LIKE IT IS: Dad’s willingness to cook served him well

LITTLE ROCK — Friday was Dad’s birthday, and like today, he was missed a little more than usual.

I don’t think anyone ever gets over losing a parent or child, but it does get better, especially when you know they are in a better place.

I can’t walk by the ice cream freezer without thinking about him. My dad loved food, especially ice cream, vanilla.

In his later years, my sisters or I would pick it up for him. We would buy the kind with artificial sweetener because he suffered from diabetes. He’d admit he couldn’t tell the difference, but he didn’t think it was worth a dime more than regular, which is about what it cost.

My dad could cook, too.He learned from his mom, who was legally blind until you stepped in one of her flower beds.

Whenever he thought it had been too long since his grandchildren had been to see him, he’d cook their favorite dish. Whitney loved his salmon croquettes.

Learning to cook was more instrumental to my dad than he could have possibly known when he was standing there next to his mom cutting up a chicken, battering it (rolled in an egg during good times) and deep frying it.

When Dad was 15 - and none of this was learned until a few years before his death when his older brother Uncle Jack came to visit - he ran away and joined the Navy.

Those who couldn’t swim had to jump off a tower about 40 feet above the water and make it to a platform; those who could swim jumped from a ledge about 3 feet above the water.

Dad was apparently a lot more afraid of heights than he was of drowning, and he got in line with the swimmers. He ended up dog-paddling to the platform.

Dad was assigned as a gunner on a PT boat in the Pacific Ocean after basic training. But one of the ships lost its cook during an attack. The cook had to man a gun after someone else was shot.

Dad told the ship’s commander he could cook if that would take him off the gun, which it did.

For about three months, the guys on that boat lived on biscuits and gravy, but then Dad was called in and grilled about his age.

Seems his mom, who was known to have a temper, didn’t like the idea that her son had run away and joined the Navy, and she had him tracked down.

He was given an Honorable Discharge, and like so many men who endure war, never talked about it.

Dad came home, becamean apprentice meat cutter (he hated the word butcher) and eventually met my mom. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mostly good history.

Speaking of history, I’m going to start working on my memoirs, about my 31 years of covering the Arkansas Razorbacks and other sports in our great state.

I’m going to do it on a blog, wallylikeitis.com, which will be on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s web page.

The good news is it will be on the free section; the bad news is that it might be priced appropriately.

I’m going to blog a couple of times a week, sometimes about current events, and sometimes about what happened behind the scenes during the old Southwest Conference days, or the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, or riding the bus in Japan with the Razorbacks basketball team in 1984.

It starts this week with my vacation out West. I’ll probably post almost daily for a week, and if I can follow the simple (to most folks) instructions, I’ll even post some pictures.

The trip will include stops in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole valley in Wyoming, Billings, Mont., the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Mont., Helena, Mont., Missoula, Mont., and Pocatello, Idaho.

Hope you’ll come along.