George H. Fleetham was born in a Michigan farm house in January of 1925 and died in Rockland County New York in September of 1974 after falling off his bike at a railroad crossing. It was a “one in a million” tragedy. I was twenty-one when we laid him in the ground in the country cemetery in Sunfield, Michigan. I’ve often wished that I had a list of his sayings that I could give to my kids, but I don’t have many to pass on. Either Dad wasn’t a talker or I wasn’t a listener. I suspect it was a lot of both.

He worked as a chemical engineer for Mobil Oil at Lexington and 42nd, but he was a carpenter at heart. I remember the summer of 1965 when he took a month off to work on the old farmhouse in Michigan. In those days, before I enlisted in the East Coast Hippie Revolution, I was still his number one helper and for three weeks I pounded nails, lifted windows, held ladders, and cut boards. I learned how to measure twice and saw once. We worked sun up to sun down and the pay off for me was a promise to play golf before we returned to New York.

On the last day of his vacation, after he had squared in the last window, he took me to the Portland Golf Course. I can still remember him wandering down the fairway in orange shorts, shanking every other shot, and grunting all the while how much he hated golf …. because he couldn’t control it. We finished in the setting sun and walked into the club house bar, crowded with laughing men. I can still see him chugging down cold beers while I tore into the best cheeseburger of my life. I remember he looked at me with his warm brown eyes and told me that I had worked hard and that I was a fine son.