Looking up my past

 My father loved his bosses at Levi’s, especially Peter Hass.  I know he had disagreements, and he could be vocal about them, but basically, they gave him everything they could.  He ended up a senior vice president of Operations, and I think he never could have been president.  They wanted someone with a business degree, good parentage, and someone familiar to their class.  My father was uneducated, no BA or MA, and he was working class through and through.  But also, he had a wife who had no education, and she had never worked after she married my dad.  But more importantly, she was a drunk, due to whatever reasons, the cancer, the life she had to put up with.  And there was my brother.  Eventually he sobered up, but he never held a job when was sober, he pretended he had businesses and interests.  So maybe it was my brother’s, my mother’s and my mixed heritage than made it hopeless for him to get that far.

We weren’t the family he needed to succeed.  Now, I’ll never know, because there was no way to tell for sure, but it is true that he quit Levi’s at 55 and thank God he did.  He died at 65, so if he hadn’t, he would have no life of retirement, and he did enjoy those ten years, with golfing, travel, and the kids.  When we returned to California after my mother died, we thought we’d have so much time, but we didn’t.  He died seven weeks after his surgery.  So here we were, back again, but without any family.  The loss of my parents was great, and they were only 61 and 65.  But all the tension and distress had taken a lot out of them.  And I took years to recover.

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