The brief bio: Rodger Ambrose Gerhardstein, born in 1925, graduated high school, enlisted in the US Army during WW II, farmed, learned to weld and erect buildings, fathered nine children, planted many thousands of fruit trees (with the help of the boys, of course), and died at the age of 59 on April 20, 1985.
Rodger and Donald Gerhardstein, circa 1928It would take many thousands of pages to really explain what this guy was about. He was larger than life, and I can’t imagine that too many people packed more life and happiness into 59 years than Dad.
We had our assigned places at the supper table, and mine was at the corner of the table next to Dad, who sat at one end. I felt special because I could sit next to Dad at the supper table. They say that a family that prays together stays together, but I think in our house, it was eating together that really kept us grounded. School, farm and work issues were discussed at the supper table, and the time around that table could be carefree and humorous, or serious and sober, and all points in between. And when the meal was over, the boys cleared the table and swept the floor, while the girls did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen.
Dad grew up on the edge of town, in a large brick house that was influenced by the German heritage of its occupants. He didn’t have a lot of patience for failure of any kind, and throughout his life, it never once occurred to me to challenge him on anything. If he said to do something, I did it, even to the extent of giving up little league baseball because he needed me in the orchard. There was very little discussion about it, and it still puzzles me that he even made that request, considering that it came from a man who was scouted as a pitcher by the Cleveland Indians. Some German was spoken in that brick house, and Dad seemed to have mostly picked up words that he should not have picked up. But one general-usage term he picked up was “Der Meister,” a term he frequently used to refer to himself, in his mock-serious way. When we might ask Dad how he knew something or how he had figured something out, he’d look at us with that gleam in his eye, tap his temple with his index finger, and say “The Master knows!”
A coffee cup I bought for Dad, but he died before I could give it to him.The Master he was, and it was easy for me as a child to assume that he knew everything there was to know, and could do anything there was to do. He was a tall, barrel-chested man, with a laugh as big as his physical self, and he was one of the hardest working people I’ve ever known. His philosophy was: Work hard, play hard, and take good care of your family – and he did all three.
He was also one of the most generous people I’ve ever known. When you are tending to thousands of fruit trees, there is plenty of work, and Dad had a habit of offering that work to people who had found the bottom of existence and had nowhere else to go. Many of the people who worked in the orchard were living in $5-per-day boarding rooms, and had no transportation or visible means of support. Dad put them to work and gave them a paycheck and some dignity.
Time passed. Then the grandchildren came along, and it seemed as if Dad had found his true calling. He loved his grandchildren, and they loved him back. This bear of a man could be as gentle as a lamb when it came to those little ones, and the smile he smiled when around them was all you needed to know about the human race. The first time I walked into the house after he died is when it really hit me – Dad would never be seen or heard in that house again, and the house seemed suddenly different and strange. And I sat on the couch and wept. That was the first time I understood the temporal nature of this life, and that feeling has stayed with me and has colored everything I’ve done and thought about since.
Like the rest of my siblings, and of course my mother, I miss him every single day.
Copyright Richard Heeks - Bearcroft Media
