LEND ME YOUR EAR: FATHER'S DAY RECOLLECTIONS BY CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK

Special observances have been slipping up on me ever since I chose to produce only one column every other week. However, questions about the horse-drawn ambulance pictured again and again in this newspaper deserve a public response, and with Father's Day approaching, this seems an appropriate time to set the record straight.

Yes, the vehicle shown so often was my father's, and it was he who implemented ambulance service between St. Louis and Memphis. But no, neither the fat mustached man in the driver's seat nor the tall, broad-shouldered one standing behind the carriage was my father. Martin G. Lorberg the First was a smaller, distinguished-looking gentleman, prematurely white-haired, with a twinkle in his eye that had nothing to do with his calling.

Some weeks ago, a lady asked how my father could have chosen undertaking as a vocation. He didn't. In his day, anyone who went into the furniture business had to supply caskets or boxes of some sort for sending the deceased off into the Great Beyond. Tears often blurred his vision over the death of a friend, and I had to keep my eyes fastened upward to be able to sing at funerals no matter who was lying in state.

Tears and laughter being extreme of the same emotion, another thing my father and I had in common was an irrepressible sense of humor. Trouble dogged us regularly because our tongue-in-cheek remarks were so often misunderstood. Dinner in our home was usually fraught with harmless jests aimed at each other, and my brothers joined forces in our exchanges. Mother was the only one spared. Once, when I felt I had topped the siblings in put-downs, I asked Dad if I hadn't shown myself to be quite a wit. "I think you're about half right," he quipped with the straightest face ever.

Dear ole Dad was just as hard on himself. Years later, when his M.D. told him he had an enlarged heart, he replied, "First time anyone ever accused me of having a big heart." Dad had a great heart. He just couldn't show it. He was also a gifted teacher, though with me he sometimes failed.

One of the first things he tried and failed to teach me was how to put a worm on a hook. Next time I went fishing it was with my lifelong friend Esther and her parents, Arthur and "Doe" Kempe. Esther and I sat on the creek bank while her parents fished. Without saying so, I wondered how anyone on God's green earth could enjoy this ever-popular sport.

Dad was more successful in teaching me about soap: I resented having to share the same bar with my brothers after they'd been playing in the mud. "Soap is its own disinfectant," Dad explained patiently. This information proved helpful during my long stay in Europe. Travelmate Helen, wife of an M.D., had never heard the like. Nor had she learned to disconnect electrical appliances during a severe storm. Why, her father, who owned a bookstore, had taken his offspring outside to marvel over the beauty in lightning! My father was not blind to beauty, but he owned an appliance store.

In my early years, folk-dancing in summer vied with piano and expression lessons, but when I started high school, Dad thought it was time I learned to dance with a partner. Never before or since have I been jerked about so fiercely on a dance floor as when he taught me the two-step. Mother didn't dance, so her partner for life never learned what a lousy dancer he was. How could I tell him, when I was no better?

Dad was also obsessed with exercise as the only road to good health, as is the whole world today. When Mother caught him reading at dusk without a light, she asked if he hadn't paid the electric bill. He vowed that exercise was good for the eye muscles. Some decades later, I read in Reader's Digest that eye strain is an Old Wives' Tale. It's good for the eye muscles to read under a dim light.

Mother had to die before Dad could reconcile himself to my way of life. Writing was a useless waste of time and energy that deprived me of the exercise I needed to recover from TB. To his shocked chagrin, our family doctor summoned Cape's only chest specialist for an update on my condition, and I wound up with a five-pound weight of gunshot to keep my right lung quiet. Or was that just a ruse to slow down this human talking machine?

Mother was my mentor for the teenager fiction I wrote, much of it first-person humor. But when she lay dying, I could no longer think funny and I settled for research. That's how my teenager novel LOOKOUT SUMMER came into being, thanks to the aiding and abetting of Research Librarian Mary Kempe, twin sister of Paula.

After Mother died, Dad stopped going to the appliance store to take her place as funeral home attendant, and soon discovered how much hard work goes into writing for publication. No one was prouder than he when the contract came for the sale of LOOKOUT SUMMER, along with a sizable check against royalties from New York's most prestigious publisher of teenager fiction, Lothrop, Lee and Shepard.

Dad didn't live to see the book published, but I felt he'd had as much to do with the production as Mother. Perhaps more, because he finally saw his only daughter as a chip off the old block as stubbornly determined to persevere against all odds as himself.