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| Billie Silvey |
| Three Fathers |
| July 2006 |
| Cecil LaRoe Wesley. Cecil Wesley was my father. A jack of all trades, he worked first in a newspaper office as a teenager. He flew planes and taught instrument flying in the Army Air Corps, leaving after World War II to work for my grandfather in his dry goods store. He was a good salesman, but he found it hard to work for his father-in-law. The greatest day of his life was when he bought the Happy Herald, the newspaper he’d worked on growing up. Not having had a father of his own (his father died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 when he was a baby), he lacked first-hand experience at being fathered. He was such a demanding teacher that he couldn’t teach me to drive because he got too angry. But he did teach me to work, to learn and to have confidence in my abilities. He let me run any machine in the shop that I was able to. One day, he took me around some of the machines, explaining how gears worked. Another day, he taught me that you didn’t need to know everything, but you do need to know where to find out. We never had much money, but we had an unabridged dictionary at the shop, where I was expected to look up any words I didn’t understand, and a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica at home for other facts. |
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| Billie with her parents in downtown Amarillo. |
| Frank Edward Silvey. Frank Silvey is my children’s father. He is a brilliant man of varied interests. A voracious reader, he goes through books twice as fast as I do. Phi Beta Kappa in philosophy at UCLA, he taught Kathy logic when she was just a child. After graduating, he joined the Navy ahead of the draft where he served as a journalist on the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in the Gulf of Tonkin and on the staff of All Hands, the Navy-wide magazine in Washington, D. C. Returning to civilian life at a time when philosophy jobs were scarce, he began working for IBM, taking early retirement and becoming a specialist in computer media at Aon, an international brokerage firm. He loves music, singing with the Mansfield Chamber Singers, a local semi-professional ensemble, in two or three annual concerts. They have also performed at Carnegie Hall and toured Germany, Austria and Prague. A highly ethical person, Frank values honesty as the basis of any relationship. That brought him into conflict with his son, Robert, who tends to be a bit looser with the truth. But they overcame the difficulty and now are very close. In addition to his intelligence and compassion, Robert appreciates his father’s sense of humor. |
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| Frank would "honk" when Robert squeezed his nose. |
| Frank and Kathy built "the world's skinniest snowman" at Lake Arrowhead. |
| Andrew Casbey Hall. Andy Hall is my granddaughter’s father. By far the most coordinated member of our family, he was an alternate for the 1984 Olympics in judo, and later was a professional dirt bike racer. He’s a hard worker, repairing and restoring classic Volkswagens for racing for a company that sells worldwide--even in Germany! He loves to ride his classic Harley and to race the VW bug he built from a shell. He has a master's degree in chemical engineering from UCLA and worked for a while for an oil company. But after a friend died, he quit in protest of their loose safety standards. A doting husband and father, he’s proud of his prodigiously clever and strong baby daughter. Our three fathers are very different and still have a lot in common. The women in our family are fortunate that all of them are hardworking, devoted to their families, and men of high principles. |
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| Proud father Andy holding newborn Katyana. |