Dad Osborne... do they make them like him anymore?

Today is his birthday... January 17th.    So this is a REPOST

In continuing this theme, I want to write about my father-in-law.


It is hard to know where to start when writing about someone. Is it their physical appearance? I can tell you that he changed over the years.... went from someone at the height of his career to someone who should have been seeking retirement. Is it his name? That, believe it or not, was hard to pin down. Was it who he was? Like all of us, he was evolving and constantly changing. Was it what he liked to do? Again, that changed, too. What he wore? Oh there are plenty of things to talk about. Will any of it tell you who he was?

First, his name. The last business card he had said his name is G. "Don" Osborne. I believe his name was Garland Darrell Osborne but I think his name could have been Garland Richard Osborne. He mostly went by Don which is my Dad's given name. Don was a nickname he got after the war or during the war where they called him "Don Juan". I know there are stories there but they did not matter for me. For me I thought of him as another Dad, but because of that little dance we did... I generally called him Mr. Osborne. I hated that because it implied distance and formality in our relationship that was not there.

He was a very tall man. And if you measured him perhaps that height is just my imagination. But he still seemed big. He was always so skinny. He ate rich rich foods... like nothing I had ever seen before. I had never had butter in my whole life and he and Orval could eat a whole stick of butter or more on a plate of spaghetti while carbo loading for a race. He struggled with ulcers and smoking and who knows what his worries were... but he always enjoyed food. Running kept him thin.

He wore suits to work until he moved to Oakdale where the suit was replaced by cowboy shirts, cowboy boots, bolo ties and that cowboy hat. He touched his roots by moving to the farmland of California and he loved it. When he was not working he wore sweats and running clothes. He could dress up fine... but at the end of the day with his running shorts and that old bandanna on his head and he blended with all the rest.

I probably met him the first time at some family dinner. Since by then, two of their children were gone from home... whenever anyone came home it became a FAMILY dinner. They had them all the time with lots of wine and beer and laughing, joking, and of course those dinner debates. Before the dinner debates came the puns. These people would throw puns back and forth and I could hardly keep up. Dad Osborne presided over these dinners like the patriarch he was. He was proud of his boys and he doted on his daughter and he had great fun with his grand children.

He was an insurance salesman. When I first met him he was running an insurance office in Willow Glen. He had like 20 guys working for him. He wore a suit and they all tried to impress him buy buying us nice presents at our wedding. We were so naive about that. Every year the insurance company would send Don and Iola to European countries or cruises to recognize the producers of sales. My mother-in-law would have to make gowns and fancy dresses to wear on the party nights. Those were things she endured because she was very much a homebody.

The thing about Dad Osborne was that I think he was in his element no matter what he did. He could shovel poop, take care of his cows and chickens, talk to the farmers in Oakdale to sell them insurance, work with the Lions club, be a working member of the Steeplechasers running club in Oakdale/Manteca, run trails with his dog and run races - Bay to Breakers! with his family all dressed together, wear a suit and attend meetings and parties, work on the cars with his boys, play with his grandchildren, barbecuing a big london broil for the family dinner, ... whatever he did.. he did it with gusto and joy. I think that is one thing I will always remember about him.

He came to Oregon the September after my divorce. I was running my first marathon and he insisted that he come and run it with me. I had a running partner but totally recognized that Dad Osborne came to share this time with me. I never would have run a mile without his being a runner. Before I married Darrell both of our fathers (named Don) celebrated New Years Eve running a race together. My Dad is in great shape and is rather competitive but likes engines to go with his effort. But it was still an awesome memory that our Dads did that together. Later after 3 kids and struggling with smoking off and on... I had finally given up smoking and taken up running. It was a healthy exchange and I ran for 15-16 years happily. The thing was that loving running was something Dad Osborne and I always shared. The very last time I saw him, he told me the doctors were telling him to quit. I was getting the very same advice from mine. We both commiserated how difficult life would be without running. It was impossible for him to think of what that life would look like. A month or so later, he fell and broke his hip while trail running and died from complications.

My father-in-law had not always been that good of a husband and father. He was preoccupied and I imagine making a buck as a salesman is not that easy. But as he aged he recognized his failures and tried hard to do the makeup work. It kind of goes back to the grace thing. Without grace one must work very very hard (and it still doesn't work). But the touching thing to me was always how hard he tried. Perhaps he recognized the jewel of a wife he had, perhaps he just knew how much pain had been inflicted, perhaps he just wanted peace... whatever the reason... he worked hard to please and honor and respect. He treated my mother-in-law like a queen and as she seemed to be failing he filled in the gaps. He showed me what love in action looked like.

So here are just some memories:

He made wine. At the beginning he would gather fruit on the street from his runs in San Jose and make wine with them. There would be wierd wines like raisen crabapple wine or prune wine or rhubarb wine. He was a prolific wine maker. I was never a wine drinker and so I was not a judge of whether or not they were good. However, he did make a cranberry champagne .. started it about the time I was pregnant with Stephanie. It tasted like cranberry juice and 7-up and had a kick after a glass or two which was always surprising. The cranberry champagne was popular among all the female family members and he could hardly make enough. But he tried, bless his heart. One of my greatest memories was one Easter Sunday with all the family at the house in Oakdale in the garage, bottling wine from the barrells with an assembly line going. Wine brought people together in the Osborne clan.

Dad Osborne had an old Studebaker when I met Darrell and the two of them worked to keep it running. It was quite the rare car and would probably be worth big money now. There had been several old cars like Oldsmobiles that had been wrecked at the old house in San Jose. He just buried the parts in the back yard. At one time he used old car parts as walls for a winer cellar in the back yard. He always drove the big long cars .. not cadillacs but that kind. The smell of success.

Once in the new fancy house in San Jose before they moved to Oakdale, he found some marijuana seeds somehow and decided to see what it was like and so he planted them and grew them. I think someone stole his crop before he could harvest. But I do think he grew some in Oakdale and tried it just to see what the fuss was about.

I have big memories of sitting on the deck at the house in Oakdale. The house was up on a bluff above the town with pasture all around. And the deck ran the whole length of the house facing west and so you could sit there and watch the show every single night. The sun sank slowly into the mountains. It was our nightly entertainment.

There are people who come into your life for a season that will last a lifetime. I see my father-in-law in the faces of my children. I learned from him things about myself. He spoke things and did things that were painful and that I struggled with. Yet always did I know that he cared about me. DKU