This series is about the person you feel has had the most influence on your life and has shaped the person you are today, and what you have achieved. That might be in reaching personal goals or to do with your career.
This is of course also a marketing opportunity for your blog and books, and a showcase of your writing skills.
At the end of the post you can find out how you can participate in this series.
Warren D. Neal, the World War II veteran, farmer, and Dad I could always count on by Joy Neal Kidney
I recently read The Men We Need by Brant Hansen. He says that masculinity isn’t measured in physical strength and trucks and hunting. It’s about taking responsibility, making those around him feel secure.
Dad was a farmer, so he was in the field early until late during much of the year. He also did carpentering. He didn’t fish or hunt, or even own a truck while I was a child. But he was a dad we could count on, to attend our piano recitals, band concerts, and school activities, even coming in from the field early to get cleaned up in time.
He took us to church every Sunday and taught a junior high Sunday School class for a time. I’d forgotten about that until I posted something about Dad on Facebook and followers began to mention that Dad had been their favorite Sunday School teacher. He was faithful.
Family at Grandpa and Grandma Neal’s farmhouse, about 1958, near Dexter, Iowa
Because Dad also raised cattle and hogs, we only took one family vacation–to the Black Hills of South Dakota. But we regularly took drives in the country, usually to check the crops or to “count the cows,” ending up at the local Dairy Sweet. I’ll admit that for most of my life, I took Dad for granted.
Learning to Shift Gears
Dad, Mom, Gloria and me, 1952, taken at Grandma Leora’s, Guthrie Center, Iowa
I was so thankful for Dad’s patience when learning to shift gears in the family car. Both parents were too busy to teach me, so one day I practiced in the farmyard until I could find second gear. When Dad came in for dinner and heard about my experiment, he said he’d work with me after supper. I spent the afternoon revving and clutching and shifting, between the house and the barn, getting the feel of that slippery second gear, the complicated coordination, grinding the gears every so often. I concentrated on focusing through the windshield while my hand groped for the lever to locate the next gear.
After supper Dad, still in his overalls, climbed in the passenger seat and directed me north on Old Creamery Road, toward the town of Dexter. I coerced the gearshift into second okay, but the Chevy began to buck in third. “Just rev it up a little more in second.” Dad was calm.
“You have to go slow on gravel,” he warned, “because it could slide you into a ditch. Always keep your speed and car under control.
“You’re doing fine. Let’s go up to the corner and turn west–won’t be any cars to meet. When you get to the corner, push in the clutch as you use the brake pedal. Don’t shift down until you’ve gone through the corner.”
Shift down? More coordination–shifting and turning and clutching and braking, all at the same time!
Dad anticipated when something new would occur and prepared me. His calm instructions gave me confidence. Dad warned again about speed. The tires raised dust at 20 miles per hour. The road sign said 65/55 night. I couldn’t imagine being brave enough to drive that fast.
To Dad’s reasoned running commentary, I backed out of driveways, obeyed stop signs, and gave a two-fingered “farmer wave” to an on-coming pickup. “Always wave. Might be a neighbor.”
Tired but elated, I drove slowly but smoothly into our own driveway. Soon I too wheeled all over the county, having learned Dad’s nuances of negotiating rural roads.
And keeping in mind what would become Dad’s most frequent final blessing: “Just be awful, awful careful.”
I lost my dad when he was just 62. He hadn’t reminisced about becoming a pilot in WWII, and I never asked him about it. But I had an epiphany about just that while sitting in an old warbird. Here is that story:
Reconciling Dad the Farmer I Knew with Dad the Veteran Pilot
1945 Marfa, TX check out the bonnet…
An engine smoked and sputtered. One propeller began to stir on the aging bomber. Then another. The third engine started to shudder and choke–satisfying sounds of old piston engines. Finally the last one coughed to life.
A few minutes earlier I had been sitting in the pilot’s seat of that World War II Flying Fortress–an old B-17 like the one in the movie “Memphis Belle”–in the seat where my dad sat seven decades ago.
My dad, the farmer.
As I sat in the cockpit, looking out the pilot’s window at the gold-tipped propellers, I tried to imagine that Iowa farmer teaching cadets to fly (at Marfa, Texas), and later being in charge of that big four-engine bomber.
In my mind’s snapshot of Dad, he was wearing Big Smith overalls where, in the bib, he carried a pocket watch and a DeKalb bullet pencil–with a little metal cap to protect the lead point. Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. A Pioneer brand seed corn cap. Tired leather work boots and Rockford socks.
Dad taking a break with a bottle of coke before he finally got a tractor with a cab, 1974, south of Dexter, Iowa
Vignettes of him–guzzling Coca Cola from a small curvy glass bottle. Leaving for the field on his red Massey Harris tractor. Overseeing his crops from his perch on a gate. Throwing back his head when he laughed. Penciling neat diagrams and math formulas on scraps of paper. Catching a nap at the table after the noon dinner, his head resting on folded arms. That’s the Dad I knew.
My husband, an air traffic controller at the Des Moines airport, had called to let me know that a B-17 was there just for a short stop-over. So I rushed out with my camera and asked if I could see inside–that my dad had trained in one in 1945.
One man led me up a short ladder into the fuselage, then over a catwalk above the bomb bay, to the cockpit. I climbed down into the bombardier station, then up into the pilots’ area. He told me to take all the time I wanted there.
As I sat in the pilot’s seat, a strong breeze buffeted the bomber. It swayed slightly. It sighed and creaked, just like Dad’s barn on a windy day. I had forgotten about those friendly sounds.
My thoughts turned to Dad’s thorough instructions to my sister and me for our summer chores–how many half-buckets of corn and oats to feed the hogs, how full to pump water into the cattle tank. And Dad patiently teaching me to shift gears on the Chevy’s steering column in the barnyard the summer I learned to drive.
It began to dawn on me that he would have used that same thoroughness and patience with young cadets. And I could appreciate that, yes, he would have been put in charge of a multi-engine plane and crew of ten. He eventually became Commander of the even larger B-29 Superfortress, with a date set to leave for combat over Japan–when the war came to an end.
While in that rare bomber, I was blessed with a glint of my dad in his other life–as a young lieutenant, in charge of aircraft instead of tractors, airmen instead of livestock.
To exit the old warbird, I was told I could climb back through the plane and down the ladder, or I could drop out the way the crew did, through a small door right below the cockpit–by grasping the edge and swinging out. There’s no photographic evidence, but I did it, just like Dad had long ago.
I returned to the other side of the chain link fence to watch the Fortress take off. The four engines were coaxed awake, one at a time. Did Dad also love that deep throaty growl?
In a few minutes, the awkward-to-taxi aircraft headed toward the runway–nose up, tail down. It lumbered behind a hangar. A roar signaled takeoff and the Plexiglas nose emerged from behind the building, pointing the bomber down the runway.
By the time that sleek rugged old warbird leveled off and disappeared over Dallas County, I could readily reconcile my dad the farmer with Dad the young World War II pilot.
Warren D. Neal, the World War II veteran, farmer, and Dad I could always count on.
©Joy Neal Kidney
My thanks to Joy for sharing this wonderful snapshot of her life and in particular her Dad… who sounds amazing.
Books by Joy Neal Kidney
A review for Leora Dexter Stories: The Scarcity Years of the Great Depression
After reading Joy Neal Kidney’s first book, Leora’s Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family in World War II, I eagerly awaited the follow-up. I am happy to report that Leora’s Dexter Stories: The Scarcity Years of the Great Depression did not disappoint.
The Leora of both books was Kidney’s maternal grandmother, Leora Goff Wilson, who was born in 1890 and died in 1987. Through reading about her, I feel I have come to know her almost as a member of my own family. I am quite fond of her, in fact.
In the the preface, Kidney provides this description of the woman you will meet in Leora’s Dexter Stories:
“She was an uncomplicated woman with straightforward goals: a home of their own, surrounded by family, and high school diplomas for her children. She was determined to do the hard work to accomplish her mission.”
Leora documented her family’s life and her own experiences through letters and journals. Kidney’s mother Doris provided her own first-hand accounts, and Kidney supplemented the family stories with extensive historical research. Family photographs are also included in the book, which further contributes to giving the reader a real sense of the individual members of the Wilson family and the family as a whole.
The book uses the techniques of creative nonfiction–story narration, scene, description, and dialog–to bring the Wilson family and their experiences during the Depression to life. One particularly striking example of Kidney’s adeptness with creative nonfiction is how the same belongings reappear throughout the book as the Wilsons move from one rundown house lacking indoor plumbing to another. At each new place, they are home when Clabe, the father, hangs “the velvet Home Sweet Home picture, the plate rail, and their familiar family photos” on the wall.
The section that made the biggest impression on me came early in the book: In the time before vaccines for childhood illnesses, having nine children come down with whooping cough at the same time, the two youngest, five-week-old twins, dying from it. There were several other experiences that stayed with me long after I finished reading the book: the sense of being looked down on by people in town for being on relief; how it broke a man’s spirit to be unable to provide for his family, no matter how hard he tried; the two eldest sons joining the Navy, marveling at the abundance of good food and sending money home to the family.
The book is balanced with some light moments, my favorite of which is Clabe’s impulsive decision to lop off the top of the family’s Model T truck to make a “sports roadster.” The photo of the roadster with youngest son Junior on the hood and pet squirrel Rusty on the front fender is not to be missed.
In addition to highly recommending Leora’s Dexter Stories to readers interested in the heartwarming story of a family struggling to overcome economic adversity, I would urge teachers of 20th-century US history classes to assign the book as supplemental reading. (A set of discussion questions is included at the end of the book to assist teachers and book club leaders.)
Read the reviews and buy the books: Amazon US – And: Amazon UK – More reviews: Goodreads – Website: Joy Neal Kidney – Facebook: Joy Neal Kidney Author – Twitter: @JoyNealKidney – Instagram: Joy Neal Kidney
About Joy Neal Kidney
Joy Neal Kidney is the oldest granddaughter of Leora Wilson, who lost three sons during WWII and was widowed, all during a three-year period. Through the decades, Joy helped take Memorial Day bouquets to the graves of those three young uncles, not knowing that only one of them is buried there–until decades later, after the death of her courageous little Grandma Leora.
Joy became a writer in order to tell her stories.
She and her husband, Guy (an Air Force Veteran of the Vietnam War and retired Air Traffic Controller) live in central Iowa. Their son is married and they live out-of-state with a small daughter named Kate.
A graduate of the University of Northern Iowa, Joy has lived with fibromyalgia for two dozen years, giving her plenty of home-bound days to write blog posts and books, working with research from decades earlier.
All of the “Leora books” tell stories about world and national events reaching into the American Heartland–westward expansion, two world wars, pandemics, how mental health issues were handled, the Great Depression, and surviving great personal losses. But they are hopeful as well.
Some guidelines.
- If you look back at your life, who would you say had the most influence on who you are today or your life’s achievements?
- It might be a parent, grandparent, or other relation, perhaps a teacher, employer or someone who you only encountered for a brief period, but changed the course of your life in a positive way.
- It might be someone you have never met but influenced you in another way such as by their actions or a book that you read by them. This is a tribute to that person.
- It can be a post your have already written or one that is unpublished.
- If already published just send me the link.
- I will top and tail the post with the usual links and a recent review etc.
- This is an opportunity to show off your writing skills and to encourage readers to follow your blog or buy your books…dress to impress.
What I need from you sent to my email sallygcronin@gmail.com
If you are have been promoted here before.
I just need your word document 1000 to 1500 words and two or three photographs to break up the text.. perhaps of you at that stage in your life or one of the person who you are writing about.
If they are an author then an Amazon link so I can copy the cover of their book or books with a link.
If you have not been featured on the blog before
- In addition to the word document and photographs for the post I will need your information.
- A profile photograph, up to date biography, social media links for website or blog, Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.
- If you are an author your Amazon Author page, Goodreads and Bookbub if you are there too.
Once I have received your post
- I will schedule and let you have the date.
- On the day of publication I will send you a link for the post.
- It would be great if you could share your post on your social media.
- I ask that all comments are responded to individually as it does make a difference to the number of times the post is shared.
- When shared on social media I will tag you if you are on that platform and it would be great if you could thank the person who has shared the post..
I am looking forward to discovering the amazing people who have inspired you and sharing them here in this series… get in touch… thanks Sally.
Image by 
Image by 
Me, Aunt Vera and Jane
Smorgasbord Blog Magazine 