Remembering My Father

Robert Meriwether Fortune

June 13 would have been my late father's 98th birthday.

Plagued by heart attacks and other ills, he only lived to be 71.

He was father to me (named Bernice for his mother), my sister Jane, my brother Robert and sister Ellen. Jane was his favorite and she was heartbroken by his death. She died two years later, at the age of 47. Robert died suddenly at the age of 60.

My father was born and raised in the South and always retained the ways of a Southern gentleman, despite living many years in the North. He was courtly and believed in such maxims as "moderation in all things," although his fondness for Jack Daniels was an exception.

When we were little, my father would cook us a breakfast of "dippin' eggs" and toast on Sundays and then take us to the playground at Elmwood Park in East Orange, where we grew up.

My sometimes Southern accent is not contrived, but inherited from him.

He was a true company man, bringing home blueprints for his engineering work on weekends. It was sometimes hard to get his attention, absorbed as he was in his work. But as many executives found out in the wave of conglomerations in the late 1950s-early 1960s, loyalty meant nothing and acquisitions displaced lots of people with corporate titles.

Although he commuted before from East Orange by trolley to his job in Harrison, his new employment required using a car to travel the U.S. Mid-States to visit clients. It was with his newfound driving skill that we went to visit our relatives in Tennessee one summer. We got over being called "the Yankees" and even learned how to ask for a"cold dope" instead of a soda at the local store.

In retrospect, my father was striding two worlds and, I think, preferred the culture of the South over the North.

When we knew he was ill and he had expressed a wish to move back down South, my sister Jane and I conspired to overcome my mother's objections and get him there, even if it meant kidnapping him away from her. But it proved too late, as his illnesses took over and he died up North. We did travel as a family to scatter his ashes in the very small town where he was born in Tennessee.

Among his own siblings, Harry Noble Fortune was an attorney, James Herman Fortune became a chemical engineer, Mary Evelyn Fortune won honors as a worldwide social worker and Charlotte Bernice Fortune Hethmon was a pioneer in public television. Baby Billy died in infancy.

With the recent death of my Aunt Charlotte, all of my father's generation is gone.

My children and I will remember him as long as we live as a wonderful example of a father, sometimes flawed but always caring to the best of his ability. My siblings among ourselves called him "the old boy" and our children called him "granddaddy." May he rest in peace.

--Bernice Paglia