The Acorn Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree
by John Prescott
presented June 19, 2005
at the 1st Unitarian Universalist Church of Springfield, Missouri

On this day when we pay homage to our fathers, I would like to tell you a little more about mine than I did last year. Those of you who missed the Christmas boat parade story will have to wait for another occasion. Today, I am making my first attempt to try to put what I know of my father’s life in perspective, which perhaps will motivate the listener to do the same for his or her father in turn.

My father had a passion for airplanes all his life, and was a pilot from the age of 17 until the day he lost his pilot’s license at the age of 70 because he couldn’t recall how to weight and balance a Cessna 150. During World War II, he flew “the hump” with the U.S. Army Air Corps, ferrying supplies from India to China over the Himalayas in support of the war against Japan. When I was in China to pick up our baby daughter this past spring, I got to see the airfield in Chongqing where my Dad must have landed. When I knew him, however, it was very rare that he was actually working as a pilot. Instead, he had a variety of jobs ranging from working at a service station, to driving a motorized sightseeing train around Ft. Lauderdale, to driving a cab. His inability to really find a career for himself had a lot to do with his bipolar disorder, but we did not know that at the time. It was while driving the cab that he would sing gospel songs to his customers in an effort to convert them to Jesus. In those days he would come home with the number of souls he perceived he had saved that day. On a good day, he might have nine or ten.

Dad always seemed to be able to come up with a “grand plan” for something we were going to do. This, apparently, was one of his consistent traits, since before I was born he had been obsessed with the idea of delivering people’s laundry to them by helicopter. When he met my mother in 1957, he owned a laundry service, and became convinced that helicopter delivery was the way to go, the wave of the future. A friend of his even gave him a watch with a helicopter inscribed on the back along with the words, “Jack Prescott’s Helicopter Laundry Service.”

As I became old enough to understand what he was saying, I heard him speak many times of the need to have little flip panels of maps built in to the sun visors of cars, and that he wanted to participate in its invention. If he could be aware of it, he would be pleased with that feature that is electronically available on cars today.

Dad’s “grand plans” often proceeded without a tremendous amount of advance planning or attention to detail. Last year I told you the story of the Christmas Boat Parade of 1971. That incident was a classic example of a grand plan gone awry. A similar, but less spectacular situation took place in about 1972, when my Dad invited me to join him for a religious retreat at Lake Wales in Central Florida which he was attending as a result of his participation in a group called Christian Businessmen’s Committee, or CBMC, a name which now seems like something of an Oxymoron when I think of Jesus chasing the moneychangers from the temple. I’m not sure how Dad came to be involved with this group since he would never have described himself as a businessman, but I’m sure it had something to do with his singing. Dad told me that we would be staying in a hotel on beautiful Lake Wales, and that there would be lots of other kids—it would be great fun. There was a bus taking most of the group to the retreat (which was about a three-hour drive away), but we couldn’t leave until Dad got off work driving the cab, so we had to drive later on our own. As a result, it was about midnight when we got to the hotel. Dad checked in, and the desk clerk told us that the children were to stay at the “camp” which was located about a hundred yards down the trail outside the side door of the hotel.

Apparently I had forgotten the aforementioned incident when, in February of 1974, my father invited me to attend with him the dedication of the new sanctuary for Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Ft. Lauderdale, at which Billy Graham was to be the featured speaker. My dad was singing in the choir there at that time, and would be sitting just a few feet from Reverend Graham, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to see this famous man in person. When we arrived, Dad went toward the choir entrance, and I went in the front door, only to discover that to get a seat in the sanctuary, I needed to have a ticket previously provided by the Church to its members. Those of us without tickets were invited to kindly take a seat in a large section of bleachers outside and watch the ceremony on close-circuit television. I never did catch sight of Billy Graham in the flesh.

Dad was a very religious, evangelical person by the time I knew him. He told me that he had undergone a conversion after drinking too much and being sick while serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He had promised God that if He got him through that night, he (Jack) would turn his life over to Him. Dad was a zealot about converting people to Jesus. He had a way of striking up a conversation with nearly every person he met, and one way or another the flow of the conversation would get around to religion. Then he would work on converting anyone who turned out not to be a Christian (this included Catholics).

The private school I attended from 7th through 12th grade had a large percentage of Jewish students. This was because a lot of people were disenchanted with the public schools at this time, and neither Christian nor Catholic schools were a viable option for children of what was, and still is, a large Jewish population in South Florida. Much to my embarrassment, Dad would occasionally pick up students I knew in the cab when they called for one, and of course he would be sure to tell them he was my father just before he began his conversion efforts. One of my Jewish friends gave me my Dad’s contact card and told me that my father had tried unsuccessfully to lead him to Jesus the day before.

My younger sister and brother had their own experiences of this kind. My sister tells of standing on a piano while all the men at Dad’s prayer meeting spoke in tongues and laid hands on her as they prayed for her cold to go away. When my brother was in elementary school, Dad, in his late 50’s and no longer working, would walk him to the school bus stop and remain there to evangelize to the other kids and their parents until the bus arrived.

Still, his efforts must have met with a certain degree of success. When I was earning my masters degree at Florida State University in Tallahassee, I worked at a retail music store for a year. One day, I sold some music to a man, and the name on his credit card was Phil Kelley. It turned out that he was the same Phil Kelley who had worked with my Dad (and with me as a young child) in the North Carolina Outdoor Drama, Horn in the West, in the late 1960’s. He asked how my father was doing, and told me that Dad’s religious influence had been partially responsible for turning his own life around. I wondered how many other people there were out there who might say the same thing.

As embarrassing as it could be to sit in a restaurant with him as he made friends with all the waitresses and anyone sitting nearby, Dad’s gift of gab wasn’t always a negative thing. On a family trip from Florida to North Carolina one year, we were pulled over for speeding by a South Carolina State Trooper. My father was able to convince the officer that he had just put two new tires on the front of the car that for some reason were a different size than those on the back. This, he argued, would have the effect of giving a false speedometer reading. He wished the trooper a Merry Christmas, and we continued on without penalty.

Because he was such an accomplished and well-known singer of gospel music, Dad was always in high demand to perform at churches wherever we were. (At this point, a recording of Jack Prescott singing “September Song” was played.) All we had to do was attend a church somewhere, and before it was all said and done, he would be up front singing a solo. Then we were likely to be invited to stay for the pot luck after church, and we wouldn’t leave until Dad had finished talking to every person who would stay and listen to him, and ours was the only car left in the parking lot. We always stayed until the last dog was dead. Later, as I became a trumpet player, he would arrange for me to bring my horn along and play something, often in conjunction with something he was doing. We performed together once at a drive-in church in North Miami. After we finished performing, the people inside applauded, and those outside in their cars honked their horns in approval.

Recently, I’ve begun to hear my own son ask me if we are going to have to talk to everybody before we can leave some function, and it has made me stop and think. It is at times like this that the old adage, “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree” aka “the apples don’t fall far from the tree” comes to mind. Am I really destined to become my father? In some regards, I know this is not possible. I don’t flirt with waitresses in restaurants. I don’t read every road sign out loud and ask the passengers what the signs mean while on long trips in the car. I think ahead and work out most of the details in advance when embarking on a “grand plan.” In many ways, I have been highly motivated in my life to not be like my father, and I’m embarrassed to say there was a time when I didn’t want to be associated with him in public.

Yet, genetics being what they are, it is inevitable that certain aspects of his inner being have found their way to me. Perhaps it is self-flattery, but I like to think I have achieved some of the things my father could have had the potential to achieve had he not been hampered by bi-polar disorder. He apparently exhibited signs of mental difficulties as early as his late teens, but was not correctly diagnosed until 1977, when he checked himself into a hospital during my freshman year in college. I remember coming home for Thanksgiving break and finding out that he had been in the hospital for several weeks. On Thanksgiving Day of that year, I played my trumpet for the entire ward of patients with whom he was staying. He was so proud to be the center of everyone’s attention for as short time as I visited him.

Later, the disease manifested itself in manic episodes. In the fall of 1984, he suddenly began eating and sleeping very little, and playing racquetball a lot, and he lost a great deal of weight. At Christmas that year, he recorded himself singing gospel songs with a Salvation Army band in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and became obsessed with my engineering a tape for him to send to Pat Robertson in hopes of being invited to perform on his weekly televised service. The tape was sent, and, of course, he never heard back.

Dad’s brother, Miles, is a brilliant person who speaks several languages, and was a life insurance executive until he retired. I always enjoyed it when he came to visit, and I think that in him, I saw the person my father might have been had it not been for the chemical imbalance in his brain. Apparently, their father (my grandfather, whom I never knew), favored Miles, the younger son over my dad, and I can understand why. Still this must have been a very difficult thing for my father to deal with. I remember him telling me how upset he was when they told him, at age 16, that his father had died.

So what does all of this mean as we contemplate Fathers Day and the genetic code? I’ve come to suspect that one of the reasons I have been (and continue to be) so driven to complete tasks and to succeed at whatever I’m trying to achieve is that I’m reacting to what I perceived as my dad’s lack of success as measured by our society. Looking at him from my perspective today, however, my impression is that he gave me the best that he had the capability to give, both genetically and in his words and actions. I wish there were a way for me to tell him this, but at the age of 82, Alzheimer’s and dementia have taken their toll on him, and he can no longer speak intelligibly, and he appears to understand very little of what is being said. As of this writing, he still lives at home, but will probably be moving to an assisted living facility soon.

In one way or another, we are all products of that which our parents give us, after which we are molded and shaped further by the world. It remains to each of us to determine how we will use the particular gifts we have inherited, or to quote from Scott Fitzgerald, “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I close with a poem which was written by Dylan Thomas for his own father, and which makes me think of my own father in his current predicament.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.