King of the house

Colbert I. King:

By the standards of today's popular culture, my father would have been labeled a poor catch. He was a high school dropout, worked as a laborer a good deal of his life, often two jobs at a time, and retired from the government as a supervisor. Definitely "a less attractive marriage prospect," according to today's stilted communal values.

It's true Isaiah King never gave his three kids an allowance or took the family on vacations. He didn't even own a car. And he didn't have the kind of jobs that made it easy to take time off to attend a kid's high school drill competition or football games. But failure? No way.

My father was simply the best.

With the exception of a one-week hospital stay in the 1940s due to a job-related injury, a brief visit to his birthplace in New Bedford, Mass., and short trips to my sister's home in Gary, Ind., to Newburgh, N.Y., where my brother was stationed in the Air Force, and to Bonn when I was overseas with the State Department, my father spent nearly every night at home with Amelia, his wife of 53 years.

His only other absences? For cancer surgery in the '80s, and two nights in a local hospice before he died in 1990.

Failure? Isaiah King was a living example of what responsible fatherhood was all about.

My dad's life refuted the notion that wealth, academic degrees or social status have anything to do with being a good father. His lasting achievement was to show, through example, that the most vital and irreplaceable condition for being a good father is simply being there.

...

When so many sperm donors refuse to take responsibility it is good to remind ourselves what fatherhood is all about. My father came from a poor rural family in Alabama, but he was the first in the family to graduate from high school and he finished as Salutatorian. He went on to work his way through college during the great depression and graduated with honors. His only outside assistance was the money his mother sent him from selling home made soap. He is 93 now and has lost some of his motor skills and his situational awareness is deteriating, but when he snaps in on an issue his mind is surprisingly keen. He still has the framed letter from Lyndon Johnson responding to one he wrote when I was wounded in Vietnam. There are also clippings of then Gov. Clinton kissing my Mom after her Kindergarten's float won first prize in a local parade.