I have a hobby of trying to come up with a single word to capture the essence of people I know, usually an adjective.  It is not that people are that easily pigeonholed, but rather certain people have a dominant characteristic that they exude, that is central to the core of who they are.  The word that comes to mind with my Dad was “serious”. He was a serious man, a man who took his work, his religion, his family and his civic and social responsibilities seriously.

After my Dad retired, he even took his retirement seriously. Not just the normal things you would expect, like church and civic boards and community projects and events, but his leisure activities as well. First and foremost, he loved his golf game and his friends from Round Meadow Country Club (RIP) – the 3 “Ray’s” and Charlie and Hugh and Coach Earp.  He kept a record of each round he played, listing his partners, their scores, and the temperature that particular day. He played from his retirement at 65 (mandatory then or he would have kept at it) until age 82 or 83, so this was no small fete, filling several spiral notebooks. My daughters still laugh about this, particularly how he even felt it important to record the weather conditions each day.

He also kept another set of notes. After a lifetime of work he found himself at home with my mother during the day quite a bit. She was not a big daytime television watcher but had one soap opera that she had become fond of – very fond of – Days of Our Lives. One p.m. every weekday on NBC as I recall. Doug and Julie and their progeny.

Unfortunately, for a while my mother ended up with her weekly hair appointment at 1:00 p.m. on Friday (presumably to look good for church on Sunday, Friday and Saturday nights being just  2 more weeknights at home in my parents’ lives). And as my Dad liked to say, Friday was THE day on a soap. Something significant always happened – a pregnancy between folks who shouldn’t be having a baby together or a long lost family member believed dead returning Lazarus-like or a car accident –  something BIG always happened on Friday’s.

My Dad, ever loyal and considerate to my Mother, scheduled his Friday golf around the 1:00 – 1:30 time slot so he could  monitor the show in her absence. He transcribed the events of the episode – from the beginning “as sands through the hourglass, so are the Days of Our Lives” through the credits at the end. And when my mother returned he would carefully read his notes back to her. I wanted to tell him that it would all be recapped on Monday anyway, but I decided I didn’t want to diminish his sense of accomplishment.

So I think I have made my point. My father took his life and his responsibilities seriously. His life was serious from the beginning.  The oldest of 9 children (one brother, John, died of the Spanish flu in 1918) born in a hollow near Pilot, a “suburb” of Christiansburg, into the typical lifestyle of that era in southern Appalachia – an outhouse, no running water, subsistent farming, no vehicle.  They moved into the big city of Christiansburg when my dad was old enough for high school, his mother believing education was the way to a better life for her kids.

My father ‘s father, Charlie King, worked various jobs – mechanic at the local John Deere dealership, laborer at the “Mill” (I think they made Purina dog chow), handyman around town and, when things got really tough, as a miner in  southern West Virginia. My Dad would hate it when his father went to the mines and would ask for the family to move there with him, but his dad would always answer “son, a coal camp is nowhere to raise a family”.

My Dad’s mother, Virgie Mae (I kid you not, that was her name), was the salvation of the family. She had something called a “normal school degree” – this qualified her to teach. Frankly, and sadly, I do not know anything about her teaching career. I do know that in more modern times she would have been on maternity leave most of the time.

Virgie Mae’s degree did create a tremendous love of education in her family – all 4 boys graduated from college and had successful careers. All 4 girls were valedictorians at Christiansburg High and, as my Dad would say his entire life,  “were all smarter than the boys”.  My grandmother had my Dad when she was 20 and his twin brothers (Clyde and Cline) less than 2 years later (Irish triplets?) – I cannot even fathom what life was like in the hollow in Pilot in those early years.

The seriousness and purposefulness of my Dad’s life was reflected from the beginning – after moving to town he worked at a grocery store while in high school, also playing football and baseball and winning about every academic and leadership award around. With the help of the Methodist Church, he attended Emory & Henry College, working in the cafeteria and selling class rings, and he again attained about every academic and leadership recognition the school gave. His dream was medical school, but the Great Depression of the 1930’s stole this from him. He once told me he spent the first 20 years of his post-college life trying to figure out how to realize his goal of becoming a doctor.

So my Dad’s commitment and passion turned to education – he spent 40 years as teacher, principal (of Christiansburg High) and superintendent of Montgomery County Schools. As teacher and principal, he was known for motivating average and below average students because “the better students motivate themselves”.  One example – he struck a deal with  a boy who was constantly being chased by the county truant officer (look it up). He promised this student the first day of school that he could skip school  the week of deer season if he had perfect attendance until then. It worked. He struck many deals like that with many students over the years, to keep them on track and so that they knew someone cared. And was watching.

My Dad took time during the first several summers of his teaching career to get a Master’s degree from the preeminent teachers college of the time, Columbia University in New York City. Remarkably for a dirt poor family from the mountains of western Virginia, his brothers Clyde and Cline were in graduate school in the City at the same time, one at City College and the other at NYU. Younger brother Elbert (they don’t name them the way they used to) also ended up in the City eventually,  working as a mechanical engineer in midtown for 25 years. All Virgie Mae’s influence I am sure.

My Dad’s tenure as principal of CHS was interrupted by service in World War II. He did not have to go because of his age and his job, but he enlisted and spent 1942 – 1945 as a bombardier in the “Mighty Eighth” – the 8th Air Force of the U.S. Army Air Corps – in the “European Theatre of Operations” as he always called it. The “Mighty Eighth” remained one of my Dad’s cherished associations throughout his life – in the same category almost as St. Paul Methodist Church, Emory & Henry College and Christiansburg High.

He became superintendent of schools in the mid-1950’s and stayed in that role until retirement in the 70’s. While he would never have characterized himself as such, he was a pioneer of change, implementing desegregation of the county schools (receiving a letter of thanks and commendation  from the NAACP for the smoothness of this significant societal change) and building many new schools which moved Montgomery County “into the 20th Century”.  He hired the first Catholic and the first Jewish teachers in the county and had a gay man as his assistant superintendent.

A couple of these instances showed his sense of fairness and his view of how things should be. And his sense of humor.  When hiring a new football coach for CHS, the interviewee leaned forward and said “Mr. King, I’m Catholic. Is that a problem for you  ?” My Dad leaned forward and said “no, is it a problem for you ?”

Later in life he told me he used to get calls from people in the county telling him that his assistant superintendent was homosexual. My Dad would respond by saying what the man does in his private life was no one else’s concern and suggested that the callers “mind their own business”. It may be startling for younger folks to hear this, but that was quite progressive thinking for the times.

As I said at the outset, my Dad was a serious man. Not that he didn’t have a good sense of humor (he did) or that he didn’t love his hobbies (sports and hunting and bird-watching mainly), but church, family, work and community came first. He truly lived his life as an honorable man, one others looked to for respect and approval. I often joked that he was called Mr. King by everyone in town, even by my mother and her sisters.  His “off duty” clothes, for example for his Saturday morning haircut or his trip to buy fruit at the grocery store or to my sporting events, always included a tie and sport coat, if not his business suit.  He would never have a drink in public, rarely at home, and held himself to even higher standards than he held others.

Recently, cleaning out drawers like most during the thrill-a-month event of the pandemic isolation, I came across a packet of personalized postcards that I had found years ago in my father’s nightstand. They  read as follows:

      Unselfish acts of kindness in behalf of one’s fellowman are too often little noticed.

You have done a good deed which has attracted my attention. In appreciation, I feel that you deserve a word of commendation for your work with ________________________________.

                                                                           Sincerely,  

                                                                           Evans L. King

That was my Dad in a nutshell. A life of personal responsibility and encouragement of the same in those around him.