Happy Farmer's Day

Thanks to Burb for jogging my memory. I come from a long line of farmers. My dad, Chas Golly III, grew up on a farm, went to college, joined the Army Air Corps, and served stateside teaching aircraft repair during WWII. Grandfather Les Golly (Chas II) farmed outside Rochester, Minnesota, as did great-grandfather Chas Golly I. It was great-great-grandfather Golly who migrated to Minnesota from Nova Scotia, where there are still quite a few Gollys.

Long story short, Dad got out of there at the first opportunity. After the war, he and my uncle ran a restaurant in Spring Grove, and when he was 31, the year I was born, he saw the possibility of making more money selling insurance in the Rochester office of Metropolicy, a big company that was getting bigger. He stayed with the same company for the next 31 years, until he retired the year his grandson Jess Golly (Chas V) was born. So much for the begats and the begots.

Dad was ambitious, and he believed insurance was a way to help people be secure in the material world. He was a successful salesman in Rochester and an even more successful assistant manager in LaCrosse. He moved up to be an underwriting consultant and then a district manager in Detroit - still essentially a teacher-coach - organizing teams of salesmen to ensure their own financial success by insuring the lives and assets of other people. He really enjoyed the contact with people, breaking it down so the clients would understand what's in their interest. He collected a million stories, and he liked to think he was "doing well by doing good."

I remember him getting up early to study for the CLU exams (like an advanced degree in insurance) day after day, year after year, because he wanted to do well. He didn't just want to pass, he wanted to be the best at what he did, and he was justly proud of those diplomas hanging on his office wall. When the entire business changed and the territory was reorganized, he became the campus recruiter for much of the midwest, interviewing college seniors for potential jobs with Metropolicy.

I sent him a card for Father's Day, of course, and besides how the kids are doing, most of what I had to say was how the tomato plants are doing, the peppers, the beans, and the strawberries we picked from plants that he and Mom brought us last summer. He's always had a few tomatoes, a few rose bushes, pumpkins, you name it, and a bunch of geraniums growing in planters. Check out our house - geraniums in window boxes, hostas all over the place, apples falling pretty close to the tree.

So Sunday, I'm sitting on the patio in Methodistville talking to Jess Golly on the phone. He's working with MoreGardens Coalition planning a summer camp for neighborhood kids to learn about plants and soil and birds and mammals and insects and worms and fungi and all that cool stuff in their community garden in the Bronx. Jess is telling me about the cheese they made, the cider they pressed, and the mulberry wine they're making. And I realize that there's more continuity between us than I thought.