Stories Rattling Around in My Mind: The Strong, Silent Type

My Dad, Albert Kirsch, was raised on a farm in Springside, Saskatchewan just a few miles from Yorkton. The German language was spoken in the home but Dad and his brothers and sisters were fully bilingual as they attended The White Sands Public School where English was the language of instruction.

Dad was a tall person of average build and always wore his hair combed straight back. He depended upon my Mother to select his clothing which was ultra conservative meaning no jeans or bright patterns or colours. He was not one to often voice his opinion but perhaps this was because his spouse willingly adopted that role.

The one thing that got his ire up enough for him to express himself was wasteful government spending. In his day, costly Royal Commissions were used to uncover wrongdoings of the government. About these he would say, "It's only going to cost $100,000 to get to the bottom of it." His emphasis was always on the word 'only'. Today the same type of Royal Commission costs millions of dollars.

The only time I ever heard him express a point of view that gave any insight into his personality was on the occasion of a wedding both parents attended. The groom, a burly policeman, fainted during the ceremony and had to be taken into a back room in the church to be revived and then brought back into the sanctuary. Concerning the groom's plight, my Dad observed, "When I saw the bride, and if I was the groom, I would have fainted too."

The follies of youth did not pass my Father by. When he was sixteen, he was helping with the harvest on a neighbour's farm. Becoming hot and thirsty, he went looking for some water to drink. Finding a pail half full of a cold, clear liquid, thinking it was water, he drank some and discovered that it was moonshine. He did not remember how much he drank but they found him lying next to a fence, passed out, with the pail beside him.

Most of his working days were spent at International Harvester Company, the maker of farm equipment and trucks. Some of the trucks had a design fault in that the ignition switch could suddenly cut out. Dad invented a mercury switch that he thought would solve the problem. He went to a patent office in Ottawa hoping to cash in on his invention and he was told that it was useless. He made the mistake of leaving his invention there and somebody took it and after making a minor change, it did become the solution to the problem. Dad was bitter over the way he was treated and he never talked about it to anyone except to my eldest brother who told me the story years later.

I don't believe that my Father ever watched a complete television program. He was a chanel surfer much to the annoyance of everyone else trying to watch a program. In the same way, skimming over the pages was how he read books but his favourite author was Robert Frost. Dad loved to quote from Frost's poem, The Cremation of Sam Magee. That poem created in Dad a fascination for the North that he carried with him all his days.

I would say that my Dad was the strong silent type. He was a good husband, a good father and a good friend. He never wore his faith on his sleeve but lived it out day by day in the way he treated others.