On Fathers Day, no one to buy a card for, but many lessons to remember – The Arizona Republic

Dominick D'Anna flew B-52s from bases across the U.S. He died in November 2014, at the age of 80.(Photo: Courtesy of John D'Anna)

This will be my seventh Fathers Day with no one to buy a card for.

My old man died just before Thanksgiving in 2014. It was 12 days after his 80th birthday, and it was the second time hed bought the farm. More about that later, but before you get all offended, dont worry, hed have thought it was funny.

A friend once told me that you never get used to a parent not being there anymore, you just learn to live with it.

Its not easy.

My wife and I are empty nesters now, and we are in the process of selling the home weve lived in for 24 years.

You accumulate a lot of junk in 24 years. Or at least we have. My grandparents, products of the Great Depression, were pack rats, and after my father retired and inherited all their stuff, he held on to it.

Now a lot of it is in my garage and in my attic and in my closets. I guess I inherited the pack rat gene from my fathers side of the family, because it definitely didnt come from my mother.

She wouldnt hesitate to throw something away even if it had sentimental value, and sometimes while you were still using it.

My wife and I(OK, mostly me) saved our kids baby blankets, their report cards, their first shoes and hockey skates their little red wagon, and boxes and boxes of mementos from their childhood.

I have none of those things from my own childhood.

Growing up in a military family and moving around every couple of years, you couldnt always take it with you. That applied to pretty much everything, even the family dog on one occasion.

I attended eight schools in 12 years. It seemed like I was always the new kid and, as such, was forced to endure whatever initiation awaited at the new school, usually something physical, always something humiliating.

Change didnt always come easy for me, and if Id been smarter, Id have probably paid more attention to my old mans example.

When he was 12, he took the train from New York by himself to spend the summer with his grandparents in Tucson. My great-grandfather had moved out West because of his arthritis, and owned a small Italian grocery store at 3101 N. Stone Ave.

When it came time to go back to New York at the end of the summer, he refused.

My dad was so steadfast that his grandparents had no choice but to enroll him in school, and his parents and sister had no choice but to sell everything in New York and join himin Tucson a year later.

The appeal of the wide open desert (and no New York winters) to a 12-year-old is undeniable, but I always wondered if there was something my dad wanted to not come back to in the South Ozone Park section of Queens.

I never thought to ask him while he was alive.

I always wondered how he fit in in school. Did he get bullied or teased when he was the new kid in Tucson? It couldnt have been easy being an Italian kid whose father was from the old country so soon after World War II.

I do know he didnt have time for a lot of friends in high school because he worked in the family store after school and on weekends.

Dominick D'Anna took a trip to Tucson as a child and refused to go back to New York.(Photo: Courtesy of John D'Anna)

My grandfatherwanted my father to work in the family store and eventually take it over the way he had, but my dad had taken machine shop in high school and thought maybe hed become a machinist. There was good money in it, and it was a trade that was always in demand.

My grandfather was OK with that, as long he had a trade. I still have some of the tools he machined in shop class at Tucson High.

College wasnt on anybodys radar back then, even though my grandparents lived only a mile from the University of Arizona campus. When my dad was a senior in high school, a math teacher pulled him aside and said that with his grades, he should be applying to the engineering college at UA.

That would be a nonstarter with his parents, but the teacher had an idea. If my dad applied for ROTC, theres no way his parents would oppose him being in the military.

In 1957, he became the first person in his family to graduate from college. It opened many doors.

Two years later, he was a second lieutenant in the Air Force and had come home to Tucson for the holidays. Hed planned to catch a hop back to Waco, Texas, from Davis Monthan AFB, but there was no space available, so he decided to take the bus.

In those days, Greyhound buses caravanned across the country. As my dad was boarding his bus, the one in front was pulling out. Through the window he saw a woman who took his breath away.

His bus followed hers across the desert. Benson. Willcox. Lordsburg. Las Cruces. Every time his bus pulled into a station, hers was just leaving, a cat and mouse game halfway across the country.

Finally they got to Fort Worth, Texas, and he saw her sitting in the waiting area all by herself.

Forth Worth was the big transfer point, so he began to rationalize that she was probably headed to Kansas City or Chicago or Washington, D.C. Besides, he was already dating someonein Waco.

But when they announced the bus to Waco his bus she got up and headed for the departure bay. She was first in line, and he ran to be second. She took the first seat behind the driver on the empty bus, and thats when my old man came up with the smoothest line ever: Excuse me, miss, is this seat taken? Did I mention that the entire bus was empty?

Turns out she was a nursing student at HillcrestHospital in Waco and had been visiting her parents for Christmas her dad was an Air Force master sergeant stationed at Williams Air Force Base east of Chandler.

Nine months after they met on that Greyhound bus, they were married, and not long after that I prefer not to do the math I was born at the base hospital at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York.

Dominick and Joyce D'Anna met on a Greyhound bus, and would spend most of their lives moving from one place to the next.(Photo: Courtesy of John D'Anna)

Two more sons would quickly follow, both born in Minot, North Dakota my mom had a newborn and two toddlers to contend with while her husband sat aboard a nuclear-equipped B-52, flying 24-hour airborne alerts during the Cuban Missile Crisis and beyond.

And for the next 20-plus years, she would follow him from base to base, packing and paring their possessions, only to be repeated in a couple of years.Rome;Minot;Montgomery, Alabama;back to Minot;Dayton, Ohio;San Jose, California;Fort Worth;back to Dayton;Tucson; and then Japan.

When my dad was sent to Thailand and Vietnam, we lived near my moms family for support.

My old man was, and still is, my hero. I can remember the sounds the metal taps on the heels of his Class A dress uniform shoes made on the sidewalk. I remember sneaking into his closet and trying on one of his flight suits, imagining that I too, was flying in a B-52, soaring through the heavens and ready to rain hell.

Like a lot of men of his generation, he didnt talk much about what he did in the military. I finally got to talk about it some in 2012 when we took a road trip together.

As a kid, though, I knew hed been awarded a Bronze Star and two Air Medals in Vietnam, but he didnt display them. He kept them in their original boxes buried behind a bunch of other stuff in the antique rolltop desk he bought from a hardware store owner in Minot for $60.

Id sneak into the desk and look at them and wonder if Id ever be brave enough to have one pinned to my chest. (I wasn't.)

When the time came for me to follow in his footsteps, I chose the same university, but a different path.

It took awhile for him to warm up to the journalism thing. That came sometime after he bought the farm the first time, which well get to in a bit.

After my dad retired from the Air Force, he and my mom decided to stay in Tucson, even though she didnt like the desert all that much. They decided to stay because his parents were getting older, and they needed both my mothers nursing skills and my fathers patience.

About that. My father was slow to anger, stoic almost, in a Gary Cooper sort of way. I probably can count on one hand the number of times I heard him swear when I was growing up. My mother, on the other hand, could be somewhat melodramatic, and though f-bombs were reserved for special occasions, the s-word was used liberally, often with the word bull in front of it.

Im often fond of saying that journalists are bilingual we speak English and profanity and Im proud to say I got my skills from herand havedutifully passed them down to my own children, much to my wifes chagrin.

In any case, after my grandparents died and my father inherited all the stuff that would eventually make its way to my garage, attic and closets my mother demanded her end of the quid pro quo.

Shed stayed in Tucson for my father, now she wanted to return to her roots in East Texas. They sold their house and moved to a flyspeck on the map called Quitman, Texas, which nobody ever has reason to hear of unless they GoogleWhere was the actress Sissy Spacek born?

There, they bought wait for it thefarm. They had about a dozen head of cattle, two dogs, guinea fowl, and a stock pond with snapping turtles in it.

My mom, whod never encountered a rattlesnake in the wild in all her years in Arizona, called me one day to tell me shed killed a water moccasin in the pasture.

She scared it to death with her scream, my father added.

My dad was pretty much the last guy Id ever imagined becoming a gentleman farmer. He wasnt much of an outdoorsman he tolerated our Boy Scout outings because hethought they were good for us but all that jungle survival training in the Air Force had taught him to appreciate a nice warm bed, and he much preferred ordering food to raising it.

Nevertheless, he persisted, mainly because my mom was so happy there that she felt like shed died and gone to heaven.

After only two years, she did just that, at age 54. She died the day after my daughter was born. She never got to hold her.

My dad was shattered, but he did his best to keep up the farm alone, until it became too much for him and he moved to the suburbs near Dallas and then eventually back to Tucson to be close to his grandkids. My brother and his wife did much of the hard work of caring for him day to day as he got older. My wife and I parachuted in from time to time.

Maybe it was the experience of taking care of his parents, or of taking care of my mother at the end of her life, but my dad seemed to try to not be a burden on us.

Still, he could be a man of many contradictions.

He liked his toast burned literally and his steak raw.

(My kids can still repeat the line he recited to every waiter or waitress when he ordered his steak extra rare: Just have the chef turn the stove on high and then let the cow walk past it.)

He was a Goldwater and Reagan Republican, but he voted for Obama. Twice.

He preferred Huntley and Brinkley to Walter Cronkite, but never missed an episode of Rachel Maddow. (He came finally around to the idea of journalism as a noble profession because he delighted in Molly Ivins scathing columns about a hapless Texas governor named George W. Bush.)

He was incredibly generous with his children and grandchildren, but he was incredibly cheap when it came to tipping. (My brothers and I would often leave our sunglasses or cellphones behind in the restaurant so we would have an excuse to go back in and leave more money on the table.)

In 2014, wed been planning a big 80th birthday party for the old man. He was born on Veterans Day, the same day as his mother, but a few days before the big event, he was hospitalized with congestive heart failure.

He seemed to make it through OK and was paroled to a cardiac rehab facility.

I went down to Tucson to visit him one weekend and we had a long talk. Things at The Republic werent going well. The company was downsizing again, and everyone was being told they had to reapply for their own jobs. It was an unfortunate byproduct ofcorporate journalism's ongoing struggle to come up with a viable business modelin a tough economy.

He told me I needed to get more education. I replied that I was in my 50s, I was too old for that. Besides, Id taught just about every course that was offered at the Cronkite School, so I wouldnt really be learning anything in a journalism masters program.

He said there were other options like an MBA or even law school, and I told him Id think about it.

It was the last conversation I ever had with him. He died unexpectedly that night.

I decided to take his advice and enrolled in an MBA program. I learned a lot, but the best management advice I ever got came from my dad, who was the best manager I ever knew.

Its better to take time doing it right, rather than wasting time doing it over.

Surround yourself with good people and trust them to do their jobs.

Never ask an employee to do something you wouldnt do yourself.

Theres always a better way, you just havent thought of it yet.

Treat people the way you want to be treated.

I think of those lessons now as I go through 24 years of stuff.

That rolltop desk is mine now its where Ive worked for most of the pandemic.

I also have the headset he wore during those 24-hour airborne alerts, and the navigators slide rule and stopwatch that he used to calculate course and speed and fuel consumption.

These things are just things, but they comfort me and make me think of him.

My own children are less sentimental about stuff. They each came home over the weekend to pack up what they wanted from their old rooms. It wasnt much.

I wonder how much of my fathers stuff theyll want when I've bought the farm andit comes time to decide what to keep and what to throw out and what to give away.

I pray they wont find themselves in the position of not having anyone to buy a Fathers Day card for for a long, long time.

But still, Im grateful for the example my father set for them. And for me.

Someday, I hope to grow up to be just like him.

John D'Anna is a reporter on The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com storytelling team. Reach him at john.danna@arizonarepublic.com and follow him on Twitter @azgreenday.

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On Fathers Day, no one to buy a card for, but many lessons to remember - The Arizona Republic