Dad

It’s hard to imagine a 13-year-old boy sitting on the sand at Huntington Beach, California feeling stress about anything. But on June 23^rd, 1995, I was that boy. I went into the water to boogie board for a short period of time but I mostly just sat on the beach while I wondered what was going on with my father.

 

My father was always just “dad”. I never grew old enough to call him by his first name and to be honest, I doubt I ever would have.

 

 

 

My dad was the resident tooth-puller of our extended family. It may sound bizarre but that is one of the first things that comes to mind when someone asks me about him. He was extremely intelligent, but always had a connection with children. He had over a dozen nieces and nephews before my brother and I were born so by the time we started to lose our teeth he was a certified expert. Whenever any of my cousins had a loose tooth, they would always come to see “Uncle Eddy”. Sometimes he would turn away business and tell us that the tooth wasn’t ready to come out just yet. He would always joke about tying to string around the door and the other end to your tooth. In actuality, he would tell you he was going to count to three, gently tug on the tooth and by the time he got to “two” he would be holding the tooth in front of your face.

 

Eddy Gene Walker Jr. was born on August 15, 1951 to Eddy Walker and Shirley Walker. As a kid he was the bat boy for his older brother’s baseball team which was coached by his dad. He would help carry equipment and trade baseball cards with the kids on the team. Baseball cards and the sport itself were a passion of my dad’s as evidenced by the nearly quarter-million baseball cards he collected over the course of his life. He was always a trusting person even after one of his “friends” made off with a big chuck of his card collection (that included several 1952 Topps cards that may or may not have contained a Mickey Mantle card that sold for as much as $275,000) when he was a teenager.

 

 

 

Long before the days of student identification cards and school security guards, my dad did something that could never be completed today. In his junior year at Redlands High School, he came to school on yearbook photo day but David Brooks did not. My dad went to have his photo taken then came back later with glasses on and his hair parted to the side and took a photo for David Brooks.

 

 

 

While attending Redlands High School he pitched for the varsity baseball team but he also discovered his other passion was music. The countless concerts he attended during his youth accounted for the severe hearing loss in his right ear and partial hearing loss in his left ear. When I would ride with him in his beige colored Toyota pick-up truck I’d have to speak up and he would regale me with stories of attending the Newport Pop Festival. I remember him telling me that Jimi Hendrix played the first day but was so out of his mind on drugs he played with his back to the audience the entire time. However, on the third and final night of the festival he came back played one of the most amazing sets my dad had ever seen.

 

 

 

It was my dad’s love for music that would lead him to the love of his life. At least once a week he would make a trip to the Wherehouse Records store inside the Redlands Mall. It was there that he met my mother who was working as a clerk. After exchanging several musical recommendations, including my dad suggesting my mom listen to Thijs van Leer, they eventually began to date. While they were dating, my mom was walking past a jewelry store with her sister and she pointed out a pair of earrings she liked. A short time later my dad gave her a necklace matching the earrings she had noticed. My mom called her sister to thank her for telling him, but her sister explained that she had never mentioned it. Within three months my dad proposed and they were married on June 30, 1979.

 

 

 

My parents did not have children right away, as I was born almost three years after their marriage. My dad however was busy preparing and he became a Boy Scout leader. He made 8MM recordings of horror films that he would act out with his Boy Scout troop. Probably not something that’d be in the Boy Scout handbook but something that he and the boys thoroughly enjoyed doing all the same.

 

My dad was a huge fan of Stephen King novels and it helped to explain his dark sense of humor. He loved Halloween and had a few expensive and creepy masks. During one Halloween that I was too young to remember my dad opened the door with a scary mask that made a young girl in a princess costume very scared. My dad tried to take off the mask to show the kid there was nothing to worry about but having trouble with the mask only further frightened the young trick-or-treater.

 

Halloween was probably my dad's favorite holiday but he helped make Christmas amazing each year for my brother Aaron and I. My grandpa would stop by on Christmas Eve and throw small rocks onto the roof while talking in a deep gruff voice to his reindeer. We would come out on Christmas morning to see the presents that Santa had left for us along with the presents from mom and dad. The presents from my parents were always wrapped but the presents from Santa were always left out near the tree and assembled by Santa and his elfs. 

 

As I was growing up, my dad worked for Minolta selling copy machines to help provide us with new toys each birthday and Christmas. He was great at his job because he was great with people. He won numerous sales awards and the most memorable for me was a trip to a fancy Japanese restaurant in Palm Springs along with limousine ride out there.

 

 

 

My dad was a big fan of movies and would take Aaron and I to the movies on a regular basis. I remember the first R-rated movie we were able to see was Speed. His favorite film was One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and his favorite actor was Jack Nicholson When I told him my favorite was Robert DeNiro I remember him saying something along the lines of "performances don't get much better than DeNiro in The Deer Hunter". After watching The Shawshank Redemption with my dad, I made the comment that Morgan Freeman was probably the best black actor I had seen. My dad quickly corrected me and told me that he was just a great actor and it was wrong to use skin color as a qualifier.

 

I loved taking trips to the zoo, especially the San Diego Zoo. I could spend over an hour with my dad walking around the reptile exhibit and of course marveling at the big cats. For a short period of time, our house began to model itself after a zoo with a dog, a cat, a snake, a chameleon, several other reptiles and even a tarantula.

 

 

 

Our house had a large backyard that we would use to play various sports with friends and neighbors. My friend Brooks met both criteria because he lived in a house just behind mine and we would often play together. On that day in late June, I went to the beach with Brooks and his family.

 

Less than 50 miles away at Cedar Sinai Hospital, doctors were preparing my dad for liver transplant surgery. He had been on the donor waiting list for years. It was several months after David Crosby had received his highly-publicized liver transplant and just two weeks after Mickey Mantle received his liver transplant. My dad being a lifelong fan of both music and baseball respected both men for what they did but I believe held some resentment for the fact their liver problems were self-inflicted and seemed to have someone let them past the velvet rope while others on the donor list were left to wait and stare into their beepers. When my dad was younger he worked for Comet Termite and it was his prolonged exposure to pesticides that caused the irreparable damage to his liver.

 

I don’t remember much after the transplant took place except for the overwhelming relief when I found out it was successful. My dad was sent to recover at an outpatient facility in West Hollywood, CA which just happened to coincide with their annual Gay Pride Parade. We would make the nearly two hour trip down to visit him and so did most of his family. During one evening when his brother Bob had come to visit him, they decided to take a walk around the building. They made an observation about how many same sex couples were walking around in the area when my uncle remarked “What do you think they are thinking about us?” and my dad quipped “Do you want to hold hands?” The only other memory I have from his outpatient recovery was when I was half-asleep eating raw bacon from the refrigerator when my mom walked into the kitchen and pulled the slab of bacon out of my hands.

 

After the transplant my dad was his normal jovial self. He received the liver transplant from a Hispanic man who had died in a car accident. When my dad returned home we went out to dinner at a small Mexican restaurant and my dad told us the food tasted better with his new liver. He would also joke that he thought the liver was from a black man because the blues sounded so much better to him.

 

On Nov 6, 1995, my dad was going to take my brother, my cousin Jeff and myself to the Best Buy store in San Bernardino that has recently been opened. We went to Burger King for lunch and my dad told us he wasn’t feeling well and that our trip would have to be postponed. It was later that afternoon that my dad died and it was single most crushing experience of my life.

 

 

 

That was fifteen years ago last month and while it's still painful, his memory brings more smiles than tears these days. Inspired by Roger Ebert's essay My Old Man, I first decided to write this and put the proverbial pen to paper because I know that I'll never see him again but I have these memories along with many more that will shimmer and fade as time passes by. While knowing I won't ever see him again is a harrowing thought, it brings me great joy to know how much he changed my life along with lives of all of his friends and family members for the better.

-Dedicated to my brother Aaron and my mom Ruth