Lessons taught by my father

By Mark Hopkins

This is the week each year when we celebrate Father's Day so, obviously, my father is on my mind. He has been gone for many years, but I can still feel his influence in subtle ways every day.

In recent years an essay titled "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" made the rounds, and it touched us for its simplicity and its truth. My father had his own simple truths, and they were born in a childhood of great difficulty. His mother died when he was 6. His new stepmother kicked him out of the house when he was 9. He slept in the loft of a livery stable until he was grown. At 15, he lost his arm in a hunting accident.

Despite such a poor beginning, all who knew him could testify that his most dominant trait was his buoyant spirit. He really did believe you could accomplish whatever you set your mind to. That was true of the small things -- tying shoes or threading a needle with one hand -- or the more important ones, such as learning the value of treating people well and of hard work.

Necessity made him a high-school dropout. His first job was as a "call boy" for the railroad. Before the time of telephones, filling a crew for the trains necessitated someone taking a list of men who were scheduled to work and walking all over town knocking on doors to let them know when to report. Dad used to smile and say, "It was a lousy job, but I got to know everyone in town." After the stint working for the railroad, he opened a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, graduated to running a food service for those who built the atomic bomb in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s, and finished with his own cafeteria that served a solid 1,800 people a day in the 1960s.

My father's glass was never half empty. Even if it was, any minute it was going to begin filling up. He liked the word "adaptability." He would say, "It isn't how many times you get knocked down; it is how many times you get back up. You can't control what happens, but you can control how you respond to those unfortunate happenings."

Dad used to say his sons were the only "wealth" he would ever have. One son was a career Navy officer who commanded ships in Vietnam and the South Pacific. The other spent his life with the education of young people and, later in life, morphed into writing columns like this one.

If my father had a motto it would be, "If it is to be, it's up to me." The lessons of my father's positive attitude are still being taught, both in this generation and the next. Self-reliance with a positive attitude. Now that is a legacy worth passing on.