Hard task.

I was mainly there to hold her hand.

Not be alone for that, it's hard to get through.

Sorry to hear this.

Your dad must have been a fine man.

With a high school education from a little town in Arkansas, he and a unschooled mechanical wiz co-worker, designed and created a new system for casting molten aluminum. Dad was the metallurgist and Clarence could fix a rainy day. The two of them then traveled the world trouble-shooting plants with the system.

The old-timers at the plant told me he knew the temperature of molten aluminum within 10 degrees by the color.

He raised two sons, adored three grandsons, and four great grandchildren.

To invent a whole new manufacturing system with a high school education.
He was very very bright and entirely self educated.
A self taught genius.
And he was a decent and loving man on top of it all.

I have a feeling he was extremely proud of you and your career.
All the grands.

He had too many run-ins with "college boy" engineers who tried to tell him how to operate the system he had built. They were usually silenced when they learned dad and Clarence had designed the thing.

He made an exception - usually - for his sons, DILs, grandsons and grand DILS.

Then again, I still hear him saying to me "Boy, if you're so damned smart, why ain't you rich?"

The engineers with fancy engineering degrees lecture two men they think are bumpkins
about the machine. Then they find out the "bumpkins" are the geniuses who built the entire system
with their bare hands from the ground up, piece by piece. I'd love to see the look on the
engineers' faces.

I don't care what your dad said about education, his children becoming educated and equal to the college
boys must have felt good on some level.

Well he must have raised you to not put greed before everything else. He did a good job.

He sounds like a character and quite a man.