Today would have been my father’s 94th birthday. I miss him, although I can’t help thinking he would not be pleased with our society today (and I shudder to think about what he would have said regarding Florida’s handling of the Covid pandemic. He had no patience for fools.) He had struggled for several years to understand the changes happening around him and it left him frustrated and a bit bitter sometimes.
Case in point – his nickname was Whitey.
It wasn’t a racial thing. Wasn’t related to skin color at all. It was all about his hair, its color and eventually its lack.
Dad had rheumatic fever when he was about 14 years old (he really wasn’t sure of the exact year.) And almost immediately afterwards his thin, silky pale blond hair began changing color and falling out. By the time he joined the Army in Dec 1950 his remaining hair nearly pure white and very fine. His skin was also very pale (maybe it was that Scottish heritage from his father?) but the nickname given to him in the Army – which stuck like glue for the rest of his life – was because of his white hair. His fellows at Camp Carson in Colorado called him Whitey and then his fellow students at Kansas State called him Whitey. And his fellow employees at the Great Bend Herald Tribune, where he was a staff photographer, called him Whitey. By the time he and Mom married in 1957 he was not only white haired but 3/4 bald. By the time I was born he had very little hair and what he had was so white it was invisible against his pale skin. And the nickname seemed more appropriate than ever I guess.
It wasn’t really a family nickname – his parents called him J.R., Mom called him Jay and J.R. and of course we called him Dad. But in the world outside the home he was almost always Whitey.
Later in life he would run into people who assumed that nickname was a statement – that he was a Klan member or something similar. People occasionally got confrontational. And mostly he got frustrated and confused. He had a close friend whose nickname was Pinky because he had pale skin which burned very easily in the Florida sun. And no one made anything “racial” out of it. Dad couldn’t understand the way some people made a snap judgement without even getting to know him.
Now I’m not saying Dad wasn’t prejudiced. He was, but not about skin color. He, sadly, had cultural prejudices. Mostly against Eastern Europeans and Latins. He and I had lots of arguments about that. But it wasn’t based on skin color but on cultural issues – religion, family size, retention of their native language. Prejudice is ugly regardless of what it is based on. But it is really ironic that Dad’s nickname occasionally got him labelled with a prejudice he didn’t have.
When I ordered Dad’s marker for his niche in the Cape Canaveral National Cemetery we included his nickname as part of his name. I got a call from the Cemetery officials that was quite awkward. They wanted the nickname removed because of “the connotations.” I explained very carefully the history of the nickname and the family’s strong desire to see it used on his marker. I explained that his entire obituary had been written using his nickname because very few of his lifelong friends in Florida knew him by any other name. We compromised. It’s there but its not part of his name. Its a word at the bottom of the stone, part of the quote. Sigh. It’s still a source of misunderstanding.