tupaview: Celluloid and heart-captured moments that matter
By Mike Tupa
March 12, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT
Were he still alive, my dad would have celebrated on March 1 his 90th birthday.
My mind slips back to the happy years of a time that now seems too good to have ever really been true.
Only the photos remain as evidence that they were. The time when I was three or four years old and he took me on one of his truck driving trips. My little stubby legs stretched out, not long enough for my feet to curve over the edge.
A sweet-smiling waitress got us our food at a real live truck stop. I felt like a pint-sized king walking beside my big, strong Texas-born dad. I think he always wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a short sleeve shirt or a long-sleeve one with the cuffs rolled up.
Lean and straight, at about six-foot-high, he sported a wave of black hair, spoke with a slight accent of the Eastern European heritage he had inherited from his parents, seemed always armed with a smile or a joke — not in a gregarious, knee-slapping fashion but with subtlety and timing.
There was the time, my mom told my sister and I about, when one of our dad’s fellow truck drivers rolled his truck off a sharp curve on a mountain highway in the forests of Northern California. The driver was trapped all night in the cabin before he was rescued. He should have died from exposure. But he said what kept him alive was when he thought about Old Tex — the nickname for my dad — and his mannerisms and quirkyisms and laughed himself warm.
The photos are many. Dad with me, dad with my sister and me, dad with my mom, sister and me.
In the year of my 10th Christmas, dad drove sis and I around the upper class neighborhoods of Eureka, Calif., to look at the light decorations. All seemed perfect that evening. All seemed as it should be.
But a year later he wasn’t there at our Christmas tree. He had left us — our little family circle broken forever on this earth. Of course, it hit mom the hardest on multiple levels. She not only had to cope with the rejection as a spouse, but she faced the wrenching task of trying to provide food and other necessities of life for us. How she did it, I’ll never know. It happened all of a sudden. She had no job, no valuables, no money in the bank. We had no phone, no car or many of the comforts of life. Somehow, God provided for us. She eventually went to work as a night shift cleaning lady for $1.50 an hour and we eked out a living.
I eventually obtained a paper route that contributed a few Washingtons to the family pot, although I’m ashamed to say I probably spent more of that money on myself — on sports magazines and candy bars, cans of chili and other little indulgences — than I should have. Many years later, mom said the money I earned and used for the family helped us survive.
Dad? Sometimes he sent — at first maybe once every two or three weeks, soon once every six weeks — a $20 bill wrapped up in blank legal paper. He almost never wrote anything.
But somehow mom always encouraged us to love our dad despite his poor choices. She refused to let hate poison her heart or infect my sister and me. She told us dad had many good traits and had just made some poor choices..
Mom died at age 55 — a happy, content woman — after enduring cancer for several months. She had lived long enough to see both her children get a college education and succeed in the working world — and also to be decent people with a strong faith in God. That was enough for her.
Even though I saw my dad only a handful of times until he died at age 65 — I flew out from Bartlesville to San Antonio and rented a car to drive to his funeral in a Catholic church in tiny Moravia, Texas, the same church where he had served more than 50 years earlier as an altar boy — but I loved him throughout the years.
One of his sisters recall that how — when he was boy and a young teenager — he would sit on the porch with his mother to watch the sun go down. During those contemplative moments, he told my grandma that someday he was going to follow the sun to where it set.
On his 29th birthday, he bawled in front of my mom because he thought his life had been a failure. But he would rise from someone with almost no formal education to become a top-tier executive at a major trucking firm based in Houston and Dallas — and even have his photo featured on the front of a trade magazine. Despite his lack of education — his father required him to stay home as a boy and work on the farm/ranch — he possessed a high natural intelligence. The army assigned him to work with radars, both as a reader and a technician, which is what brought him to California and eventually meet my mom.
When I was 18 — after I hadn’t seen him for almost five years — he showed up out of the blue and took me on a truck driving trip from Utah to California and back again. When our mom died, he flew out from Texas for the funeral. After the final graveside ceremony, he found a nearby tree, leaned on it and wept.
Just three years before he died, I flew from Bartlesville and met him for the 1998 Cotton Bowl game. My sister and I traveled from our respective places to spend a day with him just a few weeks prior to his death — due mostly to a decades-long two-or-more-pack-a-day cigarette habit.
He made his mistakes, he enjoyed many triumphs. In the photos I see a tall, young, dark-tanned handsome man displaying a radiant wide smile tinged with a touch of impishness and a glow of confidence. That’s how I remember him.