My Father

I mentioned in an earlier posting how my father - Walter Berg, Sr. - worked his whole life with little to show for it. That was true, but it was not because of any lack of talent or intelligence. He was a quiet man, not given to showing emotion, but he was thoughtful and considerate of those around him and took his responsibilities seriously. His greatest talent was with numbers. It might be said that he was a genius in that respect. He could run down a long list of four and five digit numbers, adding them in his head and then write down the sum at the bottom faster than most folks nowadays using a calculator or computer. Guess that’s why he was a good bookkeeper on the job. He loved to play cards and would challenge himself by never rearranging the hand dealt to him. He could just scan the cards and know immediately what he had and how to play them.

Dad was born in Indiana, but grew up in Beardstown, Illinois where his father was the pastor of the Lutheran church there. He had two sisters and five brothers, but two of the brothers died as young children. That was not uncommon in earlier generations. The family lived in a German speaking community, and all the services at his father’s church were in German. Dad didn’t learn English until he started to school. When he finished school in Beardstown, his father sent him to Ft. Wayne, Indiana to study for the ministry. He made good grades in Ft. Wayne, but quickly decided that the ministry was not for him.

It was in Ft. Wayne that he started playing baseball and rose to the semi-pro ranks. A bout with rheumatic fever left him with a crippled foot. That ended his baseball career. He tried to join the army when World War I came along, but was rejected because of that foot. He spent those war years in Philadelphia working for the Army Quartermaster Corps as a civilian. When the war was over, he moved to North Carolina to be nearer his folks. His father, by then, had taken a job as president of a college in Greensboro. Dad found a job selling Bibles. He rode on horseback through the mountain communities selling Bibles, until one day he was challenged by a bootlegger who thought he might be a revenue agent. I don’t know the details of that, but it must have been traumatic. It was soon after that he got out of there and moved to Florida.

In Florida, Dad’s first job was as a night watchman at one of the phosphate mines. During the day, he bought fresh produce and shipped it to his brother in North Carolina to sell. It was while doing that that he found the job as bookkeeper and office manager of O’Berry & Hall Co., a wholesale grocery distributor in Tampa. And it was there that he met my mother. That was about 1926 or 1927. It didn’t take long for the two of them to decide to make a life together and get married.

But there were two problems. Dad developed a bad case of tuberculosis and had to leave his job. He spent a year in bed, nursed by his mother. He went from a skinny 160 pounds to 225 pounds, but the confinement and good nursing brought him back to health. He went back to work in 1928, and he and Mom resumed their engagement. But they had to keep it a secret from their boss - the owner of the company. Even after they were married in 1930, they had to keep it a secret because if it became known, one of them would have to quit work. With jobs hard to find, especially at the beginning of the Great Depression, they avoided the issue as long as they could.

Then Mom became pregnant. Rather than just her resigning, they both quit. They moved to Orlando, Florida and bought a little grocery store and gasoline filling station. The building they rented had an apartment above the store where they lived. The timing was wrong. It was a neighborhood business, and nobody in the neighborhood had any money. With me coming along, the situation soon became desperate. I’ll get into a little more about that on the next posting about Mom, but after I was born, Dad swallowed his pride and went back to Tampa to beg for his old job back. He was 45 years old then. So when I was less than a year old, we moved to Tampa, and Dad went back to the job that he kept for almost the rest of his life. Mr. O’Berry took advantage of him and kept him on meager wages for years, but I never heard Dad complain.

My Dad was a Christian, but I think he was disillusioned with church, having grown up as "preacher’s kid." His father had been treated rather poorly at the end by the church in Beardstown. Also, Sunday was Dad’s only day to rest, so in my early memory, he never went to church. That changed in time, and about the time that World War II came along, he started attending the Lutheran church a couple of blocks from our home. He never felt comfortable in the Baptist church that Mom attended, so they went their separate ways on Sunday. During the war there were a number of soldier boys stationed in Tampa who would come in to Dad’s church. On many occasions he would bring them home to dinner for a home cooked meal. We never heard from some of those boys again, but lifetime friendships developed with others.

I loved my Dad. He was also my best friend. He never lifted a hand to me that I recall. Mom was the disciplinarian. I have a clear memory of listening every evening for the sound of his old Model A Ford rounding the corner at the end of Wilson Avenue as he was coming home from work. Supper was usually ready, and afterward, if there was any daylight left, we’d go out in the yard and play catch. If not, Dad would set up a card table in the living room, and we’d play Rummy. When Mom finished with the dishes, she’d join the game, and we’d play three-handed Londonderry Rummy. I learned how to count playing cards with my Dad. It took awhile to overcome the idea that 11, 12, and 13 followed the 10, instead of Jack, Queen, and King. He also taught me the alphabet and got me reading things. So, before I started to school I already knew how to count and read - and play cards.

I’m trying to confine these postings to things that occurred before the end of World War II, so I’ll stop here except to say that Dad lived until 1969 when he died at age 80 after complications set in following cataract surgery on his eyes.