bought clothes at the Goodwill store. He also discovered the Hush Puppies factory outlet in Rockford, Michigan, which sold seconds at half price. I was stuck wearing dorky-looking Hush Puppies (usually the lace-up kind with too many holes on one side) for longer than I care to remember. His feelings about replacing my Hush Puppies with something a bit more fashionable were: “Why, look, there’s plenty of wear left in these shoes!” The fact that not even Lawrence Welk would have been caught dead in green Hush Puppies like mine never occurred to him. If the soles were good and the shoes weren’t too small, they’d do just fine.

Dad was a junk magnet. He’d often pull the car to the side of the road to retrieve some treasure. “That’ll come in handy some day,” he’d say. In response, Mom would sigh and I’d just shake my head. He could spot even the smallest bolts and safety pins and iron molecules along the roadside because a) he had excellent vision, and b) he seldom drove over 45 mph. His beloved Studebaker got better gas mileage that way, and in those days gasoline had already skyrocketed to 19 cents a gallon. Our garage was always filled to the rafters with the paraphernalia he’d amassed; everything but automobiles, which wouldn’t fit.

At some point Dad stumbled upon an excellent bargain in paint. He got lots of it. About twenty gallons, I believe. Mom had been dropping broad hints about repainting the screen door on the front of the parsonage, so Dad painted it. He also painted his homemade utility trailer which he used to haul his beekeeping supplies, and his wooden fishing boat. He had several gallons left over, which, because it was good quality, oil-based paint, he kept for decades. The fact that the paint was pink was of no significance to him. Pink screen doors worked as well as any other color when it came to keeping flies out of the house, and honeybees had no prejudices when it came to pink trailers, although had Dad tried to repaint their hives, I think there’d have been trouble. And while I always prayed that no one we knew would see us trolling for brown trout out on Deep Lake in that very unmanly pink boat, Dad dismissed it all as foolishness. He firmly believed that trout were color blind, so it made no difference to them.

When deer season rolled around, we usually spent some time, along with two or three of Dad’s hunting buddies, at our cabin in northern Michigan. Even with a fire in the fireplace, sometimes the cabin got very chilly at night. To keep his bald spot warm, Dad wore one of Mom’s old nylon stockings, with a little knot on top, pulled down to his ears. Seeing Dad wandering around the cabin in his thermal underwear and that stupid nylon skullcap with the seam running down his forehead always made me cringe. To me he looked like an escapee from a mental institution about to rob a convenience store. To him, of course, appearances meant nothing. It worked, and that was that.

I was on the high school tennis team. I had a very accurate first serve, which often traveled at speeds in excess of 10 mph. Dad had played some tennis while at Purdue, and he still had his old Wright & Ditson racket. It was one of the early flat-top models with a grooved wooden grip. It had been originally strung (probably sometime around 1900) with what they called catgut, which was actually made from sheep intestines, due to the difficulty of herding enough cats for that purpose. At any rate, Dad decided that since our church was sending its teenagers to a summer camp for two weeks, and since he would spend a few days there as a chaperone, he would re-string his old racket and play some tennis with his son. So, operating under the old Sanders philosophy of never paying anyone to do what you could do yourself, Dad took his racket, some new nylon string, and an anvil with him to church camp. One afternoon he painstakingly re-strung that old racket, and then attached it to a sturdy tree limb outside the campground cottage. The anvil was suspended from the end of the nylon string. In the morning the anvil had done its job, and the strings were as tight as a drum. So tight, in fact, that the racket’s head now set atop the shaft at a very unattractive angle. Dad was proud of how tightly he’d strung his tilted racket, ignoring the thing’s appearance. We played most of a set, but whenever Dad managed to hit the ball it seemed to travel with much more elevation and velocity than normal, and since there was only an eight-foot fence around the tennis court, I spent most of my time in the surrounding woods, retrieving lobs he’d launched into the stratosphere.

Dad was a Renaissance man, and like other Renaissance men, he wore many hats. (To his credit, he never wore more than three at a time, and then only to keep the frost off his bald spot.)

Those green Hush Puppies and pink fishing boats no longer embarrass me. In fact, I still have Dad’s warped old tennis racket stored in the closet. It’ll probably come in handy some day.