Readers Remember the Best Things That Their Fathers Gave to Them

The pages of the tattered black scrapbook have become so brittle by now that bits of their crinkled edges fall away when touched. After almost 40 years, Sandra Huestis Boyer doesn’t really need to open it because she remembers every word and picture inside. But just knowing it’s there on the bookshelf in her Garden Grove living room makes her feel loved.

When we asked Family Life readers to commemorate Father’s Day this year by telling us about the most important gifts--and lessons--their fathers had given them, most of those who responded pointed to intangibles such as love, confidence and understanding.

But Boyer’s gift is different, something she can hold, albeit carefully. Her father, Chester Ellsworth Huestis, was older than her mother, had heart disease and, she says, “knew he probably wouldn’t live to see me grow up.”

So, when she was just 3, he began the scrapbook; the date August 26, 1949 is inscribed inside the worn front cover. As his daughter grew and his condition deteriorated, he filled the book’s pages with poems and pictures, using his own words and his favorite words of others to record a philosophy of life that she was much too young to understand.

One of her favorites is a clipping of a poem called “The Bear and the Butterfly,” with an addendum by her father.

The bear and the butterfly had a fight,

All of the day and most of the night.

Till at last the bear lay waving his paws

And the butterfly lit on one of his jaws.

Oh, never struggle and never fight

With a butterfly on a moonlit night.

Below it, her father wrote:

“The fight is over, and you can plainly see, the butterfly won by strategy. If something should happen that makes you mad enough to cry, use your head, like the butterfly.”

When she was old enough to understand it, her mother gave her the book. “I would get it out whenever I was in trouble, or frightened, or just to share with a special friend. It made me feel like I could do anything.”

Becky Douglass, 12, of Laguna Niguel shops for two Father’s Day gifts each year, one for her natural father and one for her stepfather. But it was her stepfather, St. John Bannon, who taught her the lesson she found most important.

“When I first knew that I was having a stepdad, I felt sort of left out,” she says. “I thought he was taking my mother away from me.”

Becky was 4 then, and “I was really mean to him. I wouldn’t listen, I ignored him and just stayed away from him. I didn’t realize how nice he was trying to be to me. I just blocked it all out of my mind.”

She also was afraid that acting otherwise would have been disloyal to her natural father.

“But he just put up with it,” she says. “He just felt hurt.” Finally, Becky says, she realized what he was trying to show her.

“There is enough love in me to love both of my dads equally,” she says. “And that is the greatest lesson of all. I am so grateful I have two dads that love me, and I have two dads to love.”

Heidi Scott of Anaheim paid tribute to her father, who in spite of a harried life, taught her to “take time to smell the flowers along the way.”

“The flowers he has smelled with me . . . comprise a full bouquet,” she writes. “Saying prayers as he tucked me into bed at night, giving piggyback rides, teaching me by example how to raft in the ocean, introducing me to the thrill of hiking in the forest, taking Saturday morning bike rides and free financial advice.”

“The most important lesson my father taught me,” writes Nancy McNeely of El Toro, “was that it was nice to be important, but even more important to be nice.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to grow up to be just like my dad . . . I owe all my accomplishments to a man who taught me that people are as important as the position you hold.”

Cristin Brady, whose father, Stan, lives in Placentia, wrote to share two lessons he had taught her.

The first: “I remember him always telling me, ‘No matter what you attempt in life, put out your best effort and try your hardest, and no matter what it results in I’ll always be proud of you,’ ”

The second was a bit more specific. “When I was 16, he taught me how to check the oil on my car and how to change a tire.” But in a whisper, he told her to use that knowledge “if and only if there was absolutely nobody around to help and I positively had to,” she says.

And that’s, uh, Uncle Harry

Does your family have a black sheep? Someone you’d just as soon not invite to the reunion or leave out of the family album? Tell us about the person you’d rather not be related to. Or if you’re the one they love to hate, tell us how you feel about not fitting in.

Separate checks or community property?

How does your family divvy up the money--and the household bills? Do you have his and hers checkbooks? Is it all marked Ours ? If one of you earns considerably more than the other, does that affect your family financial system? Do you fight over money? Tell us how it works--or doesn’t work--for you.

A baby at last

Your parents have been waiting for grandchildren for what seems like most of your life. And finally, now that you’re in your 30s (or older), you’ve decided to stop being the baby of the family and have one of your own. The Baby Boom generation has postponed procreation longer than any of its predecessors. If you’re part of the trend, we’d like to know why you waited, and what difference you believe the delay has made in your life and your child’s.