Rest in peace, Dad.

Ronald G. Albright, Sr., 1928-2010

My father was a hard man, a product of hard-scrabble times. He fought with his three older brothers for a place at a meager table of the Depression years and he carried these lessons of want and hunger and poverty all his life.

Little educated, he worked the hellish open hearth furnaces at TCI and then joined the Air Force, I suspect for a brief respite from the hard life. When he left the Air Force, he married and - in short order - had 3 children. His "big break" came when he passed the Postal Service Exam and he went to work as a mail carrier. He retired from that job after 34 years and never worked a day after.

After the dissolution of his first marriage, Dad discovered that there was a Angel in his future: my stepmother, Glenda, who he married July 6, 1961 and he spent the remainder of his days worshiping the ground she walked on. They traveled the world together, were devoted to each other as few couples can ever claim and lived in the first house they bought until the day he died. It was their haven from a world they understood less and less as time passed but they didn’t mind - they had each other.

He had two great loves in his life: his soul mate, Glenda Ann, and a 25 cent cigar smoked with a cup of coffee on his patio, his perpetual bride at his side. He sought little else in life as these sufficed a simple man’s wants.

When he began to develop the illness that would eventually take his life, his gentle wife was constantly at his side. When he called out in the middle of the night in anguish or fear, she would rush to his bedside to comfort him. He could depend on her love, even when his mind was decaying and his once strong body, was betraying him.

He taught me more things than I will bore you with here but a few will suffice: he taught me to love my country, work hard - even when you don’t feel like it, and face adversity with a brave face, even when you are dying inside.

Today is a day, not to mourn the passing of a simple man with humble roots, men to whom monuments are never built but who, themselves, built a nation. It is a day to remember how this simple man with meager talents forged a full and happy life through sheer force of will and the sweat of his brow. He lived to walk the streets of Moscow, Rome, Berlin and all of the Carribean with the love of his life. He leaves this unforgiving earth owing no debts, begrudging no man, and the love of his life secure for her remaining days.

Certainly, he knew tragedy - the death of a daughter and a grandson - and faced them with dignity and a inner strength that few can muster. He knew the joy of a grandson that will carry his proud name, Ronald Gene Albright, well into the future. But most of all he knew that his simple guiding truths - hard work and self-deprivation - passed onto him from his hard days, were worth it, after all.

For me, he was my hero, my role model and my friend. And what father can ask for more than to be loved and admired by his son? A son who beams with pride to call him "Dad".