My Father Remembered

January 14, 2012 marked the 110th anniversary of my father's birth. As a tribute to his memory, I wrote the following composition:

Daddy
Admirable fatherhood is an illusive quality for me to describe, especially since joining the ranks of those who hope to attain it. However, I can say that I certainly admired my own father, Roy Weaver Stoner (1902-1984), whom I called Daddy, or Pa, most of my life. He was an unpretentious man, about five feet, seven inches tall, with a ready chuckle and friendly approach to people and life in general.

I never knew my father to draw a paycheck except when carpentering soon after he married, and I wasn’t around in those days. After that he owned his own market business in Pennsylvania, and then farmed in Alabama for fifteen years. That took him to retirement when he did small remodeling and painting jobs and mowed lots for grocery money. But during retirement he mostly enjoyed doing volunteer maintenance in several Christian camps in the South that he and Mother visited over the winters while living in their Airstream travel trailer.

Daddy was a frugal, hard-working man. If he didn’t have the money for something he needed, he waited until he did. The market business in Pennsylvania prospered well enough for him to build a home and eventually purchase two medium-sized farms which he rented out. I am the youngest of four children. My two sisters, Becky and Ruth, married while I was quite young and lived in Lancaster County, PA. When my brother, Bill, was thirteen and I was seven, we moved to South Alabama to help with a home mission project of our church.

Just before we moved, Daddy worked a couple of months building our new house in the piney woods ten miles north of the town of Brewton, AL He had the help of Harold, Ruth’s husband, and a couple of other men. Some years later he sold the farms in Pennsylvania and bought another in Alabama where Bill and Hope lived for a time after marrying.

Daddy taught his children to work well physically. My brother and I always had chores to do before and after school. I would get off the school bus at 3:15, have a snack, and change to old jeans and pull on my high-top work shoes. Then I helped out with what needed doing around the farm until chore time. Chores lasted until dark: feeding the twelve hundred laying hens, or five thousand broilers, and tending the cows. Before breakfast and school I had fewer chores, usually to milk the cow or do part of the chicken feeding. During the summer months the work increased with garden and field tasks. It was a matter of sharing what had to be done. Daddy did his part, and my brother and I learned to do ours. We thought that such chores were required of all kids our age!

Daddy trusted us early on. For instance, he taught me when I was still a mere lad, how to operate the tractor and pickup safely, though not out on the highway. The result was that years before I was old enough to get a driver’s license, I had driven various vehicles regularly on back roads. He also showed me how to handle firearms safely, beginning with a Benjamin air rifle and moving up to a pump action .22 rifle, and finally how to shoot the sixteen gauge shotgun that kicked hard and left black and blue bruises on my shoulder at the beginning of hunting season each fall.

My father was well respected in the community as an honest farmer and businessman. He was friendly to everyone, even to the unfortunate who happened along occasionally. One evening a fellow who had had a few too many drinks chugged into our lane in his old car and just sat there. Mack, our dog, made such a fuss that no one in his right mind, and certainly not a person under the influence, would venture to get out of his car. Finally, Daddy went out to see what the ruckus was about and stayed so long talking to Jack that we began to wonder what had happened, and if Pa was still safe. Daddy didn’t seem upset or unduly concerned, apparently thinking it best to humor Jack a bit before suggesting that he crank up his car and drive home slowly. Back then there wasn’t as much concern for drunken drivers on the road, and Jack did find his way home eventually.

A man lived about five miles away who really appreciated “Brother Stoner” and his fine Christian testimony. One day when chatting with Daddy, he said he wanted my father to preach his funeral sermon. Well, Daddy could give a good Sunday school lesson, but he didn’t consider himself a preacher like Bro. Hollinger or other respected country preachers in those parts. Daddy told us about his friend’s desire, adding with a chuckle, that it might be easier if the man outlived him! They were both in apparent good health at the time, and I don’t know which one went first since we moved away from the area before any such arrangements became necessary.

Daddy hired a couple of local fellows periodically to help out on the farm, especially when his sons were off at boarding school. He loaned one fellow money to buy his first car, a used 1951 Ford sedan, allowing the young man to pay off the loan by working for him for several months. During one of our visits back to Pennsylvania, he left Ray in charge of the farm and sent him a paycheck through the mail. Ray never received the check, so Daddy wrote him another when we returned home.

The rest of the story is that some twelve years later, the local post office discovered Daddy’s undelivered letter containing the check, and tried to deliver it to Ray, who in the interval had passed away! By this time my parents had moved back to Pennsylvania. The local newspaper, The Brewton Standard, picked up the story and printed a photo copy of the outdated check with an article about it. Under the photo was a fitting caption describing how the Post Office had indeed kept the promise to always deliver the mail, though in this case it had taken much longer than anticipated!

Our family became part of a new church plant ten miles up the road. The hopeful group met for several months in a church building owned by another denomination until we could construct our own facility in the Range community. The Stoner family was in on this building project from the beginning, Daddy as chief builder and block layer, and Mother and I helping too. I think Bill was off at boarding school during those days. We used our own electric-powered cement mixer which I became skillful operating when the men poured the sanctuary floor: sixteen shovels full of sand, four of gravel, and two or three from the cement bag, the correct mixture for each wheelbarrow load, along with just the right amount of water from the hose.

I was going on eleven and proud to be part of the building project that my father was directing. Shortly after its completion, Grace Fellowship Church was the scene of my own spiritual conversion in 1955, but that’s another story. The building still stands, passed on twenty years later to another church group.

My parents gave me the same opportunity they’d given to my brother, to go away for my last two years of high school to a Christian school in another state. All went well until spring semester during my junior year when a letter arrived, telling of a fire back on the farm, caused by a faulty gas brooder in one of the broiler houses. Within an hour, two sizeable chicken houses, the barn, and Daddy’s newly constructed custom butcher shop were completely destroyed.

This event definitely changed the future course of the family. My brother decided to get a job in town. I finished high school in North Carolina and went on to college in Birmingham, going home for only part of each vacation period. Daddy and Mother soon realized that their sons’ futures were probably not in the poultry and butchering business, even if they could rebuild. There had been no fire insurance. My parents took a write-off on their income tax that year, farmed a couple of more years, and moved back to Pennsylvania for retirement.

Obviously, the fire was a difficult experience for all of us, but Daddy somehow found the grace to sum up his own reaction in the words of Job: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” With that spiritually mature attitude, Daddy positively influenced my own faith journey probably as much as the sum of all our church activities and regular Bible reading before meals during all those years on the farm.

Years later Daddy sat down one Friday evening after a work day at a camp in Florida and wrote a letter to each of his four children. The next morning the Lord took him home to heaven through a boating accident. He was eighty-two. He used to say that everyone had to die of something, and for him it was very sudden and unexpected. I greatly cherish my memories of Daddy, and thank God for his legacy. Certainly he was a remarkable man and an outstanding father.

Thanks, Dad! (On the occasion of Dad’s 68th birthday, January 14, 1970)

Thanks, Dad, for being persistent. Many times I didn’t like chores and work, but where would I be today if I’d not learned the satisfaction of a job well done?
Thanks, Dad, for being patient. It would have been easier and safer to do it yourself, but you allowed me to learn to drive on the back road to the farm.
Thanks, Dad, for being so practical. When things needed fixing or building, I learned that resourcefulness is the key to satisfying accomplishment.
Thanks, Dad, for your sense of humor, not often expressed in flagrant laughter, but in life’s quiet and constant paradoxes, comments revealing balanced insight.
Thanks, Dad, for your faith. Spiritual values are caught as well as taught. I learned that churches need preachers and also others, to teach, to build, and to mow the grass.
Dad, these are a few of the things that are impressed on my memory, qualities God allowed you to model, to make my life a richer experience.

Your son, Charles