MY FATHER

My Father…

I will make an attempt to talk of my Dad so that the family can get a feel for who he was, and what he meant to me.

Robert Joseph Francis was born on April 22, 1910 in O’Conner hospital, San Jose, California. (I was also born in the same hospital) I don’t seem to remember anything of his Father. My grand mother died of complications of childbirth, bringing my fathers brother Urban into this world…so I didn’t have the opportunity of meeting her. My Grandfather was a barber by trade and died in Santa Cruz.

My Father attended Catholic schools in San Jose and undoubtedly was very involved in
the Catholic Church. He was a member of the Knights of Columbus which was a Catholic fraternal organization for men. After leaving high school my father tried enlisting in the Navy but they told him that he was too skinny and that he should go
home and live on milk shakes to try and fatten up. I guess that he met my Mother before he could chunk up and go back and try again.

I never heard where my parents met but they got married June 26, 1930. My brother Bob was born December 10, 1935 and I would imagine that brought a little bit of a conflict into my Dad’s life because the Catholic Church would have denied a baptism for Bob because his Mother wasn’t Catholic. I’m guessing that it probably caused him to leave his church. I never had a chance to talk with him about it and from time to time he would make a few jokes about the church that he probably picked up at his high school.

After I was born, WWII broke out he found himself married with 2 boys so he moved us to Oakland and went to work on the ship yards as a pipe fitter in near by Mare Island.
My brother Ron was born in Oakland 0n January 28, 1942.

When the war ended we moved back to San Jose where they bought a house on Wabash avenue across street from Lincoln High School’s football field…I remember hopping the chain length fence many time to stand on the sidelines and watch Lincoln’s games.

I attended Luther Burbank elementary school a block and a half away, on the same street.

I have many good memories of the times that we had living there. My father was working at the Cadillac dealership as a body and fender man. Every Saturday he would give us a quarter and we would spend the entire afternoon at the “Hester Theater” which was quite a walk away from our house. It cost 10 cents to get in and so we’d have 15 cents for candy. The afternoon would be spent watching a bunch of cartoons, (The ones with Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner Brothers characters were the best.)
Then they would show a serial or two…Superman or the Green Hornet…Flash Gordon, or the lone Ranger then there would be a few western movies.

My father loved working with people so he decided to start an insurance agency in Santa Cruz. My mother took a job to help out while he got it off the ground..she worked at Lass Molded Fibre making things out of paper mache. (Like snowmen or Santa’s)

We had a 2 story house on the corner of Broadway and Pine streets. It wasn’t a huge house but felt like it to a 10 year old. It had a garage in the back and a big lawn around the house with 2 large pine trees, one on each side of the walk way to our front porch.

Next to the garage my Dad and Brother Bob built a green house where my brother raised
Black Orchids to sell to flower shops.

About 6 blocks east of our house was Gault Elementary School on Seabright Street, that I went to starting as a fifth grader. Going north on Seabright there was a roller rink and the Rio Theater that allowed me and my brother Ron to keep up with our Saturday movie routine.

My father worked pretty hard at making the agency go but I think times must have been difficult because the pressures were hard for him….we only lived there for 3 years and in that time my Dad got stomach ulcers resulting in them cutting out ¾ of his stomach..he then had a mild stroke. The doctors told him that he had to change his profession to something less stressful. Work was hard to come by in the little town of Santa Cruz so he took a job in San Francisco at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard as a welder. We sold our house and moved to SF late in 1953. My dad hated not working with people so he went into sales for a large printing company. My Mother went to work for her sister Elizabeth who had the largest court reporting business in SF as a typist.

I think that the pressure was still hard for my father..he got a whiplash in an auto accident and a week later he had the stroke that killed him.

I remember my Father as a very loving man with a ready smile a great sense humor…my Father wasn’t like my uncles that I grew up with, they were all involved in hunting and he never went with them as I remember. They also enjoyed playing poker and I don’t remember my Dad being a gambler.

I was having lunch one day with my cousin Kenny and I mentioned to him that I always wondered how my Dad fit in with his Dad and my other uncles. He said that they all seemed to be good friends and he remembers his Dad telling him that my Father was a good body and fender man that was excellent at doing the pinstriping on vehicles that he had repaired. He also remembered his Dad telling him many times that my Dad had the best sense of humor of anyone that he’d ever known.

I need to mention the love that my Father had for cooking…the weekends were the time for my Dad to take over the kitchen. My Aunt Elizabeth and her husband Al owned a restaurant in Lake Tahoe…when they sold it they gave us the huge griddle from it. Every Saturday was “Hamburger day” …Whoa, did I love that!!! We would cut up french fries and cook them in our REAL deep fat fryer, and cook up GREAT hamburgers!! So you see I come to this LOVE of hamburgers quite naturally.My Dad would start Sunday’s big meal on Saturday…if we were having Italian…he’ cook the marinade sauce all day and night over a very low flame, getting up during the night to stir and adjust the ingredients to make the best sauce on the planet. We would wake up Sunday morning to the most delightful smells as there would be on our griddle the following…bacon, ham and sometime sausage, hash browns, pancakes and eggs.Around 3 o’clock in the afternoon we’d all sit down to a FEAST!! Man that Man could cook! Jack Alan seems to come by his love for cooking quite naturally.

I miss my Father and think of him often…it’s sad that I didn’t get to associate with him as an adult…we’d of had a GREAT time together.