By Gary Bennett
This article appears in the Frederick News-Post’s “Real Life” section on June 20, 2026.
My dad is not with us anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time. He only got 67 years on this Earth, departing back in 1993.
I was thinking about his role as a dad. Was it something he really wanted or was it something that he was just sort of thrust into and made the best of? We never talked about such things. He wasn’t one to examine his life, or if he did, he sure wasn’t going to share it.
I suppose most dads of that generation — the Greatest Generation — were like that: strong, silent, sure fellows who could seemingly do anything.
They survived all sorts of childhood maladies that claimed so many of them. As young men, they struggled through the Great Depression. They marched off to World War II, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. They started jobs and families in the relatively comfortable ‘50s. They watched their sons go off to Vietnam in the ‘60s and didn’t want them to. They settled into late middle age in the ‘70s and retired in the ‘80s, watching their children leave home one by one.
One Greatest Generation dad, Howard Alva Bennett Jr., was born on Jan. 8, 1926. He would have been 100 years old earlier this year. Heart problems and undiagnosed COPD from a lifetime of smoking unfiltered Camels got the best of him just a few years into a well-earned retirement.
He was the oldest of four children. He was the only boy. His three sisters adored him. He was born and raised in one of the most out-of-the-way places imaginable — Cross, West Virginia. Cross sits on top of a mountain west of Keyser, West Virginia, 20 miles southwest of Cumberland, Maryland. As a young, restless man, I can picture him hoping for a chance to get off that mountain.
Dad grew up very poor in a two-story, clapboard house with a spring running through the rocky property. My grandfather cobbled together a meager living from light farming, sporadic mining and driving a school bus. My grandma kept house.
Dad didn’t talk about his poor circumstances much, but he did let on once that getting an apple and pocket knife for Christmas was his best one ever. He couldn’t graduate from high school. He was needed to help out at home.
Growing up and into his twenties, Dad was rail thin. I marvel now looking at the old, faded, black-and-white photos of him as a kid, teen and then newlywed in his 20s. I never knew him that way.
Little by little, as life progressed, Dad produced quite a belly. I always felt like he earned it. Maybe he felt the same way. He never seemed ashamed of it, often going shirtless in the summer around the house. Exercise and eating right was a foreign concept. He already worked hard and was damn sure going to eat whatever he wanted after nearly starving growing up.
In 1944, at just 18 years of age, Dad enlisted in the Army. He couldn’t wait. He was worried the war might pass him by. The world needed saving from fascism and Dad was eager to get off the mountain and do his part.
He did not see action in Europe but saw some terrible things anyway. The pictures he took of liberated concentration camp survivors looking more like skeletons than humans are just like the ones you see on TV. It still puts a lump in my throat to think that such a young man would have to experience the results of such vicious cruelty.
He married young in 1947 at 21 years of age. My mom was 18. She was from the George’s Creek area of Allegany County, Maryland, and also grew up very poor. I don’t know which parent grew up under worse conditions. Somehow they found each other and made a go of it.
He got his first job in 1947 at the B&O Railroad in Keyser, West Virginia, and made a career of it. He retired in 1990 sitting behind a desk at the B&O office in Cumberland. He became a “railroader” through and through. That was his identity, and he was proud of it.
There would be five children spread apart — almost absurdly — by 23 years.
The first child came in 1950 — Barbara Jean — who everyone called Jeannie. She was the first grandchild for my grandma and grandpa, and I know Dad took great pride in that.
He enjoyed telling the story of grandpa walking across his yard on the mountain with a cane he didn’t need when Jeannie was presented to him in 1950, making him a grandpa.
I came next in 1957. I’m not sure what took so long. I suspect they simply had trouble conceiving. I’d like to think, but am not sure, that my dad was eager for a son. He never said so. Growing up, he didn’t provide much guidance and we surely never had “the talk.” Nevertheless, I believe he did the best he could with me.
He wasn’t a father interested in playing. When I was very young, he would wrestle a bit, and as I grew older, would play catch some. My clearest childhood memory of him is coming home from work, collapsing into an old easy chair and reading the paper while I removed his work boots. He seemed to like that.
Next came my late brother, Todd, who arrived in 1960. He died in 2023 at age 63 from lung cancer. We were never close. I think Dad had a little more affinity for him because Todd was rascally and prone to getting into trouble. I’m sure Dad saw himself in Todd.
That was it, our family was complete, or so we thought. Dad had three kids, a good marriage, a house and a solid job. All manageable “dad” circumstances. Fate had other ideas.
My sister Lisa was born in 1967 when my mom was 38 and my dad 41. That was not unheard of in those days, and they seemed genuinely happy about it. Dad goodheartedly took the ribbing that he had two families.
By the late ‘60s, Dad was mellowing. I think he looked forward to having a little bonus baby he could spoil. Sure enough, Lisa was the apple of his eye. Later that year in 1967, because we now needed more room, we bought a larger house a few miles away.
Dad was so proud of that newly built brick house. Life was good and he had the house to prove it. He had a two-car garage, workshop, rec room and room for a garden out back. But a few years later, to the surprise of everyone, another new baby arrived.
Lori was born in 1973 when my mom was 44 and Dad 47. Uncommon for sure, but they made the best of it. Mom got a job working “cat eye” at the local Celanese plant. Dad worked even harder, coming home late from working overtime. We subdivided the basement to make new bedrooms for our growing family that now numbered seven.
Unfortunately, fate struck again. Mom died just 10 years after Lori was born in 1973. Her death in 1983 at just 53 from breast cancer left Dad a widower and his two young daughters without a mom. We even had the terrible luck of Mom dying unexpectedly on what would have been my wedding day.
I’m not sure there has ever been a man less equipped to take over mom duties than my dad. He was clueless in the kitchen and the needs of young girls. But he did the best he could. Remarriage was never an option. He had always been, unquestionably, a one-woman man.
Thank goodness Lisa was 16 and mature for her age and could take on some of the responsibility of raising Lori. Dad’s one nearby sister and Todd’s wife helped out, too. With the three older kids out of the house and starting lives of their own, it was just Dad and the two girls.
When Lisa departed for college in 1986, it was just Dad and Lori. Finally retired, Dad truly rose to the occasion during this time with Lori. She did her part by looking after her aging dad who had just a few more years to live.
When I look back over Dad’s life, there is nothing earth-shatteringly great but everything that is decent and consistent. He was a good man who did his best with what he had.
He was a simple man who liked simple things. He loved his beautiful backyard, naps on the patio, a vegetable garden he tended vigorously, hot roast beef sandwiches, Piedmont High School basketball, West Virginia University football and meeting fellow retirees at the local gas station for snack pies and chitchat.
Before he passed in 1993, he had the pleasure of getting to know several grandkids. To each one, Dad was the goofy, easygoing “country” grandpa who let you do “dangerous” things. I’m not sure where that persona came from. I sure didn’t see it growing up, but as we all know, being a grandparent is easier and much more fun than being a parent.
My wife and I laugh to this day that it took a week or two to get our son back into the “city” swing of things after a week with Dad in the country, going barefoot, shirtless, dropping his g’s and getting muddy every single day with no chance of a bath on the horizon. But, you know, we wouldn’t have had it any other way.
