I completely agree. It’s important to keep our parent’s legacy alive. I’m glad Jason stopped by, it’s nice to have a man’s perspective (aside from my husband’s, of course) on my posts.

I must admit that I “borrowed” some of it from Next Slide Please (his biography), but some of it he shared with me while we watched the Trials at Nuremberg together. Love you too!

Jason – what a fantastic tribute to your mother, and what a role model she was. They say you can tell a lot about a man by how he treats (and feels about) his mother, and you, sir, must be a stand up guy. I’m sure she’s as proud of you as you are of her. My husband is a momma’s boy, too. 🙂 I’m saving my post about my mother for veterans day 🙂

PS. Thanks for the feedback on the post. It’s hard to summarize sometimes, but then I hear Kristen Lamb’s voice in my head and I keep at it until it’s as high concept and brief as it can be.

I don’t have a cool story like that about my dad, but there’s always been an incident from my youth that I’ll never forget that made him a hero to me:

I was a very picky eater when I was young and my mother had to find creative ways to get me to eat just about anything. I remember one night at the dinner table I had asked to be excused and she told me I had to finish my potato first.. (I had half of a baked potato that I had barely touched.) I sat and pouted and picked at the potato and even put a tiny bite into my mouth. I asked again to be excused. Got the same response. When my mom got up to start clearing dishes from the table, my dad reached across the table and stuffed the entire potato half into his mouth then put his finger in front of his lips. When my mother returned from the kitchen she smiled and told me that I could be excused.

To this day I’m not sure if she knew that my dad had eaten the potato of if she really truly thought that in about 45 seconds I had polished off that spud, but either way, my dad was my hero that night. And I’m sure he was probably still hungry since we didn’t have a lot of money and sometimes mealtime was scarce, but again – my dad, my potato-eating hero.

Thanks for sharing your lovely story.

Patricia Rickrode
w/a Jansen Schmidt

Tom — at the end of the war, my dad was injured (not sure of the nature of the injury) so he was sent to the hospital in Nuremberg. He was on a ward where the injured soldiers slept with the Americans who were guarding the German prisoners accused of war crimes (the Trials at Nuremberg were going on and they were committing suicide so they had to be guarded one-on-one during this time). At night, the guards would share stories of the prisoners with the injured men.