Bobby Spooner

"A life experience is an experience that changes an individual. This is associated with hardships, problems, risk taking, effort and originality whereby individuals stretch themselves to improve their character, talents and knowledge." simplicable.com/en/life-experience

Bobby Spooner's life experiences impacted the life of mine whether I liked it or not. I was his daughter and I couldn't escape that truth. Most of my life I didn't even know if I liked him or not. I frequently didn't, in fact. But I was still compelled to know his mysteries. Bobby Spooner was my father. And I am what is left of him in bits and pieces.

His story, our story, started in the first week of the year 1925. For those of you doing the math, that was almost 100 years ago. It boggles the mind to understand how many changes can occur on our planet and how very short a century can actually be in historical facts. But times and events do impose expectations and restrictions on who we are and what we will become of ourselves, so I must present my father through the lens of a timeline.

Robert Lawrence "Bobby" was born into privilege, the son of a geologist. His mother was the grandchild of a physician. This was not to say there hadn't been hardships and struggles in the lives of his parents, because there had been. But he grew up in a world where he saw very little of that unfold in the same ways many other Americans had in that generation. But most of the security my father had was because his parents worked hard to attain stability and status. Material security was gifted to him.

My father's mother or (Grandma Mary as I called her,) spoke of the Great Flood of the Mississippi River that had occurred when my father was only two and his brother was four. Her husband had been away on a business trip and she was left to care for the family and keep them safe.

Being from privilege doesn't make one immune from disease, though. My father had just learned to walk when he was stricken with polio. It left him crippled in one leg with a noticeable limp, and he had to relearn walking with the atrophied muscle that was left. But he was one of the lucky ones.

"Polio was not an unknown disease: its reputation for cruelty was well earned. In the 1916 outbreak, there were 27,000 cases and more than 6,000 deaths due to polio in the United States, 2,000 of which were in New York City. After the war (World War I,) people had living memories of this horror. People were also used to adjusting their behavior. In 1918, people left cities for resorts, movie theaters were closed for lack of customers, groups cancelled meetings, and public gatherings dwindled. Children avoided swimming pools and public water fountains, fearing that it was transmitted through water. Whatever the therapeutic merit of this, these actions required no force; it happened because people do their best to adapt to risk and be cautious.

In 1949, the new polio epidemic appeared and swept through selective population centers, leaving its most tragic sign: children with wheelchairs, crutches, leg braces, and deformed limbs. For children with polio in the late 1940s, the disease caused paralysis in 1 in 1,000 cases of children aged 5 to 9. The rest had only mild symptoms and developed immunities. In the 1952 season, of the 57,628 cases reported, 3,145 died and a shocking 21,269 experienced paralysis. So while the infection, death, and paralysis rates seem “low” by comparison to the 1918 flu, the psychological impact of this disease became its most prescient feature. The “iron lung” that became widely available in the 1930s stopped asphyxiation of polio victims, and it was a triumph of innovation; it allowed a dramatic reduction in the death rate.

Finally, by 1954, a vaccine was developed (by private labs with very little government support subsidies) and the disease was largely eradicated in the U.S. twenty years later. It became a signature achievement of the medical industry and the promise of vaccines." https://www.aier.org/article/no-lockdowns-the-terrifying-polio-pandemic-of-1949-52/

( I was born in 1954 and my father saw to it that I received the vaccine! )

My father told me stories of his youth about his brief stay at military school. Apparently he and my uncle had been a handful for Grandma Mary. She even sent my father's baby sister to an all girls school. (Grandma Mary was very active socially and my Grandfather was extremely busy with his work in geology/oilfield discoveries.)

One of his tales was that while in the lunchroom, he took his rifle and shot out the overhead lights in the room. He was expelled, of course. He laughed about it, but I wondered if he had secretly hoped for an escape.

After military school, my father attended Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana for a few semesters. His major was to be philosophy, but his philosophy and dreams and aspirations and those of my grandfather's weren't the same. My father longed to be a lawyer; my grandfather said "Fine, but become an engineer first."

Centenary didn't work out for him, but he did find a niche at Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. He was really a great golfer! He bought me a set of women's golf clubs for my sixteenth birthday. It was a nice gesture, but when you don't have a father around much to take you to the courses to learn to play the game, or for that, even afford to take lessons, what good are clubs? I promptly sold them and got a telephone. What can I say? I was a teenager. Post note: I bought my own set at age 40 and took lessons...it felt like unfinished business, but I learned to love the game.

After college and before he met my mother, was perhaps the darkest of times for my father and his family. His beloved sister passed away after a fierce onset of kidney failure at the age of seventeen. (Her name was Shirley and he named me after her.)

My father and mother met and married in 1951. They came from different worlds of economy and background, but still found similar interests. They loved to party and laugh. They loved to read. She was his arm candy and he was her prince. It was a collision. They would be married and divorced from each other twice by 1965. But when it was good, it was a whole lot of fun. When it was bad, it was mean and nasty and sad.

My parents lost a child by miscarriage before I was born in 1954. That must have been very hard. They lived in Denver, Colorado shortly after their marriage, where my dad trained to become a seismologist. This was as close as he would get to being like his father, the geologist. That training would take us overseas to stay in Canary Islands while he worked in the Sahara Desert for an oil company. My brother was born on the Spanish-owned island in 1961. My sister would come after their last and final separation as a married couple in 1964 in Houston, Texas.

Funny story: When my mom was pregnant with my brother, I remember my dad dressing in her maternity gown and dancing around the kitchen to make us laugh. It is one of my favorite memories of him. I'm grateful for that memory. I wish my siblings had seen him in this light.

As a child, I was never "aware" of any deficit to my father's physical being. To me, he was my hero, he was ten foot tall. I am proud of the fact that he never saw himself as a victim or person with limitations. In doing so, he gave me that courage, too.

When my mother left my father, taking me and my young brother, and being in the early months of pregnancy with my sister, Daddy was livid and wounded. He accused her of adultery, when he, in fact, had been the adulterer. This life-changing event had happened when we were back in the states and he was going to real estate school in 1963.

There are some lessons in life that I really wish my father had been self-aware of and adhered to, but that was not to be. He married the woman he had the affair with, "Val." She was older than him and their marriage was seeped in alcoholic-driven fights. That union lasted until the early 70's.

My mother had remained single and spent a vast majority of her time with her plants. It was her way of healing, I suppose. My father took a job in South America for a short while, buying a racehorse and living his best life with his new wife. We received no child support from him during that phase. When he came back, I had become a teenager and hardly recognized him, physically or spiritually.

It was during those years with Val that my father lost both his father in 1966 and his mother in 1971. I did not attend my grandfather's funeral for reasons unbeknownst to me, but I vividly recall Grandma Mary's death, funeral, and when I went back to my father's place after the funeral that evening.

There had been a brief call from him to tell me that my grandmother had passed. We had been expecting the call because my mother had already taken my siblings and me to visit her in the hospital. It was then that we had said our goodbyes. My father made no arrangements to take us to the funeral. My mother did, though. And we sat away from the family section because he never asked us to join him. I could see him grieve from our seats and it broke my heart. I had never seen my father cry. And he cried hard. Yet, I was so far away and couldn't comfort him. He had Val and her daughter and her daughter's husband with him and not us. It crushed me. But more was to come.

I never expected to see my grandmother's jewelry greedily gawked at and divided between Val and her daughter. But they did it in front of me and my father allowed it to happen. I don't recall him even asking if I wanted a remembrance of Grandma Mary's during this travesty. And it was the evening of her funeral. I was ashamed of my father and so very angry and sick to my stomach. Who was this man?

After the funeral, life went on as usual for me and my siblings at my mother's. Not so with my father. He had quickly slivered into his new role as heir of a big inheritance. I would later find out that he had also cashed in, with the help of his crooked lawyer friend, his own children's college funds set aside by Grandma Mary...each for $100,000. We saw little of him during that time and when we did, he was cold and distant and perfunctory.

He soon divorced Val and replaced her with Ann, 15 years his junior. Our relationship went further downhill after that. They moved to Florida, a state where all belongings are passed to the spouse after death. Long story-short: we never got any inheritance monies or properties or keepsakes. My dad died first and then she changed the will to exclude us. In the kindest way possible, this is who she was:

My dad had some good habits and interests, though: he was fastidious in his grooming, he loved watching the NFL, enjoyed crossword puzzles, drove Lincoln Continentals, over-tipped waitresses, sang Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin songs when he'd had too much to drink, and spoiled his grandchildren.

He died from leukemia in 1996. I didn't even know he was sick and wasn't notified of his death, either. We had not spoken in roughly 5 years. The silence caused me to investigate his status through the state agency in Florida. I received his death certificate in the mail. I allowed myself only a week to grieve. I did love him, though and therefore, have no regrets.