"Birthplace"

BIRTHPLACE

In the photograph, a tow-headed boy of perhaps four is standing next to the open back door of a blue Ford station wagon of late 1960s vintage. The boy, with his crew cut, maroon-gold-and-white cotton short-sleeved shirt, and brown corduroys, is smiling and pointing at the backseat. Although the photo itself does not make this clear, he is pointing at the behest of his father, for whom this simple gesture is simultaneously humorous and deeply meaningful.

The boy is my younger brother, Lowell, and our father was Calvin Munson Fair. On what is likely an early spring day in 1971 or 1972, the station wagon is parked on the somewhat snowy garage apron in front of our old homestead house (which at that time wasn’t so old, having been completed in late 1967). On the far-right edge of the photo appears the back bumper of our other family car, a brown four-door Dodge Dart Swinger, which is parked inside the garage. The photo is indicative of the progression of our family: First, Lowell was the third and last of three Fair children (after me and our sister, Janeice). Second, the appearance of two cars is important because for many years we had only a single vehicle, which meant that my mother was often left without transportation (other than our 1948 Ford tractor) on the homestead when Dad traveled in to Soldotna to work at his dental practice. Third, the big white colonial-style house replaced the single-wide trailer that we had lived in since October 1960. Fourth, inside the house was the family’s first telephone (a rotary-dial affair on the wall of the mud room) and first color television (replacing our old Zenith black-and-white set), and somewhere roaming around outside was the first family dog (an independent-minded German short-haired pointer named Queen).

But when it was taken, this photograph was more about looking backward than looking forward. Dad had captured the image to forever remind him of a story….

On a cold and stormy Jan. 25, 1968, Dr. Paul Isaak was preparing his single-engine aircraft to carry two passengers on another flight to the Seward hospital. Isaak had made hundreds of such flights—in fact, in 1983 he would estimate that he’d made at least 2,000 such trips—through Resurrection Pass between his medical practice in Soldotna and the peninsula’s only full-service hospital in Seward, where he often performed surgeries, delivered babies, and responded to emergencies.

Here’s how (in the book Once Upon the Kenai) Isaak described the Jan. 25 flight: “I was going to take one of my obstetric patients and her husband to the hospital in Seward for delivery. This man was a prominent citizen in the community, and it turned out that when we got about five miles out of Seward, the weather deteriorated rather rapidly and I was unable to continue, so we turned around and came back. And so he [the prominent citizen] drove to Seward, and about seven or eight miles out of Seward she [the obstetric patient] decided that she was going to have that baby, and indeed did have it in the back seat of the car. Fortunately, I had some of the bare necessities with me to manage the delivery in the car, even though it wasn’t the most ideal situation. Everything turned out fine for mother and baby, and they spent several days in the hospital after that experience.”

Of course, it’s no great surprise (given my set-up in this story) that the “prominent citizen in the community” was my father, and the “obstetric patient” was my mother.

Even now, my mother is terribly embarrassed by this story, despite the nearly half-century that has passed since it occurred. For the last two or three years, I have been wanting to write about this story in my local history column (the Almanac) in the Redoubt Reporter newspaper, but my mother has forbidden me to mention her name or to use the photograph of Lowell. I realize that I don’t technically need her permission, but I would like her blessing.

Her response: “You can write about it when I’m dead.”

On Oct. 10, 2012—unbeknownst to our mother—my brother told the story in Anchorage as part of a presentation for his Toastmasters group. A couple of years ago, I told the story in the newspaper, but I left out all the names and the crucial photograph. Writing it up in this blog is probably the best I can do right now.

But I do have to add this: In the photograph (displayed above), my brother is gesturing toward the backseat of the family station wagon because my father had (a) opened the back door, (b) stationed my brother there, and (c) told him, “Lowell, point to where you were born.”

I can imagine him laughing almost too hard to press shutter button. And I can imagine that when his yellow box of slides came back from the Kodak Company, he laughed again. (He may or may not have shared the photo with my mother at the time.) And I know he laughed when I placed the photo in a special photo-memory book that my siblings and I created for Dad’s 70^th birthday back in 2002.

My mother, however, still is not laughing.