My father, Carl Eilertz Malmgren
Carl Eilertz Malmgren was a mining engineer who worked 35 plus years for the Gardner Denver Company. For most of my youth (maybe all of it), he was a traveling man. He’d get on an airplane at the Philadelphia International Airport on Monday morning and get off one on Friday afternoon. My father was the strict one and my mom was a pushover. I was one of those rare kids who liked the school week better than the weekend, due totally to my father’s absence. My mother’s mantra for dealing with me was: “Wait until your father gets home.” Horrible words for a young son to hear.
The situation got worse in my adolescence. I started sneaking out of the house on school nights. Most nights I couldn’t get anyone to join me, so I’d wander the streets alone, enjoying the freedom. I went through a phase stealing hood ornaments, and another taking cigarette packs left on the dashboards of unlocked cars. Eventually, my mom found my hood ornament stash–my dad tightened the screws on the weekend.
At the end of ninth grade I wanted to go to Ocean City, New Jersey for Memorial Day weekend to be with my girlfriend, Patti Pellegrini, whose parents had a summer house down there. Every Memorial Day weekend, the students of Upper Darby High School made a mass exodus to Ocean City for three days of carousing to celebrate the advent of summer. Only ninth grade was still junior high–no freshmen at UDHS. So while my brother, a junior, would be heading for the coast, I was not allowed. Then I found out my father would be making one of his rare two week trips over Memorial Day. As soon as he left town, I lied to my mother, saying I’d been invited to a Poconos Mountains cabin with Danny Daugherty’s family. On Friday afternoon I walked out of my school and stuck out my thumb.
More on Ocean City later. (It was truly a Lost Weekend.) When I walked into my house on Monday afternoon, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with a half empty bottle of sherry in front of her. “How was your weekend in the Poconos?” she asked.
I dove into a litany about foot long fishes caught, hikes taken, campfires lit–when my brother Carl appeared behind her waving cautionary arms. “She knows,” he mouthed to me. “She knows.”
My face fell flat. “Aw, Mom, you know that I went to Ocean City.”
She picked up the sherry bottle and threw it at me. I ducked and it crashed on the wall beside me. “Get out!” she commanded.
I spent the night in the car in our driveway. About 6 a.m., I snuck into the house. Dowanee (my grandmother) was already up. “Oooo, you are in big trouble,” she told me. “She called him last night. He is coming home today, cutting short his trip. He is going to kill you.” (Dowanee lived for this kind of intercession.)
I’m not sure what possessed me at that moment. Fear and dread, certainly, but even more so, the overwhelming certainty that I did not want to be there when he got home. I grabbed my bag, walked to the highway and stuck out my thumb. I think I heard Dowanee cackle as I went out the door.
I went back to Ocean City (the only route my thumb knew). Patti Pellegrini’s parents had already banned me from seeing her, but I had a cute friend named B.J. Struble, whose parents had a summer house in Ocean City. I was on the beach with her when her mom came out to tell me that my dad was on the way to get me.
There is a scene from the movie The End where Burt Reynolds, thinking he has cancer, decides to kill himself by swimming out in the sea. When he gets way out there, he changes his mind and begins negotiating with God to get him back to the shore, making promises of future goodness. They stole that scene from my life.
My father picked me up and we drove home from Ocean City in utter profound silence. I knew I was doomed when we got to the house and no one was there. Not even Dowanee. He directed me downstairs to the recreation room and told me to pull down my pants and kneel against the sofa. He took out a willow switch he had prepared (from my beloved tree!) and he proceeded to beat me, literally raising welts on my ass. He would have lost me forever in that moment, except that when he finished, I turned and saw that he was crying harder than I was.
It didn’t end there. My father only got two weeks’ vacation time a year, so it was precious to him. The plan had been for all of us to take a week long car vacation down the eastern coast when he got back from his Memorial Day trip. My Ocean City fiasco deep-sixed that. My father decided that the rest of the family would take the planned trip while he and I stayed home and painted the house. The whole exterior! I wish I could say that we came to some sort of reconciliation during my week in basic, but the opposite is true. My dad was so pissed off about my reckless behavior, and about having to miss the family vacation, that he barely spoke to me the whole week other than assigning me grunt work.
Our relationship went south after that. In the tenth grade I made the final cut and was on the varsity basketball team. My father pulled me from the team when I made C’s on my report card. I began smoking and drinking. In the summer after tenth grade, I had a car wreck on the fourth of July. There were eight people in the car, and everyone was hurt except me! He banned me from driving for the next year. After my junior year of high school, we moved from Philadelphia to St. Louis. My father refused to let me live with my best friend’s family and finish high school at Upper Darby–he transplanted me to a huge school in Florissant, Missouri.
After I dropped out of the University of Missouri when I was nineteen, I got arrested for possession of marijuana–twice. The second time they put me in a St. Louis prison for two and a half months. That was the last straw for my father. He never came to visit me in jail, and I doubt if he spoke a hundred words to me in the next five years.
I became a Christian when I was twenty-six years old. As evident from above, I was in need of reformation, so my conversion involved a radical transformation for me. I soon realized that I needed to try to repair my relationship with my father.
They had retired to the West Coast by then, and I was living in Columbia, Missouri. So I wrote him a five page letter detailing all the things he had done wrong in raising me. He shouldn’t have kicked me off the basketball team, he should have bonded with me when we painted the house, he should have visited me in prison, blah blah blah. I ended the letter by telling him I forgave him for all these offenses and wanted us to be close. While I still believe my motivation for writing the letter was good, it took hindsight to reveal to me just how arrogant and pious my letter sounded.
I mailed the letter and waited. No response. Almost a year later, my wife and I went out to visit my parents in California. Karen was pregnant with Bethany at the time. After a fabulous crab leg dinner and numerous glasses of wine, I got up the nerve to ask my dad about the letter.
“You know, Dallin, I opened your letter and read it…then I read it again. Then I got up and went to my desk and wrote you a letter telling you all the things you did wrong as a son. And believe me, it was a very long letter. But when I finished the letter I decided I would wait three days–and if I still wanted to mail the letter, I would. After three days I no longer felt the need, and so you never got the letter. And you never will.”
At this point my father looked at me like he never had before. “I will tell you my biggest regret as a father, and it doesn’t apply just to you, but to all of my children. I didn’t hold you, I didn’t put you on my lap, I didn’t hug and kiss–I never expressed all the love that I have for you. And the only excuse I can give is that I didn’t know how–because nobody had ever done it with me.”
At this point my dad was crying and I was crying, and I’m happy to report that we had a vibrant, vital relationship for the last fifteen years of his life.
I always tried to convert my dad to Christianity. I would send him books, like C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and we would have discussions. But finally he told me, “Dallin, if you want to convert me, it’s really very simple. All you have to do is convince your mother.”
I never could.
Addendum: I wrote this about ten years ago, for my brother and sisters. The only thing I would add now is that I love my three children with all my heart—and they know it—and I know they love me. I have my dad to thank for that.
This was an amazing story. THANK YOU for opening yourself up. I can relate some what, I grew up in a house that did not have alot of affection. There wasn’t alot of” I love you” that was said or hugs and kisses. Matter of fact unless my mom was saying,” I love you kids and this is how you treat me?” I never heard it from her. Thankfully with counseling and Serenity church, I realized she did the best she could with what she knew. My grandparents were very old school, children seen and not heard and all that. I guess longer story longer I understand on some level.
Ps.…oh btw OMG I LOVE LOVE LOVE the movie The End. One of Bert Reynolds and Dom De Luise best. I want to write all my favorite quotes from it but I will spare you.
Dallin, this is such a beautiful story you’ve written. I was very moved reading it. Bless you so much. You have broken that chain which passes the sins of the father to child and grandchild, for generations sometimes — or rather, the sweet and wonderful love and kindness of God through you.
Thank you for sharing this. Your heart is big. How wonderful that as we age and shrink, our hearts can keep growing. Much love to you.
Eugene
Thank you for sharing this!!! I now know why I felt like you “understood” the rebellion I had when I was in your class in high school. You truly did. You are STILL my all time favorite teacher and I am
So glad teachers like you didn’t turn your back on me. I needed love and you always made me feel like I was smart and I mattered. I’m so thankful for that and I’m even more thankful for breaking the cycle of dysfunction I grew up in. ❤️❤️❤️
Aw Dawn…you make me blush. I remember you well from high school–I confess that I wasn’t aware of the unpleasant or dysfunctional things you were going through. I just saw a kid that was bright and compassionate and not full of herself (humble). You were so easy to have in a classroom. I am thankful to God for how wonderfully you have turned out.
Wow, you have painted a much different picture of you than I would have ever thought of you. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for reading! As teachers, we had to be careful of how much of ourselves/history that we revealed–it could so easily be misconstrued. When students asked me about my history with drugs, I always said “Nope. None. (which was a lie) I worked on the drug/alcohol abuse unit at a mental hospital (which was true).” I’ve never regretted telling that lie.
To me you have always had an indomitable spirit. It’s yours, no one could dampen it. I’m so glad you bonded with your Dad.
Thanks, Gretch! I’d probably substitute the word “blessed” for “indomitable”. I’m so glad you read my blog.