Paying tribute to my father, Ed Wisniowski Jr., 1945-2024.

The connection between a child and their parents is a complicated affair made more challenging by the pressures of life and the passage of time. In her series about presidential wives on Slate.com, Melinda Henneberger pointed out that understanding marriage from the outside was impossible. Only the two people sharing their lives can understand the dynamics that apply to their romantic and domestic partnership. This observation is also accurate about the bonds between a father and a son. This week, I lost my father to heart disease. He was 79 years old, and I loved him deeply. I feel compelled to write about him this week.

My father grew up in Southern Chicago after the Second World War. He was part of a large working-class cohort of people working in the steel and manufacturing industries along the border of Illinois and Indiana. He was part of a segregated America where riots and violence often greeted efforts to integrate housing. A welding accident at the factory claimed the life of my paternal grandfather, highlighting the lax safety standards that put industrial workers at risk. This tragedy forced his widow, my grandmother Ruth, to remarry. Unfortunately, her new husband was terrible to both her and her son.

An existence of deferred dreams and casual neglect of human dignity could have embittered and jaded my father. Instead, like many people his age, he sought refuge in the booming folk and jazz scenes of the time. He also chased a dream of getting off a factory floor and working in an office. He worked in the clerical pool before the technological advance of copy machines. He managed shipping and receiving for the catalog company Spiegel. When that did not pay the bills, he worked in a steel mill and then manufactured Cheerios cereal for General Mills. The goal was always the same. He wanted something better for himself and the future. That something better was my mother's arrival in my father's life. Their romantic bond grew, and in 1965, to the horror of my grandmother and grandfather, they eloped and began a life together. It was a loving partnership of over 58 years.

My father joined a company known as SeaLand, which in the 1960s pioneered the use of shipping containers, which are now universal in the global economy. Today, that company is known as Maersk. He had two sons, me in 1968 and my brother William in 1973. The family retreated from the city to the suburbs where we would grow up. The 1970s must have been a strange time to raise a family. The counter-culture of the 1960s collided with the women's liberation movement, and the improvement in civil rights upset the worldview my father understood. His kids were in integrated schools and learned to count with "Sesame Street" and read with the help of Bill Cosby and Rita Moreno on "The Electric Company." Teachers were responsible for sorting students into workers, leaders, and missits. My father had two misfit children for a long time, but thanks to his support and my mom, we would find our way.

Educational and social changes swirled alongside political and economic turmoil. The Watergate scandal shattered our trust in government. The fall of Saigon illustrated the limits of American military power. The oil embargos and inflation of the 1970s created a feeling that the good times after the Second World War were over, and the deregulation of air travel and trucking took those industries and made them more accessible while at the same time undermining financial and personal security for countless workers. The Iranian Hostage crisis was the cherry on top of a decade and the beginning of what would be called the Regan Revolution in America.

Working as an operations manager at a trucking company, my father faced a tough choice. To support his family, he reluctantly took on the task of breaking the local teamsters union. Plenty of business people were forced to make these choices in the early 1980s, and I suspect that is why we distrust big business today. As the 1980s continued, the culture transformed with the revolution televised on MTV and androgyny flaunted by musicians like Prince, Eurythmics, Motley Crue, and most scandalously of all, Culture Club. It was also the beginning of the plague years of AIDS, which was a death sentence for anyone who contracted it. We paint that time with rose-colored glasses now, but those years were heavy with the fear of nuclear war or the crushing blow of a factory closure that could gut a whole town.

In high school, I learned discipline, a love of writing, and exposure to the arts, including speech and theater. It set a path for the remainder of my life. It puzzled my father because it was not a sport or vocational training. As a teenager, I found my unique way, and my father watched confusedly. I would go to college first at a local community college and then on a scholarship to a Division One school. He did not understand speech and debate, but he had attended all the events he could when I was in Division One. This time, he also transitioned from the trucking business to real estate.

As a real estate broker, my father decided to help first-time home buyers and provide estimates and valuations for banks and mortgage companies. He met each transition and change head-on with stoic determination and good humor. Grudges and anger never festered because his focus was clear: providing for his family meant putting those things aside.

I always wanted to make my father proud of me. He was always grown-up and knowledgeable, understood how to work with difficult people, and had a work ethic that made me envious. After suffering his first heart attack when I was a senior in college, one of the first things he said when he woke up in the cardiac unit was, "The kid stays in school!" Even in a moment of well-justified selfishness, he always thinks of others.

My father would fight heart disease for the next thirty-six years. He would suffer another heart attack, quadruple bypass surgery, and plenty of stents and angioplasties. The experiences made him appreciate life more and gave him a purpose in his later years. As he grew older, he became more of an equal, providing me with guidance and asking for technical support on his real estate business. We always loved to argue about current events and science-fiction novels. The strangest part of maturity is seeing your parents as they are warts and all. Despite realizing that your parents were imperfect, you still love and respect them. I am deeply grateful that my father and I reached that point. I will never be half the man my father was, but thanks to him, I became all of the man I am today.

My life is going to feel empty with my father gone, but I will have plenty of memories and a few pictures to remember him. Everyone I have spoken to since his death said he was a lovely man and a decent soul. I cannot think of a better description of my father.

Good-bye Dad!