Vickie Fee

Daddy knows the drill

May 15 would have been my dad’s birthday. I shed a few tears and I texted with my brother and sister— the only two people in the world who understand that loss and who share many of my sweet memories of our wonderful daddy. Little brother pointed out that Daddy would have been 90 this year. I had lost track of time.

Our dad was quite a guy. I still think of him often, especially on holidays and anniversaries, like his birthday. I see a lot of him in my siblings. He was easy-going. He was a hard worker. He was generous. Our former pastor referred to him as a Christian with his sleeves rolled up, because he was always ready to help people out. And he had a great sense of humor. I like to think I inherited that from him.

My dad in his usual ball cap and my brother as a teen at one of the annual DuPont company picnics. My brother, like me, worked at DuPont as a college student during the summer.

For more than 30 years, he worked for DuPont. Starting out as a line worker at the factory and working  his way up to a supervisor. During college, I worked three summers at the DuPont plant where my dad worked. It was good pay for a college student. Two summers I worked in clerical jobs, but my third summer I worked, along with all the other college hires, in janitorial. I built up a few muscles in my biceps and forearms that summer. And I enjoyed spending most of my time around other college-aged people. Because of our last names, everyone knew who we belonged to.

One afternoon, fellow college student and work pal, Jackie, and  I decided to slip out of our regular area and go to a neighboring area at the plant for afternoon break. They always had popcorn then. We had fun visiting with some different people, some we had worked with previous summers. We thought we were home free. But, we ran into a complication. The plant decided at that very moment to conduct a major emergency drill.

The pretend  emergency, which was a potentially fatal gas leak, happened to be “located” between where we were and where we were supposed to be. Jackie and I tried a couple of work-arounds, but the upshot is: we were cut off and in the final report we were listed as missing and presumed dead!

While this may have been a pretend scenario, the powers that be were deadly serious about these drills.

When I met up with my dad in the parking lot for the ride home, I wondered what he would say. I was certain he had heard. He was smoking his pipe and from behind a plume of smoke, he said, “Glad to see the reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“Did you get ribbed by the guys?” I asked.

“No more than usual,” he said. “I suppose Jackie’s okay.”

“Yeah. But we’ve both been summoned to Building 1 in the morning. I plan to be humble and apologetic.”

After a beat, he said, “That’s how I’d play it.”

He never gave me grief about it, although he did mention he thought it was the first time they’d had fatalities during a major emergency drill.

Daddy knew I loved him, but I’m not sure I expressed how much I liked him. We never know how long we’ll have our loved ones on this earth. Just that it’s never long enough.

Did you ever have a summer job as a teen or college student? Did you ever work for or with a parent? Share in the comments.

26 thoughts on “Daddy knows the drill”

      1. I’m so very happy to say my Daddy is still alive and relatively well. Your post did stir my memories, though. Made me more appreciative. Tore at my heartstrings a bit, knowing you and so many others have already lost their dads.

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  2. Your dad sounds very special, Christian with his sleeves rolled up & a sense of humor would also be a great description of Jimmy Carter!

    As a teen I worked at the candy counter at a movie theater, after the manager was fired due to theft we were all let go & they hired all new staff so I got a job as cashier at a deli. My son was lucky in college when his stepmother got him an interview at her company, he worked there every summer & was offered a permanent job when he graduated.

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    1. I’m glad that worked out for him. Btw, I didn’t get fired for”dying” during a major emergency drill. Just got chewed out a bit.

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  4. Your dad sounds like a terrific guy, Vickie. And you’re right: It’s never long enough that we have our parents with us. Sigh….

    My primary job as a teen was baby sitting for the kids of my parents’ friends and colleagues. Three bucks an hour to feed the kids an already-prepared dinner, put them to bed, and then sit around and watch “Mannix” and “Hawaii 5-0” on TV. Not a bad gig.

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    1. Most of my babysitting jobs were pretty low stress. There was once with a crawling baby, a four-year old and a seven-year old. The 7-year old disappeared for a while on his bike. I toured the neighborhood pushing a stroller and calling out his name. I was about to call my parents to come help me look for him when he turned up. I was scared to death!

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  5. Thanks for sharing, Vickie. Your dad sounds wonderful. And I echo Leslie that it’s never enough time…

    We owned a restaurant while growing up, so I spent my time serving food, clearing tables, and ringing up customers.

    P.S. Wonder if that drill experience led you on the path to mystery writing…

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  6. Vickie, what a beautiful tribute to your dad. He sounds like a wonderful man – and someone it’d be a lot of fun to hang out with.

    I taught drama at the local summer camp during three summers. For my last summer between junior and senior year, my dad got me an internship with a commercial director he worked with. (Dad was in advertising.) The guy was a gigantic a-hole, which Dad didn’t know because as the client, he got treated very well. But I brought home all the dirt on Ruben – who was having an affair with one of his coworkers – much to my dad’s surprise and occasional amusement!

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    1. Those both sound like cool jobs, El. So many guys from DuPont came to his funeral and shared stories about his sense of humor — and his kindness. It was so nice of them and meant a lot to us. (And only ONE of them mentioned me not surviving the major emergency drill!)

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  8. That’s a great memory, Vickie.

    I never worked with my dad because he died before I was old enough to know him. I was raised by my mom and my aunt, his sister. Ma worked any number of jobs to make ends meet, and for a while she did clerical work in a large commercial bakery. In those days, minimum wage was $2 an hour, but workers in the bakery got something like $15, because you had to work in 120 degrees all day. Ma talked to someone in the office, so I got a summer job there in 1970, the year I got out of high school. That time is still seared into my memory (pun intended). Because I was summer help, I didn’t have a regular station. I did janitorial work, packed donuts and put loaves of bread in a giant oven that was like the fires of Hell. I had to get up at 3:30 am on Sunday to go in and help get the donuts for Scranton PA out the door by 7 am.

    Of course there was no air conditioning, but there were electric fans that move the hot air around. The only place that was cool was the break room — I lived for that fifteen minutes when I could get in there and drink an ice cold coke. The old guys who worked there told me I was nuts. On their breaks, they stood outside in the heat drinking hot coffee. They didn’t want to ruin their acclimation, I guess.

    One day the AC in the office where Ma worked went out, so the bosses took the electric fans off the donut line where I was working for the ladies in the office. At the time, Ma didn’t know where the fans came from, but she was mortified when she found out that us troglodytes had to roast a little hotter so the office ladies could be cool!

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    1. Oh my gosh, Tom. That was one tough job. But the Sunday donuts in Scranton had to go through! Probably ended up in a church hall, far from the fires of hell.

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  10. What a touching memory and tribute, Vickie. ❤

    I didn’t work with/for my dad, but when I was a kid, I spent many hours at his law office during summer vacation, waiting for him to finish work. He’d set me up with a typewriter and tell me to write stories. I think that’s where my love for writing began!

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