Thanksgiving 2019 (12 minutes)

A Thanksgiving Talk given November 22, 2019 in the Newark 3^rd Ward, Wilmington Delaware Stake. 

A couple of weeks ago our daughter Emily called to remind me that it was my Dad’s 99^th birthday.  Or it would have been had we not lost him four years ago at age 95.   Dad grew up mostly in Provo, Utah where his dad had settled after coming from England at age 15 as a Mormon immigrant.  Grandpa Ridge had been an apprentice printer in England.  His family had joined the Church Middlesborough in Yorkshire in England.  The family provided support and leadership to the Middlesborough branch.  They frequently put up the missionaries and occasionally put up the mission president who at the time was Heber J. Grant. 

Dad told us quite a bit about his dad’s family of whom he seemed quite proud.  They immigrated to this country in stages with grandpa coming last.  It was 1915 so the trip was perilous as German submarines were preying on Atlantic shipping at the time, but he made it to New Orleans and ultimately to Provo.  The family struggled in Utah since the skills they had acquired in industrial England were not immediately needed in the more frontier environment that still prevailed in Utah.  They tried their luck in California for a while without much success and they returned to Provo. 

Dad did tell us that his dad taught himself to do photolithography.  He cut his first plates in the grandmother’s bathtub, much to her dismay.  He ultimately built a rather clever rocking acid bath for that purpose cutting the exposed plates.  It was a constant struggle but ultimately, he was able to turn his printing skills into a way to provide for his family.  In fact, later there was a period of time when all the pictures in the Daily Herald were printed from plates that he made.  He also ran the linotype for the Herald. 

What Dad did not tell us was that until that work began generating some regular income, hardship including real hunger produced serious stresses in the family.  Most of what I know of this time comes from dad’s brothers.  Dad never talked about it much.  He had a hard time talking about feelings and talking about that time doubtless brought difficult feelings to the fore. 

They lived in a little house on 2^nd North between University Avenue and 1^st West.  The family grew to include dad’s five younger brothers who grew up together during the depression.  What I did learn from some of his younger brothers included the fact that at 10 he was responsible for the garden in their little yard on which they depended for vegetables.   He was also responsible for putting coal in the stove and firing it up in the morning when they had coal.

According to his younger brothers the stresses of these times led not only to discouragement but also to anger and resentment that sometimes boiled violently to the surface taking a toll especially on Dad who was the oldest. 

My uncles also tell of difficulties fitting into the neighborhood that also led to some resentment.   Grandpa had a Yorkshire accent and his clothes were sometimes stained with printers ink and the family was poor and their circumstances meager.  The boys have memories of neighborhood playmates called home by their moms who said they didn’t want their children playing with “poor white trash.”

According to one brother, another of the boys named Allen was dating a Hedquist girl named Edna Mae.  Edna Mae’s family owned a drug store on the corner of University Avenue and Center Street about 5 blocks from Provo High School.  Allen and Edna Mae would walk down to Hedquist drug for a sandwich and soda during lunch-time.  Frequently they would pass an older man in ink-stained work clothes.  Allen and the man would exchange nods and grunted hellos as they passed.  Finally Edna Mae had to ask who that man was before Allen confessed that it was his dad so embarrassed was he about his family. 

In spite of everything by the late thirties, however, Dad was at Provo High School and evidently doing pretty well according to stories I later heard from his brothers.  He was in the PHS band that travelled to San Francisco and marched across the Golden Gate Bridge when it was first opened in 1938.  He starred in the PHS production of Booth Tarkington’s “Seventeen”.  He edited the school paper.  On one occasion Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, came to PHS to demonstrate his invention.  Philo had a camera and a monitor and asked for someone to come up to the stage and be on TV.  Dad, the star of the school play, was volunteered by his fellow students and thus became the first person in Utah to be on TV. 

He went to BYU earning his way by running the press that produced the student newspaper The Daily Universe.  I found a photo stuck away in a dusty BYU yearbook of two skinny guys in shorts and boxing gloves standing on either side of an enormous powerful looking man.  I recognized one of the skinny guys as my Dad.  It took considerable research to find out that the occasion was an exhibition match that he and the other finalist in the 135 lbs division of the BYU boxing tournament put on for student and faculty sports fans.  The enormous man between them was their referee for the match Jack Dempsey, the great heavyweight champion of the world.  Dempsey had an LDS background and had responded to an invitation to visit BYU and help promote student sports.  I have always been puzzled that Dad never volunteered anything about the incident.

After BYU Dad went to Dental School in Portland Oregon where the students were all in uniform since the war effort needed trained medical personnel of all kinds.  After graduating he went to Richland Washington where he helped provide Dental care to physicists and engineers working on the Manhattan Project.   Ultimately he established a practice in Provo, Utah.  Except for two years when he was drafted during the Korean War to provide dental care to Marine recruits in San Diego he continued to practice in Provo until he was 85.  He served as President of the Utah Dental Association.  He always kept up with advances in his profession and even published on lessons he learned from over 50 years of dental practice.  According to a number of other dentists I’ve met he became something of a legend in Utah dental circles for the quality of his work, his leadership and his longevity in active practice.

He and my mother met and married as BYU students and I was born in Portland while they were in Dental School.  They had four children, 21 grandchildren and an increasing number of great and great-great grandchildren.  One way or another he passed along some of his drive and ambition to many of his family.  They are, for example, on the whole a very educated group.  On one occasion ten years or so ago some of the family gathered in Provo for a baby blessing and went to Church with Dad.  As we sat down someone noticed that there were 7 doctor ridges sitting in a row.   Of course, some were Ph. Ds and not real doctors. 

I go on about all of this just to make the point that obviously Dad was very accomplished and had much to be proud of.  But he never really talked about it.  I don’t really know how he felt about his life and his accomplishments.  Strangely, he always seemed insecure about his place in the world.  He was always driven, but never seemed to arrive at a place where he felt safe and secure.  There was always a certain defensiveness in his interactions with others.  Communication about feelings was always a challenge for him.   His difficult childhood, about which he was so diffident, may have been a key to this.  In any event this insecurity and inability to express feelings in an effective way contributed to the break-up of his marriage after 32 years and to a certain distance between him and his children over the years.

Over the years I think I resented the emotional distance and the constant uncertainty about his feelings about me.  As I have talked with my siblings about this we all feel that he was proud of his children, but this is something we all deduced from secondary evidence. Things we have heard that he might have said to others.  Pictures and articles and certificates that may have been on the wall in his office.  But nevertheless resentment can work its way into the heart.  I have at various times felt that a darkness in his life has cast a shadow of insecurity that sometimes darkened my life.

On the other hand as I have reflected on what I have learned about Dad since he died, and what I learned from others while he was alive, that I might have been asking the wrong question all of these years.  I should have worried less about whether he could tell me he was proud of me, and more about whether he knew that I was proud of him.  I am very uncertain my attempts to tell him so over the years were sufficiently sincere and let’s say unshaded by a deeper resentment to be effective. 

That is really my Thanksgiving message.  I suggest that as we take inventory of blessings this Thanksgiving, we consider particularly those people for whom we are grateful and ask ourselves whether they know how grateful we are for them and how proud we are that they are part of our lives.  Family, friends and loved ones can slip away without the strength and light that knowing of our pride and gratitude may provide.  Communicating pride and gratitude of this kind really requires an honesty that can only come from a searching of one’s own heart.  It’s possible that some kind of repentance may be required.

Some years ago a distinguished Russian Professor of Chemistry spent a sabbatical year in our laboratory.  During that year Professor Nikolaev took some time to tour our country with his family.  He had just completed that tour and returned to Newark in time for Thanksgiving and we invited him and his family to celebrate the American tradition of Thanksgiving with us.  As we were visiting about his trip I asked him what was the most remarkable thing he had seen on his travels.  He said the most remarkable thing he had seen in America was our family.  That was, of course, a very politic thing to say.  On the other hand he didn’t need to say it.  He was going to get his turkey and dressing regardless.  So I took it at face value, and began to reflect then as I do now on whether I really appreciated my family.

In particular I reflected then as I do now on whether my family was aware of how grateful I was for them and how proud I was of them.  As Julie and I considered getting married we talked about children.  We both wanted a family but I thought two would be the appropriate number of children while she favored a family of six children.  Well we compromised and had six. 

I am so grateful that we went with Julie’s number.  It certainly hasn’t been easy.  After our fourth turned out to be our fourth and fifth life got pretty complicated.  My memories of the time are a little hazy, but I seem to remember walking around with a manuscript in one hand and a dirty diaper in the other and then later hoping that I had done the right thing with each one.  And then seven years later we finally completed our family with number six.  Finally another daughter after a girl and four boys.  Since half way between two and six would be four I should note that our fifth and sixth have been a joy and blessing in our lives.   Our family would simply have been incomplete without them. 

I don’t know if I have effectively communicated to my family how proud of them and grateful for them I am.  The least I can do on this public occasion is to say in fact that I am very proud of  each of our children and I am very grateful for each of them.  I would also like to say that I am very proud of each of our grandchildren and I am very grateful for each of them.  Finally I would like to say that I am very proud of my wife Julie.  I feel very fortunate that she consented to be my wife.  I cannot imagine life without her.  I am very grateful for her.  If I am honest with my self, my principle contribution to the family Professor Nikolaev said he found so remarkable was simply persuading her to marry me.