Today is the 30thanniversary of the death of my Dad, Glen Edward Holverson. It was the biggest sad event of my life. I’ve been alive almost as long without him as I have with him. I miss Dad enough to write this long-winded diary all these years later.
Dad was born in 1928, the second youngest of six siblings. This was back when one could raise a family of eight on a farm of just 120 acres in the Loess Hills of Iowa. One about needed a family of eight to farm that back when corn was picked by hand. Dad grew up during the hard times of the Depression and World War II. He was the pitcher for the old Soldier high school team with a scrapbook clipping of his no hitter. He married Mom and started the Farm. He took over those 120 acres and grew it to 448. This is all through droughts, commodity prices tanking, getting a big bouncy rubber check from American Beef going Chapter 11, the late ‘70s farm crisis of depressed prices with inflationary production costs, and that really fun ‘80s “Keep the grain! Export the farmers!” Farm Crisis. He was the northern version of a Yellow Dog. The reason that my family are the rare rural hereditarily Democrats is that Grandpa Holverson lost the Farm under Hoover, some sort of tax issue, but got it back under the FDR’s New Deal programs. That’s a contributing reason why I’m here instead of, say, Truth Social. Dad came of age with mechanized agriculture. Steam was just before Dad’s time, but he grew up rolling on a steel-wheeled binder through various upgrades to the orangey goodness of a WD-45 to finally the air-conditioned confront of the mighty 7045. Mom and he adopted Sister and me in the early ‘60s. We grew up in respectable material comfort in the late Post-War economic boom and in the later end of the Baby Boom. Even if that was a little tarnished by getting my butt a little too ran off doing farm duties and being a misfit in a rural school that was awful enough to get put out of it misery through dissolution.
I admire Dad, often for being a lot of things that I was not. He could be as square as Hank Hill, but still loosen up and chum up and kid around with us kids like Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, my favorite childhood movie. He was a rugged alpha male who didn’t take no shit from nobody and had a formidable force of personality, while I was a wimpy beta nerd pushover. He was left-brained neuro-typical while I was right-brained autistic and probably racked with ADD back before that stuff was understood. Dad tolerated a weird kid being interested in weird things like antique technology, a personal precursor of the most arcane and curious sort to what is now called Steampunk, and Studebakers, which boomerangs into Googie before hitting critical mass as Atompunk. While a lot of people on the Left disdain tough guys who don’t cry, I admire him for that since I was too weepy for the first 20-some years of my life. Despite Dad having a Homer Simpson level of book smarts in real life, he had an uncommon amount of common sense and business sense. Enough that he even came out of the Farm Crisis ahead, even if it was scary hard going during it. Obviously, he was good at running his own business, while I got the short end of toxic gatekeeping during the “anybody can get published” Indie Comics Boom and a flop comic book company, an ill-fated model rocket company, and now I’m working as just somebody else’s employee in the public sector. He married and raised a family, as opposed to this terminally single autie.
Unfortunately exposure to ag chemicals and chain smoking did Dad in. It was was disheartening to see a big tough guy like him cut down to being weak and frail and on oxygen and put in an early grave. Mom was naively optimistic that Dad’s final trip to the hospital would get the medications sorted out and things would get better. I was naively hopeful too. I had finally gotten out on my own with an apartment and a job with a company that did tractor radios, bus video, and contract manufacturing, and let me operate cool tools like their automated 33ton pneumatic turret presses. Dad instead had one very rough night. He was shot up with painkillers and then Mom, Sister, her husband, and me did a vigil over the next two and half days until he finally passed.
Dad had some influence over my comics. His friendly tough guy was an influence on Montue, Flexia Bast’s father on InterStellar OverDrive. An exaggerated version of his business smarts and alphaness influenced Leonina, Flexia Bast’s mother. There’s some flirting with “muse abuse” with differences of the alphaness of the ex-jock father and the beta nerd son played up in a proposed Sci Fi Guy! episode that will probably go nowhere. Dad’s death influenced me to get going on the ‘90s InterStellar OverDrive revival before any more mortal time passed. The title of this diary is from an unfinished InterStellar OverDrive story from that time. A character that was a composite of a self-insert and a fictionalized version of Douglas Coupland who grew up to write a book called “Life after Dad”. This is a play on Mr. Coupland’s Life after God, one of his early follow-up books to Generation X, and some of my feelings of loss that I still felt a couple of years after Dad died.
Poor Dad didn’t live to see a lot of things. He would have been delighted to see the Clinton victory had he lived later into the year. Maybe if he had quit smoking back in the ‘70s, he could have celebrated the turns of the Millennia with family, the populist one of Y2K flipping over and the technically accurate flip into 2001. Maybe he would have been amused, but not part of, the rise of computer and Internet culture. Maybe he would have enjoyed the novelty of the first Black President. I wonder if his input would have been a different or even no Holverson Designs or Fun Rockets. However he did miss the unease of the flubbed 2000 election, 9/11, W’s feel good wars that went south, or the local community sinking into blood red, redneck, MAGAland. I wonder what he would have felt about me belatedly getting diagnosed with autism a year ago?
The rest of the family continued on with our lives. Mom went on and dated and married a World War II vet and we all ended up with stepfamily. He was a good Republican named James Blaine, like the good Republican who lost to Grover Cleveland in the Mugwump election. He lived well into his 80s, but Mom out lived him. She’s still alive and well. My Sister was already married and on her own. She raised a couple of daughters who have since grown and started their own carriers. A publisher phoned up to buy and send a $300 advance on my attempted contribution to the early ‘90s Smut Glut on the day Dad died and then reneged at his leisure. I spent two or three weeks after Dad’s death tripping over some item about some old tractor or just the good old days and I was going to ask him about it, but realized that I couldn’t. I shuffled through Heroes’ World, and jobs with Long Lines, Fun Rockets, and Omaha Compaq, and other less than good luck. I finally found a career niche working the past 17 plus years as an electronic technician for the USPS. I’m looking forward to retirement, but not necessarily counting on it because I don’t trust the economy, politics, or my luck. Since my best model rocket buddy, who was a few weeks younger than me, died without us ever getting back together and flying together, I’m working through an unofficial pruned and prioritized bucket list.
Notes:
An alternate diary could have been about last spring’s 35thanniversary of the death of Grandpa Skow. He was born in 1908. He grew up with his hands on, and fingers in, Model Ts when the cheap beat up ones were a kid’s $5 first car. He turned that into running a successful small town Standard Oil station that grew into the world’s bestest little Allis-Chalmers and New Holland dealership. Grandma and he would indulge us grandkids from “there’s a DQ up ahead! Anybody up for some ice cream? Maybe a foot-long?” to having Pop Tarts and Lane’s orange or grape soda pop around for the break in the middle of mowing their block-long yard to bumming spray paint for model rockets back when Centuri Engineering gave Estes Industries some serious competition. I admire Grandpa slighlty more than Dad for probably being smarter, although this is probably too subjective. At least Grandpa earned a two-year business school degree in Omaha and he didn’t use ain’t, often part of dropping a double negative. Maybe if you’ve been sent to Sunday school as a kid, say growing up in the Baby Boom, maybe in the Generation Jones end of it, they try to teach you not to do adult vices like drink, smoke, or cuss, among many others. And as a kid you probably noticed that grownups are pretty much awful at practicing what they preach. Those lessons stuck with Grandma and Grandpa who didn’t cuss or drink or smoke, unlike good ol’ boy Dad. The death of both maternal grandparents in the spring of 1987 was impetus, along with the previous year and a half being rough, and picking up the pieces after an emotionally brutal trip to the ’87 Chicago Con, for rebooting the original Captain Saucer as the first go around of InterStellar OverDrive.
This long-winded thing was written for myself for once. Previous long-winded diaries like Heroes’ World or The Big Six-Oh!, ran long and were pruned in ways that hurt them because I was trying to write for long gone disapproving school and college English instructors. No matter how much I tried or got in the zone, let’s see how much red we can mark up on that page! I suspect some neuto-typical bigotry involved on somebody who wasn’t a conformist pet, especially the extra good ones that were younger, prettier brown-nosed versions of teacher. I also wonder if there was some gas lighting involved. Tell a kid after all that effort that they were just goofing off and not trying. Who are the parents going to believe, a big ol’ grownup with ‘thority and a desk and tenure and everything or some weirdo kid?
Another note: The next diary probably will be about either about The Feirds or a post-mortem for my old hacked Facebook profile. The Feirds are rounding a 50thanniversary and were a bit of juvenilia that had a long legacy influencing all my later comic projects. The Facebook post mortem may be a post-post mortem since the hacker has revived the account like a zombie. I may not write about it, since I’m some what burned out on the whole ordeal.