05/12/2024
Adventures With Daddy Wags
My Travels By Harley, Jeep, RV
Dad’s Voice
July 2023
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico -- I heard my deceased father’s voice. And listened to it.
Dad had been gone for 31 years.
In the spring and summer of 1990, which was 33 years ago, my father recorded his life story. On cassette tape, which at the time, I think, was the most advanced method for regular folks to record and preserve one’s voice.
My dad, whose name was James “Jim” Harrison Wagner, had a voice that resonated with perfect clarity. He enunciated with precision. The words he chose were the right words.
I remember as a kid watching Dad and listening to his voice on a local Houston, Texas, TV station. He was a sportscaster, I think. That was a job he held concurrently with his fulltime job at The Houston Press newspaper. At one time or another, according to his cassette story, he called high school football games on the radio. On the tape, he said one of the high school teams he called was that of Baytown High School, somewhere south of Houston toward the Gulf of Mexico.
My knowledge of Dad’s tapes is traced to my receiving them, in the mail, I think.
I don’t recall having a keen interest in listening to them immediately. But at some point, which might have been 33 years ago, I decided to slip the No. 1 cassette into an audio device.
I pushed the “on” button.
Less than 10 seconds later, I pushed the “off” button.
My recollection is of hearing Dad’s voice saying this: “I will start at the beginning. My name is Jim Wagner.”
Hearing the voice of my deceased father was more than I could handle.
Later, my wife, Roberta, and I stashed the tapes away. Someday, I figured, I would be ready. If only we could remember where we had stashed them.
Remember, this was 1990. As I write these words, it is July 2023. It also happened to be two weeks after the death of my father’s oldest sister. Aunt Barbara was 100, two months shy of what would have been her 101st birthday.
In the recesses of my own memory was a vague recollection of what must have been a horrible experience of my father during World War II. He was in the Army, serving with the 1st Armored Division. He was at Anzio, Italy, one of the most brutal battles of the war. He was a radio man. The Anzio campaign lasted from January to June 1944. I don’t know just when Dad arrived there. Nor do I know if the incident that had stuck in my mind occurred at Anzio.
My recollection was that Dad was standing in a food line. Next to him was a good friend. Tragically, that friend was struck by – this, I don’t know – a bullet or shrapnel. Whatever it was, it killed him.
Over the years, I’ve wondered just what happened that day. I never asked Dad. And Dad never talked, to me anyway, about his World War II days.
About five years ago, still wondering, I phoned my Aunt Barbara. She might know, I believed. No, she told me. But call her daughter Mary, who would know, Barbara suggested. Mary had listened to Dad’s cassette tapes, Barbara told me.
Well, I did not contact Mary, who was a cousin. Mary and Dad were close. I figured that Dad had also shared his cassettes with Mary.
Thirteen days ago, several hours after Aunt Barbara’s burial on a shaded hillside at an old cemetery in Decorah, Iowa, I and six cousins met for dinner at the venerable Mabe’s pizza house. I asked Mary about my recollection that one of Dad’s friends had been killed standing in the chow line.
Mary’s response was to hand me a brown envelope, about 5 by 8 inches in size. Inside were two cassette tapes. Listen to them, she indicated. The answer’s there.
Also inside the envelope were four pages of typed wording. Dad had listed the topics of each vignette he described. The words were essentially headlines.
I scanned the pages. Yes, this was Dad. Totally organized.
Mary, these are the “headlines,” I said to my cousin. Did Dad also include the “stories”? Like me, Dad was a newspaperman.
Ten days later, I was sitting on a stool across from the owner of a small business in Albuquerque that that had the technology to transfer the sounds on a cassette to a thumb drive. The owner, a native of Russia who still had a heavy accent after 16 years in America, told me she would contact me in a week to pick up the thumb drive. Two days later, she phoned. I visited her the next day.
Sitting on the same stool, I asked her if she had listened to the tape. Did she hear Dad’s voice? I had feared that somehow, over time, that maybe the tapes had been ruined and that Dad’s oral history – that’s what he called it – would be lost.
She had, she told me. Then, searching for the right words, she replied that Dad’s voice was that of a “professional.” Like the voice of a man on the radio.
Exactly, I said.
She said it sounded to her like Dad was reading his oral history, that perhaps he had written his stories prior to recording them.
Then the woman told me that to listen to Dad’s voice on the thumb drive, all I had to do was to slide the tiny device into a slot on a computer or TV or laptop.
Then as an almost “by the way,” she asked me where sides 1 and 2 were. What? I wondered. She showed me the small handwriting on the tapes, which said “Side 3” and “Side 4” and “Side 5.”
I had no idea. Nor had I even looked at those notations.
Well, maybe at home I had a third cassette, one labeled “Side 1” and one “Side 2.”
I seemed to recall that Roberta and I had stashed them in her hope chest, which we kept in the garage.
Two hours later, I slipped “Side 3” into my laptop computer.
This time, I felt no anxiety about hearing Dad’s voice.
“Side 3” did not begin with Dad’s words, “I will start at the beginning.”
That afternoon and evening and then beginning at about 6:30 the next morning, I listened. Two of the tapes were about 45 minutes long. The other, about 25.
Twice, tears came to my eyes.
Mostly, Dad’s stories were the headlines. Just the facts. The verbs Dad chose were precise. The enunciation was precise.
Over the years, when I found myself describing my father to others, I used the words “bigshot” and “snob.” The former carries an importance, a significance, a person who led and made important decisions and was respected. Yes, Dad was that. As for the latter word, “snob,” well, I might be unfair. Yet Dad made it clear, in his oral history, that he did indeed rub elbows with the high and mighty, with presidents and boxing champions and baseball stars and media moguls and with the wealthy and influential.
Today, as I sit at the keyboard of my laptop, writing this entry to my blog, I am struggling with my description of my father as a snob. Perhaps I’m being unfair. As for Dad being a bigshot, he was, in the mind of his first-born. An impressive man, he was.
As for the rest of his oral history and perhaps learning if my memory of Dad’s friend being killed in the chow line, well, I searched the hope chest in the garage for a cassette labeled “Side 1” and “Side 2.”
It was not there.
--Jim ‘Daddy Wags’ Wagner
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