Happy Father's Day, Robert Doyel: author, judge, destroyer of segregated baseball league
WINTER HAVEN, Fla. – My dad has never been afraid to fight. You know how some people grow up the youngest kid in the house and they get hardened – they learn to fight – that way? Not so for my dad, the youngest of 10 in Shawnee, Okla. He was loved on by his older brothers and siblings, “spoiled” as much as an impoverished family can spoil a kid. With love, they spoiled him.
But the neighborhood was tough, because those were some lean years after World War II – my dad, a Baby Boomer, was born 10 days before America dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945 – and because Shawnee had railroad tracks and my dad grew up on the wrong side. No electricity for most of his childhood, no water or gas, eating cheese and a Spam-like canned meat product only because his Mama stood in line every week at the government distribution center.
Kids teased my dad about his hand-me-down clothes, and my dad wasn’t having it. He was a little guy, this bantam rooster of a boy who grew to be 5-8 and barrel-chested, but he had quick hands and his older brothers taught him: If you have to fight, hit first. When it was necessary, Dad would pop that left jab once, twice, three times – pow-pow-pow – and the fight was over.
His older brother Marvin told me about the man with the tamale cart.
An elderly man with a pull-cart, a humble man just trying to get by, made his living by selling tamales around town. Some kids in Shawnee teased him because they could, because he was never going to fight back. One day an older kid was teasing the man with the tamale cart, and it was cruel, and my dad stepped into the middle of it, stopped it, and told the older kid to apologize.
The older kid’s response was to square up on my dad. You know my dad’s response.
Pow-pow-pow.
The older kid never again teased the man with the tamale cart.
From 2017: The Christmas that Gregg Doyel learned the truth about his Grandma
That’s my dad, the strongest, bravest person I’ve ever known. He hasn’t thrown a punch in decades, hasn’t had to, but time slows for nobody. Sometimes a car doesn’t slow for you, either, just runs you over, right there in a crosswalk in Central Florida.
Time keeps going, and one day your heart starts to give out. Then a stroke. Then another.
Not sure which time he went to the hospital over these last 15 years – wasn’t the first or second or third; maybe the seventh or eighth or ninth? – but at some point I’m sitting in the room with my dad, tethered to those hospital machines, struggling to walk across the floor but refusing to quit, when I saw the depth of his strength, his courage, and realized something.
Robert Doyel is still unafraid to fight.
Author, judge, destroyer of segregated baseball league
You didn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit with my dad, not if you expected to win anyway. Zero chance of that.
You didn’t want to play tile rummy either, a card-like game where players draw tiles numbered 1-13 and lay them on the table in groupings of three or more – four 11’s, for example, or an 8-9-10 run in any particular suit. The goal was to play every tile in your hand. First person to run out of tiles, wins.
Over the course of a game, as the table fills with all those groupings of three or more, players use the tiles on the table in combination with the tiles in their hand. After a while, when the game started dragging, my dad would decide it was time to end it and start using what was on the table to play the tiles in his hand. His final turn would take several minutes, but by the time he was done the table had been completely rearranged – one of those four 11’s would now be on the end of an 8-9-10 run, for example – and you’d just shake your head at the brain that could deconstruct a table with 50 or more tiles and put them back together in a completely new way, one that allowed him to play the final three or four tiles in his hand and declare the game over.
In other words, my dad’s brilliant. Not just smart, OK? Brilliant. Studied French in college for a few years until his father-in-law suggested a career where he could make more money, so Dad switched to accounting, where – for him – a calculator was optional. Then he went to law school, was managing editor of the Oklahoma Law Review, got a job in a firm in Norman, Okla., then taught law school at Ole Miss, where he shut down the town’s segregated youth baseball league in 1979.
My dad turned down offers in politics and the chance to be dean at the Oklahoma City University School of Law, later went into private practice in Florida, then ran for judge in Central Florida. Won that election, and another, then retired.
Dad was the first person in his family to go to college – he can still read French, by the way – because his older siblings insisted, his Mama insisted, and his guidance counselor at Shawnee High insisted. Five decades later, after grinding through life the only way he’s ever known how, by giving his best every single day, Dad retired in 2010, finally ready to relax in his mid-60s. Well, ready to relax his way. He wrote a book about his experiences in family law. Title: “The Baby Mama Syndrome.” My dad’s irreverent.
Dad also wrote a mystery novel. Dictated it, actually, and had someone type it up for him later. Imagine coming up with a story so big it requires 350 pages, all those plot twists and everything, and keeping it in your head.
That was my dad in “retirement,” writing books and running for office twice in Polk County at the urging of local and state Democratic Party leaders – a futile effort in one of the reddest parts of his red state, but my dad never was afraid to fight. Some battles can’t be won, though, I don’t care who you are.
Car vs. pedestrian, for example. My dad didn’t have a chance.
He had been retired for just a few months.
All that pain, zero pain medication
Not sure how many bones he broke.
Doctors didn’t know in real time, because there were fractures all over his body and they missed some at first, but fortunately his skull was intact. Dad had been walking in a crosswalk on a busy road when a car hit the intersection fast and turned right fast and slammed into my dad, popping him high into the air, where he hit one of the car’s rearview mirrors before hitting the road below.
Dad was discharged after a few weeks, and started noticing aches in others parts of his body. Doctors found one broken bone, then another, then ordered a full-body scan – and discovered a handful of additional fractures from the car crash.
That’s where his retirement took a wrong turn, in that crosswalk months after he removed his judicial robe, and it’s just been hard ever since. Hard for my dad, sure, and for his wife, Chelle, and not because she’s become a full-time caregiver over the years, though she has. She doesn’t complain about that at all – she loves him – but it hurts her to see him in pain. Hurts me to hear about it, all these hours to the north, but my dad just put his head down and kept grinding. He was living his life with as much joy as he could muster, teasing Chelle or friends or servers and telling those impromptu dad jokes of his.
Then his vertebrae started collapsing. Compression fractures, they call those, and Dad suffered a handful, leaving him struggling for years to get comfortable around the house.
In one of those ironies, my dad cannot take narcotic pain medications like Vicodin. He’s allergic, if that’s what you call a reaction that leaves you with terrifying hallucinations, unaware that the killer demon approaching your hospital bed with a knife is actually your nurse with medication or your wife with lunch.
When I was about 12 and we were playing catch in front of our house in Oxford, Miss., I threw him a pop fly that drifted toward a tree. The ball clipped a branch on the way down and changed directions, finding a new path into his forehead. Split him open. Stitches. No pain medication then, or in the days afterward. He didn’t complain.
We were playing catch the next day.
'Giving up isn’t in my DNA'
After the car cash, after the vertebral compression fractures, Dad healed up enough to run for office again – Sisyphus pushing his blue boulder up a red hill. He served on a local LGBTQ board. He blogged on Facebook. He helped the local Democratic Party plot strategies. He went to Hardee’s for buttered biscuits.
Then came the heart attack.
After the attack Dad had a procedure on his heart and suffered a stroke during recovery. He woke to double vision and aphasia. A cruel thing, aphasia, leaving my dad unable to form even the smallest words in his enormous vocabulary. At first it was a missing word or two from nearly every sentence. Even now, when a number comes out of his mouth, you’d better double-check. He tends to say a number two digits higher than he means. The clocks says 7? Dad will announce it's 9, then start giggling.
“It’s not 9!” he’ll blurt, correcting himself, sounding almost tickled by his mistake. “That’s my stroke talking.”
Smartest person I’ve ever known, and there are still moments when he’ll trail off in the middle of a sentence, searching for a word he can’t find – then forgetting what he was trying to say anyway.
“That’s my stroke,” he’ll say, and sometimes he’ll chuckle. But not always.
He’s aware of his limitations, and at times it leaves him angry or frustrated, especially the way all those ailments have worked in conjunction. The collapsing back bones left him in a recliner, the only place he could stand the pain – no serious pain medications, remember – just eating and sleeping and watching TV there. He was reading when he can, but have you ever tried reading with double vision? It’s exhausting, especially after reading one of his son’s loooong sports columns in the IndyStar he gets in the mail. Then he’ll sleep some more.
After the heart attack and strokes – he’s suffered several smaller ones, after the big one following heart surgery – Dad was laid up in a hospital and then a rehab center. Weeks became months, with occasional returns home, just long enough in his weakened state to fall and bruise or break something else and head back to the hospital. Then the rehab facility. It was a vicious cycle and atrophy set in, a process started by the collapsing vertebrae and recliner, and exacerbated by the heart/stroke issues and hospital stays.
“Giving up isn’t in my DNA,” says my dad, who had to relearn how to walk, something he does now with a walker. He goes to a personal trainer twice a week and occupational or physical therapy two other times a week, though he can’t remember the word “occupational.”
“Not physical therapy – the other kind,” he’ll tell me about his day, sometimes with a giggle, trying to remember the things he’s forgotten, knowing some of it might be gone forever. Maybe not.
Either way, I’m not challenging him to a game of Trivial Pursuit. He’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know, but 14 years into his cruel retirement he hasn’t forgotten how to smile or giggle. Superhuman, the strength of my dad, and he'll wake up on this Father's Day the way he wakes every day, throwing those jabs, pow-pow-pow, fighting to live his best life.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Happy Father's Day to the bravest, strongest dad I know -- mine
