Some Bittersweet Memories of Life With Father : Life in the Rotary

Father. Fathers loved and fathers feared, close fathers and distant fathers, famous fathers and “ordinary” fathers. No matter what the relationship, he’s special. In the remembrances that follow, Times writers tell something of what that relationship has meant.

The recent flaps about admitting women to Rotary and discrimination in clubs takes me back to a small, all-white town in Michigan in the mid-1950s where my father was a Rotarian.

My father didn’t choose to eat lunch every Wednesday with what constituted most of the influential men of the town. His idea of a fun lunch was to dash home, make a quick sandwich and practice a Beethoven sonata on the piano for half an hour before returning to his one-man optometric office.

He did not dislike the club or the men. It just wasn’t his thing. From one Rotary lunch, he brought home sheet music for a dreadful song called “Rotary My Rotary” and played it for me. We tried to sing it, sitting there together on the piano bench, but we were laughing too hard to gasp out the words.

His genuine social life was in music. It was with some difficulty that he found friends in our town who liked to spend frequent evenings listening to opera records or going to Detroit for concerts. Probably none of this group joined clubs like Rotary. They were in the main unconventional.

One of these friends was a Chinese psychiatrist, I’ll call him Dr. Wang, who was on the staff of the state mental hospital a mile outside town. How what came about happened, I don’t remember--I think it was that Dr. Wang wanted to meet some of the local doctors. He would go to a Rotary lunch as my father’s guest.

Risky Undertaking

As odd as it seems today, to sponsor a non-white man at the Rotary was a risky undertaking in that time and place. My father could offend some of the professional and business men of the town (he would never learn how many, the “gentlemen’s agreement” being, for the most part, tacit). Or he could make some excuse to Dr. Wang. He didn’t say much about it. He never saw this sort of situation as a dilemma.

Dr. Wang was probably the most educated and cultivated man in the church hall when Rotary members introduced their guests that Wednesday noon. But there were a few members there, my father said that evening, who let him know that what they had seen was a yellow-skinned man and they would rather not see him again. Whether Dr. Wang made other attempts to seek acquaintances in the town, I don’t know. Over the years, he and his wife were often on my parents’ guest list for small musical evenings and larger parties.

My father liked to talk to us kids about many things--about music, about the stock market, about the world events of his life, the Depression and the War. What I don’t recall are sermons, even short ones. Yet he taught us every day how to live.