Housecalls, fruit pies and deep faith: How these elderly Louisvillians remember their dads

Tommie Houston still remembers her father making house calls on horseback near her childhood home in Sligo, Kentucky, in Henry County.

He was a physician in the early 1920s when transportation and medicine looked much different than they do today.

As I sat with Houston in her room at Magnolia Springs East, a senior living community at 13600 La Grange Road, a vase of fresh red roses sat near her chair. She was just a day away from celebrating her 100th birthday, but in this moment, we weren't talking about her own accomplishments.

Instead, in honor of Father's Day, she was sharing memories of the man, who partially gave her the foundation for her long, happy life.

"He's very sensitive and a caring guy," she told me. "When I joined the church he cried, when he walked me down the aisle to get married, he cried again. He was just a very gentle, wonderful dad."

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If you're a frequent reader of this column, you'll notice this is my second trip this year to Magnolia Springs East near the border of Jefferson and Oldham counties.

Earlier this winter, I introduced you to Hugh Moore, 88, who lives there and delighted me stories with me about the engines he helped design for NASA's Centaur and Saturn rockets in the late 1950s and early 1960.

As we spoke this past January, he reminded me of my own grandparents, which in an unexpected way, brought me back to him and his community just in time for Father's Day. Admittedly this is odd, but as we approached the holiday honoring fathers, I kept thinking about my own grandmother.

She called her father "daddy" and still missed him until the day she died in 2018.

I wondered what other people in the twilight of their lives remembered most about their fathers.

So I spent a few hours at Magnolia Springs East just after lunchtime on a Tuesday afternoon looking for an answer.

Now, I'm not naïve enough to believe everyone has fond and inspiring memories of their fathers. One woman in the community even called her father "the devil" and asked not to talk about him.

But for the ones who did speak with me, I listened for how the men that raised these people still lived on in their words and actions decades and decades later.

I heard stories of deep morals, kindness, strong principals and sometimes, even survival.

Dick Purkins' father worked in printing back when printers did typesetting by hand. He knew the printing industry inside and out, but his skills stretched far beyond that.

"He could do anything with his hands," Purkins told me. He wasn't an artist, but he could build furniture. He never went to college, but he knew the basics of plumbing and electricity. He valued reliability, and that's something his passed on to his son.

"He just always taught us to 'live by your word,'" Purkins said. "If you told somebody you were going to do something, you damn well better do it."

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A little further down the hallway, Loretta Briggs, 79, explained her father was a truck driver and wasn't around a lot. He came from a family that didn't really show love to one another, but as a child, Briggs always knew that he loved her, even when he didn't express it. She trusted him and valued his insight, too.

"I always went to my dad if I needed an answer on something, and nine times out of 10 he would have the answer," Briggs said.

Mary Lou Miller remembered her father as a jokester and a prankster with a strong work ethic. When I asked what kind of pranks he pulled at her childhood home in Southern Wisconsin, she gave a sheepish laugh, and shared a comical but vulgar memory.

"You won't want to print this," she said.

She was right, of course. We're a family friendly paper after all.

What she told me next made me smile in a much different way.

"The only use he had for fruit was pie," she said, marveling at how many pies her mother must have made. He used to walk along the side of the road picking elderberries to put in them. In the final years of his life, when he didn't have much of an appetite at all, he still enjoyed pie.

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It was a warm memory and such a simple, human one.

It made me think of the Wrether's Originals my grandfather always kept in pockets and the cashews he kept by his recliner.

As I went from room-to-room in the community, some of my conversations were brief. Moore, who loosely inspired this whole column, simply told me his father was "hardworking and very honest" and that "he made sure we never stole anything or told lies."

Chuck Heitmiller, 82, had fond memories about hunting and fishing with his father. Ray Dougherty, 74, and I talked about how his father farmed during the day and worked at the gas company in the evening because that tough schedule was the only way to keep food on the table.

Ed Miller, who grew up in Meade County, shared an incredible story with me about how his father was responsible for bringing electricity to the area in 1936 when Miller was just a year old. He grew up with electricity because his father helped hatch that deal.

"It was a big deal in our part of the world," Miller said.

A little later on Peggy Whatley, 88, and I had very different conversation about her dad. She never knew her "real" father, but she was so well loved by her aunts and uncles that she never noticed he was missing from her life, until she started attending school. When she saw that all the other children around her had two parents, she "felt really down" about herself.

Eventually, she told me candidly, her mother married her stepfather, who didn't really love her, either.

"But I never suffered because my aunts and uncles were there, and they raised me, and I turned out OK," she explained, glowing. "Oh lord yes, they all loved me."

As Mary Beth Brednich welcomed me into her room, she reached for a small book labeled with "Mimi's Memories." Her family had given it to her one Christmas as a way record everything she recalled from her eight decades of life.

She turned to the page she'd written about her father, and she told me "anything I did with my daddy was special." He was a preacher in town, she explained, and "he would take me to places and introduce me to his friends and always with pride."

Brednich grew up in the 1940s and 50s in Shreveport, Louisiana, and her father was the most disciplined person she ever knew. There wasn't a day that he wasn't sitting at the breakfast table wearing starched shirt and tie.

He was "witty and wise," she recalled.

One of things, though, that she admired most about him was his ending, she told me.

He had Alzheimer's, and even as his world became more confusing, he never lost his temper.

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"People said 'oh, he will get angry, he'll probably spurt out curse words,'" she said. "But he was always just elegant and a gentlemen" until he died in 1995.

Then her eyes welled just as my own grandmother's used to do when she talked about her father.

"I can't believe I'm crying," Brednich told me. "Just like it was yesterday."

And as she spoke I saw in her something I didn't realize I'd been searching for when I first walked into Magnolia Springs East.

Between the memories of hard work and the way things used to be, I'd seen this flicker in a few of the conversations I had with her neighbors, but the sentiment was abundantly clear to me as the minister's daughter clutched on to her book of memories.

You can be in your 80s and still want your "daddy" to walk through the door.

Features columnist Maggie Menderski writes about what makes Louisville, Southern Indiana and Kentucky unique, wonderful, and occasionally, a little weird. If you've got something in your family, your town or even your closet that fits that description — she wants to hear from you. Say hello at mmenderski@courier-journal.com or 502-582-4053. Follow along on Instagram and Twitter @MaggieMenderski. 

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Kentuckians tell how their fathers still influence them decades later