A Name is to be Chosen(Ric Wooldridge) A Name is to Be Chosen

No matter how you look at it, when a man or a woman dies there is a wrongness about it. Even when the person of question is generally viewed by those who know them as of no account. They were born and usually had a mother who loved them. They had an effect on the world around them. They loved someone, maybe. As this is going on, their body functions. It regenerates worn out tissue that heals itself, with a little time, in a way that science would love to duplicate. And one day the process just stops. A human being uses a small fraction of the storage capacity of his brain in a life span of eighty years, for most. Then this wonderful machine that is a wonder of design from the tiniest atom in the DNA chain to the nervous system, the respiratory system, circulatory system, olfactory, ocular and optical, all begins to fail at once. Very slowly, and, most often, painfully.

My father died last Sunday and I am trying to express my own honest feelings about his life, and his death. My father and I did not have a good relationship after I was ten years old. We had begun to become less a part of each other’s lives even before that, as my brother and I had started living with my grandparents more and more frequently. At that time he was a carpenter, which is a hard physical trade. It is also a difficult trade to support a family of six. My brother, David, and myself were extra weight. We were left in Yachats, Oregon, while our family moved to Portland. When I was ten years old my grandfather brought me to my parents, and we were together for about six or seven months. At that time I found out that the tools that my grandfather had given me had been listed as collateral against the house that my father had bought in Portland. I found out when I found my mom home crying after school and some men were taking everything in the house, including my tools. When I made a fuss my father told me that I didn’t own anything. When I wouldn’t take that for an answer he slapped me hard across the mouth. That night he left my mom and all of us kids.

Again, I went to live with my grandfather. To this day Cap Wooldridge, the owner of the Yachats Hardware Store and Shell station, is the only family member who ever really loved me. I stayed with him until I was twelve years old. He taught me so much. He was an architect and engineer, and since I became a building contractor in California I realize how exceptional that really is. He used to take me fishing and gold prospecting. Because of him I could read blueprints before I entered high school. This is because I would make a pest of myself at the store, so he set up his drawing machine and showed me how to use all the tools, gave me a radio and told me to keep the noise down. When I was twelve, my grandfather took David and I down to Novato, California, where my mom and my other brother and sister had moved.

Everything was different. Yachats, when I lived there, had a population of 413 people. Novato had right around 30,000. I promptly picked the wrong bunch to hang around with and started the war in my home. My grandmother had given me my first Beatles album. My mother’s uncle gave me a harmonica which was banned from the house. I started to grow my hair out. That meant that I wound up with several military buzzes, seeing that I was the son of an ex-marine.

Right about that time, to make things worse between us, my father was setting a beam on a house he was framing at work. Somehow, he fell and the beam with him, as he landed with his back across the forks of a forklift. He was busted up pretty bad, and after three months in the Veterans hospital, he came home in a body cast. He was unable to lift anything. So my brother, David, and I did whatever we could to take up the slack. No problem. BIG PROBLEM. My father resented it so much that it became a source of hatred for my brother and I.

As David and I were younger, Dad tried to teach us both what martial arts they had taught him in the Marine Corps. David was just not a fighter. Also, he tried to teach us to ignore a certain amount of pain. David never could. Dad didn’t like to give regular spankings with a strap, as many of the kids got. He gave us pushups, and if you didn’t keep pace you got a pop on the butt. It stung a bit, but it wasn’t unbearable. In fact, it could be ignored. But not by David. If it wound up that you had a spanking, my Dad would only give you three whacks, but you had to remain silent and not move. Again, David couldn’t do this. He would scream and jump around the room, and this would make my father mad so that he would swing that belt until they were both exhausted.

When my dad finished Vocational Rehabilitation he was a Barber. We moved from Novato after he’d served his apprenticeship. He bought a shop in Cloverdale, California. By this time I was dressed like one Peter Tork of the Monkees. Paisley shirt and corduroy vest, along with Whaling cords and Beatle boots. When I got to Cloverdale, everybody dressed like James Dean. White Tee shirt, pegged levis and converse tennis shoes, or cowboy boots. The guys instantly hated me. I solved that problem by buying a drum set and practicing everyday for four hours all summer, and two hours daily after school. I also went to work at the Clover Theater.

Of course, I made friends with all the other misfits. By the time I was fifteen I was playing with a band. And I was silly enough to try talking reasonably with my dad again.

“Dad, you know that audition at the Citrus Fair building last Saturday, where I let Dominic borrow my drums so they could try and find a new drummer for their band?”

“Yeah. I remember. So, did you get it back, or are you done hanging around with those fairies?”

“Dad, they all like girls. Just like I do,” I said.

“Well, you dress like one, with those high heels. And I never see you with a girl.”

“That’s because you and mom go to bed at eight thirty. Anyway, the audition was a washout. They were looking for a drummer that was a little older, you know. Well, I just sat in with them and jammed with them for about a half an hour. Dominic called me today and told me that they would like me to be in the band. Dad, there were nearly three hundred drummers there and they want me!”

“It's not going to get in the way of school, is it?”

“No dad. Friday and Saturday night gigs. Mostly college auditoriums, a couple of places like the Citrus Fair and the Healdsburg, Veterans building, a few clubs in Santa Rosa. I can’t leave the stage area on those, because I’m under twenty one.”

“What’s it pay?

“It splits eight ways, after we’ve paid our share for the overhead. Different each time.”

We were all sitting at the table eating dinner and I couldn’t believe the conversation was going so well, only a little queer joke. Might as well take the plunge and get the worse part out in the open.

“Could you do me a favor, Dad?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, the band is trying for a sharp, professional look. There’s certain hair styles that are in right now and the guys are getting them. I need to let mine grow out. Would you style it, when it gets long enough?”

BAM!
I was looking at mom when he hit me. Knocked me right out of my chair. The next thing I know, he is straddling me with a hold on my hair with one hand and an open knife in the other. He was trying to cut off my hair with a pocket knife. My mom and sister were screaming. My brothers were yelling. And I was trying to get away. I grabbed hold of a chair to try to pull myself up and it came down on his back, which was still sore from multiple surgeries.

That got me standing up, but it did not get me away. He grabbed me by the hair again and began dragging me toward the basement, where I suspect a beating was waiting. My mother was pulling the other way with one leg and my sister was helping her by pulling on the other leg. I was so angry, nothing hurt. I managed to twist loose, probably leaving a handful of hair behind, and I left home. While nobody was home the next day I got my clothing and musical instruments and left. I got permission to store my drums in the Theater. I finished my Sophomore year in high school, staying with whoever let me sleep in any kind of dry place. At age sixteen I fell in love with an impossible woman. She was about six months older than I was and she loved me. I had a serious aversion to dating a girl who had seen me playing in a band. The women who chase the band members are not after reality. I’m nobody’s superhero and I can’t live up to that kind of expectation. Plus I value REAL friendships. How can you trust someone who believes in cartoon characters. May and I lived together for the next year. A week after she turned eighteen we were married. She was my best friend for twenty six years.

I was seventeen when I married May. I didn’t have much contact with my parents after that. We took our children over to visit but I would never leave them with my parents. My household was a peaceful one. My parents lived on bad feelings and adrenaline. One night I could hear screaming and yelling coming from my parents house, as we lived four houses down the street from them. I started walking to the house and I saw the front door fly open and my youngest brother run out of the house and into the dark toward Sulfur Creek. As I reached the front door, my sister, Lisa, came out and told me that my father had beat my brother, Randy, with a fireplace poker. I didn’t take time to think, I just went into the house uninvited. Before I said anything my father saw me and told me that this was none of my business. I walked up to him and looked him in the eye as I told him, “If he’s hurt I’ll Kill You.” That was the only time I’d ever saw my father afraid, because he knew I would do it, and he had taught me how.

As it turned out, Randy is tougher than he looks. Randy is the one who truly loves my father. His thinking has always been different than mine. I’ve always loved Randy and have always wished we were closer. But Randy has done what I haven’t been able to do, and that is be there all the time for our parents. It’s not like I’ve ignored them. I call regularly and if they need anything from me they know I will drop everything and come. But Randy is THERE. And the way my father likes an argument, it can’t be easy.

The final spike in the coffin of our relationship was when I began getting an education in the Bible. Seeing that I too was in the building trades, it's only right that I should get three months of disability because of an injury that made it necessary for me to lay still for most of the time. During this time I was contacted by Jehovah’s Witnesses. The only thing my father knew about Jehovah’s Witnesses is that they do not bear arms for their country. He never asked questions. He told me that I couldn’t possibly be his son, and simply quit speaking with me, which didn’t upset me too much because it was his normal behavior.

At that same time my father served as the commander of the American Legion. One morning I was out on the street of Cloverdale, approaching people who passed by with the Watchtower and Awake! magazines. One of the members of the American Legion recognized me, came up to me and took the magazines out of my hand and tore them in half. Then he spit on my shoes. After he performed his little ritual, he went to my father’s barber shop and told him, “Your Commie kid’s out there on the street, disgracing your whole family.” Now I know he went to my father’s barber shop, because I saw him. One of his customers nearly broke the land speed record out of the barber shop up to where I was standing to tell me what had happened. He told the guy, “Listen you. !#^*$#!. I fought in Korea because I believe that my son has the right to believe any damn thing he wants to. So mister, it's about time for you to learn to mind your own business.”

I waited. He never told me about it. But he did, immediately, begin talking with me again.

I didn’t go out of my way to visit my parents over the years. I just checked and saw that everything was going okay for them and left them alone. They were always upset that I didn’t leave my children to stay with them, but neither my father or my mother agreed with my moral or social beliefs and any contact with them always ended up in an unpleasant argument as they would teach Jason and Jennifer the exact opposite of what we had taught them. Their behaving in this manner continued until my children became adults, old enough to make their own decisions.

At about that time, my family and I moved to Point Arena, California, to help out in the small congregation there. There were only nineteen people meeting there, and they all had to drive close to thirty minutes to get to it. In six years we saw that the old Kingdom Hall was demolished and a new one was built. The attendance rose from nineteen to seventy, all of them active ministers who worked in the four hundred and some odd square miles of territory. Then we were asked by our circuit overseer if we would be willing to move to Ukiah, to help a large congregation with a small body of elders.

It was here that everything started to fall apart on me. I’d been married to May for twenty six years. She was the hardest working woman that I’d ever met in my life. If I couldn’t do something, she could. As you might guess, I’ve left out a lot of things that made for a very adventurous life. I’m still in awe of May’s capabilities. And her good nature is as legendary as her stubbornness. She never told me that she’d been feeling badly. Never told me of any negative doctor’s reports. I came home at about 2:00 p.m. on March 1, 1998 to find a note in my back porch window from my daughter.

Something’s wrong with mom. I’m taking her to the emergency at the hospital. Please come quick!
Jennifer

May had suffered a stroke while she was outside cleaning her car. It took two weeks to find that May had ovarian cancer. Along with that she’d had multiple strokes that made her unable to move or communicate. The last two weeks of her life she slipped into a coma. I kissed her goodbye the night she died. Her wonderful smile. Her beautiful blonde hair was gone from the chemotherapy. For the last month all I saw was pain as I gave her shots. I allowed the doctors to punch a hole in her belly and put in a tube so that I could pour in Insure, to make sure she was fed. May had helped so many others through hard times, now she was so humiliated to have her husband have to clean her up. When the doctor told me that there never was much of a chance for her, I came as close as I have ever been to becoming a murderer. The reason being, this same doctor told May and I that we could lick the cancer, that we had caught it on time. With that information, May decided to fight for her life, and I promised her to do my best to help her. No matter how I look at it now, my conscience tells me that I tortured my wife to death. I did things to her that I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy.

That is the only time in my life that my father has ever told me that he was proud of me.

Without May, I thought I was dying. I lost seventy pounds, mainly because I’d forget to eat. I convinced myself that I needed to remarry as quickly as possible. So I started meeting women, intentionally looking for the opposite of that of May’s. I met this sweet, reserved, and very intelligent woman and dated her for about three months. Then I married her. It took four years for her to get thoroughly tired of me and throw me out. Because I reacted in an unchristian manner, I lost all my responsibilities and privileges among my brothers and sisters, and very soon after I was disfellowshipped, which means that I was expelled from all association with the worldwide brotherhood of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and rightly so. (1 Corinthians 5:11-13) I threw away privileges I valued above everything else. I lost my good name and reputation for not paying attention to what is written in the Bible. I also unjustly gave haters of Jehovah something bad to say about him.

My father was one of the first to use my own stupidity as a reason to reject listening to the good news of the Kingdom. (Romans 2:24) This was a deception, because it was just a fact that he simply was not going to learn anything from one of his children. By this age I’d quit rising to any bait my father threw out to start a quarrel, his favorite form of entertainment. But with my mother and brother chiming in it did nothing positive for me.

I wound up living in a tool shed full of rats and black widow spiders for about a year and a half, until one of the doctors got me to use some anti-depression medication. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is what I was diagnosed with. The doctors said that I didn’t allow myself to mourn my first wife. I compounded the problem by marrying a woman with severe mental and emotional problems herself. Without my consent my brain went on strike and said, “Everybody go away! Leave me alone! I’d rather live with spiders and rats!"

Within a few months after that I began to see where I was in the real world again. Then some very kind elders in Turlock, California, where my tool shed home was located, helped me get myself together again. It has been approximately nine years since the brothers in Turlock helped me. I am remarried to a wonderful woman who has two daughters, one of which is living on her own in Ukiah. The three of us live in Magalia, California, and love it here. Once again I am serving God with all my strength. I offer free home Bible studies to all who would like one. I supply Bibles and study aids at no cost. And, best of all, I get to do this with my wife, my daughters, my son and his wife, and my grandson.

I went to see my Dad on Saturday. He looked very small. Over the years he’d had five back surgeries. He’d spent most of his life on pain medications. My mother spoiled him outrageously, and from my viewpoint, he showed little gratitude. Try as I might, I cannot think kindly of a man who is violent with his mate. I also have a problem understanding a woman that puts up with it. I hear that my brother, Randy, is in agreement on this matter. I told my mother that there is no reason that she should put up with that, and made arrangements to come back Wednesday and spend a few days so I could help him at night, which is when he has been hurting her. I made those arrangements. I told Dad goodbye, be back Wednesday. Gave mom a hug. And drove back home to Magalia.

Richard Lee Wooldridge Sr. Died on February 18, 2012 at 11:00 a.m.. I don’t have any tears for him. Mostly anger. I envy Randy’s ability to cry for him, because Randy really loved him. My feelings for my father are really mixed. I did love my father. When I was little I was something to him, and I haven’t talked to David, but my guess is that he probably feels the same of me. I have a feeling of a great incompleteness.

If we lived longer. Like everlasting life. Viewpoints could change. Because of circumstances we turn into different people than we should be. Because we have pain, our personalities aren’t really ours. And because we are so imperfect we have wars and recruit and make warriors, like marines, who are so proud of themselves that they cannot be proud of their children. Because we’ve lived with it all of our lives we think it is normal. But it is just plain wrong!

A capable wife who can find? Her value is far more than that of corals. A wise son is the one that makes a father rejoice. And you, fathers, do not be irritating your children, but go on bringing them up in the discipline and mental-regulating of Jehovah. A name is better than good oil, and the day of death than the day of one’s being born.

Why would the Bible say that the day of death is better than the day of being born? That is because a newborn had made no name for himself. We have no idea what kind of person a new born little one is going to be. But someone my father’s age has made a name for himself. : He played football in Waldport High School. He had my grandfather sign for him to join the Marine Corp. at age fourteen, and he fought in Korea. After Korea, he got married to Dolores Valerie Schreiber, with whom he had four children; Richard L. Wooldridge Jr. (me), David Allan Wooldridge, Randall Dean Wooldridge, and Lisa Rachelle Wooldridge (now Pilgrim). He worked as a carpenter to support his family, and did so as well as that sort of seasonal work allows. After injuring himself he became a Barber, and he helped his son, Randy, into the same trade. For a time, he and my mother were paramedics, as the program was in its infancy in California. For several years he was the Commander in the Cloverdale Chapter of the American Legion. He was a good Barber, quick with a thousand jokes, (many which appalled several mothers). He could talk to anybody and everybody, except his own family. My father made a name for himself. All of his choices are made. Still, everything seems all wrong.

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