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Its coming up on father’s day again and again I find myself holding
conversations with a man who has been gone from this earth for sixty two
years. Since I was only six months old when he passed away, I only know him
by the stories family and friends have told me through the years. While
some were witty and funny, others were sad or dramatic. People who have
depended on others to embellish on their reputation have gone from ordinary
people to men of great renown. Others have gone from complete losers to
great successes. I could tell you tales of that sort about my father, but
it would
serve no purpose. Maybe the real reason is because I do not have the word
power necessary to raise him above all other men. So I will tell you a few
short items to give you an idea of who he really was and if per chance my
father comes out the other end being just short of Will Rogers or Andrew
Carnegie it will be because of his life and not how well I can spin a tale.
Dennie Duff was a born of humble beginnings, lived an
unassuming life and died in obscurity. He came into this world with nothing
and left with less as far as possessions are concerned. He never owned or
drove a car. What little he had accumulated in his savings account was taken
when the banks closed during the great depression. When he wasn’t working
on the railroad, he was producing as much as his small farm would allow
including seven children. He saw to it that his family never went hungry
and taught his children that a good name was worth all the money in the
world. (If you would talk to any of his children, they would have opted for
the money.) That, as far as the world is concerned, is the story of my
father.
The merchants who had done business with my father would
gladly tell me how he loved to stop by their store and swap tall tales with
the locals. He once had a man convinced that at five twenty in the afternoon
the true distance was only a mile and a half from the top of Keeny’s Knob to
the Sun. Another time he told the story of how he saved the express
passenger train from derailing. It seemed, as my father told it, he was
working on a section gang in a remote part of West Virginia when he noticed
early one morning there had been a landslide which covered the tracks and
had taken out the telegraph wires which ran along them. My father said he
jumped up on the camp cars that the crew was staying in and taking a couple
of stove pipes, he wrapped them around his legs and went up on the side of
the mountain with the telegraph wires attached to the stove pipes, where
there was a large rattle snake den. He provoked those snakes into striking
the stove pipes in such a way as to send an SOS signal to the closest train
depot who flagged down the train.
He also had a serious side. Once a flash flood had almost
wiped out a coal town in the southern part of the state. My father
organized the section gang to help clean up after water had subsided. If he
gave his word he kept it. If he made a deal he went through with it. If he
made a debt he repaid it. Mr. Rowe, the president of the bank, loaned me the
money to buy my class ring when I graduated from high school, because of my
father’s reputation. He said he would not normally loan a seventeen year
old money, but if I was anything like my father, he would get his money
back. He did, I remember making every payment.
I miss my father very much. You would think it would be
hard to miss a person you never knew. There have been occurrences in my life
when I wish he could be there to share those moments with me. Even now, I
find myself talking to him, asking his advice. I am now older than he was
when he died, yet the father figure doesn’t change. The older I get the
more I revere him, not for what he achieved in his lifetime, but for what he
left me as a legacy for mine.
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