Celebrating Edmund Gates, Jr. on the 100th Marking of His Birth

                   June 15, 2019 marks the 100^th year since the birth of my father, Edmund Gates, Jr. For about a year, I have been anticipating this posting date of June 9, 2019, because it is the one before Dad’s 100^th birthday. 72 hours before the blog posting should be published, I had only the title.

Edmund Gates, Jr. at his 88th Birthday Celebration

                Then Thursday’s events help me know what to write for this special week. I fed our beloved neighbors’ pets and then checked the cattle. I never check cattle early in the day, but I had to verify that one of our heifers had calved. I was sure I had seen her with a tiny white calf but had no camera to capture what I thought my eyes had seen.

                Sure enough, that dandy little heifer had a snowy white bull calf. As the morning progressed, I began to develop concern for it and decided to check again. The spunky, white baby bull leaped and ran baaing for its mother. As I drove back, I foolishly took a route that I hadn’t taken in two months due to the rain. Of course, I got stuck. I headed back to the house. At my mother’s urging, I called Vonda and Greg Goad. Within minutes, they arrived. Greg positioned their pickup, hooked up the chain and gave Vonda directions in their truck as I steered the wheel of Dad’s old truck. In no time, he engineered the removal of the old pickup from the slippery mud.

                As I thanked them, waved and walked into the house to update Mother on the successful pull- out, I thought Dad would say, “All my life, we neighbored with  the Goads.” In the Bend, neighbor is often used as a verb meaning “to help the person living near you with whatever that person needs.”

                Dad thrived on that way of living. A man told me that he had a flat tire near the farm and although he didn’t know him, Dad, in his late 80s, offered help. The writer of Hebrews extolled that way for living in chapter 13 verse 16:

Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

                As we have anticipated the 100^th year since Dad’s birth, Mother mentioned one of her favorite characterizations of him remains, Man of Steel; Man of Velvet. She heard the phrase first in a sermon by Jon Ogle.

                Dad never backed down from any task. He learned that when Grandpa, Edmund Gates, Sr., put Dad on the other end of a crosscut saw to curtail sloughing off when he was an upper elementary student at Woodland School in the Bend. I assisted as he dug out a sewer line with a shovel and 101 other unsavory tasks. As a man of steel, he successfully completed 25 missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. Yet his dentist and friend, Dr. Gary Henderson, said Dad never told of being awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

                The man of steel, man of velvet was illustrated as Dad promised his mother to keep his baby brother, Jim, safe at the Arkansas River. He positioned little Jimmy in a puddle so he could splash the water but sternly told him, “If you move from here, you will never come back to the river with us.” Little Jimmy obeyed. The man of steel took his sister, Martha, on horseback to her eighth-grade graduation in 1938 in a flooded deluge of rain. His velvet side sympathized with her having to endure horrible weather in her pretty dress. My only surviving aunt, Julia Irene Gates Newland, recalled the decorated World War II airman being the only sibling inquiring what was wrong with his little sister. When he found out she was suffering from a toothache, Aunt Julia assured me that Dad found something that relieved her pain.

                Dad became a man of steel for Mother when he agreed she would never have to do field work again. He planted, tended, and harvested the garden for her. Then she took the produce and did all processing, canning and freezing. Angie and I were enlisted to help both parents.

                Mother and Dad discussed most aspects of their farming operation and maintenance of it. Yet the heavy work fell to Dad and that was how he wanted it to be. That sensitivity to Mother revealed the man of velvet.

                As a parent to Angie and me, Dad supported and loved us unconditionally. He was the first to say, “It’s only spilt milk” indicating mistakes were no big deal. That was the velvet side. We both knew some issues were non-negotiable. The man of steel conveyed without words, Don’t go there.

                As I navigated the worry of the new little calf, the impending rain, and the stuck pickup, I prayed to not complain. That prayer came from my lips or appeared in my mind many, many times that day. Thankfully, I entered the house without murmuring about the stuck pickup. I enumerated the many reasons for gratitude. Maybe that has been one of my greatest ways to honor the man who never complained, no matter how tough the road became, even as he dealt with complications of two strokes.
               Being strong but sensitive, not complaining, and neighboring with whomever God brings across our path can carry on the legacy of the man who would have marked a century on June 15, 2019.