An Essay About Mom and Dad
by Charles E. Norton

My parents were not great.

When I write this, I should also, in good lawyer’s fashion, provide a definition of what I meant by the word “great.” I use the word in the grand, old, precise 19th Century sense: “of a size, amount, extent, or intensity considerably above the normal or average; big…”

By this standard, Genghis Khan and Dwight Eisenhower were “great”; Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln were “great”; Jonas Salk and Steve Jobs were “great.”

My parents did not marshal armies to subdue empires; they did not bend their nation to their will, and cause it to redefine itself as a political community; they did not develop a cure for a disease that had afflicted humanity, or market technologies that changed fundamentally how people live. And, so, they were not “great.”

But my folks were very intelligent and very hard working; kind and compassionate; passionate but private; fun loving and very, very funny; oriented to notions of honesty and honor and not very much interested in commerce. Perhaps most striking of all, they were truly courageous and adventurous.

I have now passed through the stages of life that my folks experienced when I lived with them full-time. I have learned that some of these qualities that they had are compatible with “greatness”; and others are simply not. And so I have become deeply grateful for being born into this family that was not “great.”

Dad was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in April of 1913. He worked very hard as a boy and a young man, delivering milk from a wagon seven days a week, for $6 a week and then ushering in a vaudeville theater at night as he got older.

It would be a mistake to be too Dickensian about all of this. There was a lot of fun in Dad’s young life too, especially anything that had to do with sports. As Mom would later say, if any activity involves a ball of any shape or size, your Dad will take an interest in it. And so there were sandlot baseball games every evening in the summers; a lot of touch football, which evolved into tackle pretty quickly; and some basketball, although neither it nor football came close to the stature of baseball for Americans in the 1920s.

Dad graduated from high school in the late spring of 1931. Mighty industrial America had hit the skids. The unemployment rate nationally hit 25 percent; it was probably higher in the factory towns of upstate New York. Dad was lucky enough to get work shoveling coal in the train yard and later hired in at the carborundum plant as a “stationary engineer.”

All the while, the romanticism that was so much a part of the young boy who loved to read “Ivanhoe” and Zane Grey was struggling to express itself. Dad hitchhiked and rode the rods on a train to get to Indiana; he worked on a farm for a month or so and came home. He tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but fortunately for my future existence it was Bastille Day and their office in New York City was closed. He then found his first career at Mitchell Field on Long Island in 1937, when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps at the age of 24.

Dad completely took to the Air Corps and the Air Force. He loved the camaraderie and the adventure, the military pomp and circumstance, and the disciplined sense of purpose. He became a master sergeant very quickly, and served as a crew chief in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy during World War II. He received the Legion of Merit in North Africa for designing a system for maintaining and repairing Allied aircraft and keeping them in the air continuously. After the war, he served in Alaska, flying in B-29 patrols close to the Bering Strait.

Mom was born in Appleton City, Missouri, in 1918. Her parents came from a long line of steady and industrious German farmers. Grandpa Henry Renken married Grandma Kate in 1912, and in 1920 decided to buy a farm in eastern Colorado near the town of Flagler.

Mom was the center of her parents’ lives in all respects. When you look at her pictures from the 1920s, you can see that eastern Colorado was a frontier; in one photo, she is wearing a homemade gingham dress and playing with a turkey. She was an only child, and so developed as both daughter and son for proud parents. Mom was a fantastic cook, but also a dead shot with a .22 caliber rifle; she sewed her own clothes much of her life, but she could also ride a horse bareback all day.

Mom came to Denver in 1937, and went to work for The Denver Post in 1938, where she stayed until 1955. She worked as a “girl Friday” doing a little bit of everything, including selling insurance, editing the in-house newsletter, giving people the location of polling places by phone on Election Day, taking tickets a few evenings a month at the old baseball field at Merchant’s Park, and even putting together skits and pageants on special occasions.

Mom loved The Post and everything about it, including the reporters, who ranged from very thoughtful and gentle people to guys who lived on whiskey and cigarettes and who would just as soon punch you in the nose as debate you if they thought your point of view was ridiculous. It was through her contacts at The Post that she met Dad, who was stationed at Lowry Field.

I suppose I could say that their early relationship involved a smoldering passion, but that would be a lie. It was a forest fire. You can see it in the pictures; Dad photographing Mom, sitting by a stream in the mountains, wearing shorts with her legs stretched out, Dad trying to show how beautiful she is, but never quite being able to capture it to his satisfaction. Her pictures of him have that same quality; a big, handsome guy in a suit and a fedora, cigarette hanging from his lower lip, carrying their bags as though he might just leave or might just stay. He was the pirate king, and he had taken the farm girl far away, but no further than she had taken him.

I was born in 1954, and together we saw the American West in the last days before post-modernism and development caught up with us. We would camp every weekend in the late spring and summer, with a one or two week camping vacation thrown in for July or August. At first, Mom and Dad would take an old canvas tent from Sears and we would pitch it and break it down, rarely staying more than three nights in the same place. I saw Mesa Verde when the evening campfire programs drew 10 people on a busy night; Navajo men and women came from the reservation to dance fertility dances, and we knew that this land was not ours and never would be in the same way it belonged to the dancers. The three of us were the only visitors sitting around the fire one night at Capulin Volcano National Monument, with a park ranger and an old rancher telling stories of Spanish conquistadores, fur traders, and cowboys, with the refreshments consisting of hot strong coffee brewing on the campfire, a few eggshells thrown in to settle the grounds.

When I left home, I opted for a more orthodox life than they had lived; I went to law school and became an attorney, a fact that made them very, very proud. Those last years were kinder to Dad physically than to Mom; he and I hiked all 42 miles of developed trails in Chiricahua National Monument over six days when he had just turned 67. Mom’s knees became arthritic and bent, and her last years were in a wheelchair. But up until almost the end they still went camping together, now in a modest camper on the back of a Ford pickup, Mom still cooking meals for him from scratch, tending the fire, watching the hummingbirds, painting, and writing poems.

One night, when he was 79 and she was 74, they were camped at Sawmill Gulch in North Park. The temperature hit about 20 degrees, and I was sitting in Denver, really worried. I needn’t have; Dad had picked Mom up, and he carried her up to his bunk to be with him and to keep them both warm. They laughed as they slowly and awkwardly made this little journey; they had seen so much together, and lived lives that no one could ever repeat. They knew that they had lived their modest dreams to the fullest and there were no regrets.

In his third State of the Union Address, President Reagan famously said that “America is too great for small dreams.” I must respectfully dissent.