This post will be about my dad’s life. I can’t really call it a typical obituary, but then I’m not a typical cat.

Harry Harold Gimble, Jr. was born in April, 1942 in Delaware. While he was still a toddler, his mother divorced his father on grounds of cruelty. She moved to LA, California to start a new life leaving Harry with his father. When he was five, she had remarried, and asked her ex-husband to send Harry to California. His father placed him on a Greyhound bus unaccompanied. He was given a sack with his clothes, and another with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the trip. As an adult, he talked about how kind people on the bus were, but how scared he was during the entire trip.

At age 7, his stepfather adopted him thus changing his name to Harry Harold Miller. With that adoption, he gained an extended family of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. He remained friends with one of those cousins (Larry Miller) for the rest of his life.

The family lived in Hollywood where stepfather, Max, managed a golf course, and Harry was free to ride his bike everywhere. Cousin Larry’s family lived next door to the man who trained and stabled Roy Rodgers’s horse Trigger. Both men loved to talk about how smart and beautiful Trigger had been.

When Harry was in junior high school, the family abruptly moved from California to Anchorage, Alaska where Max became a surveyor for the power companies and later for the Alaskan pipeline. Harry was tasked with cleaning the brush with a machete for the survey crew. He said it was miserable work and he was only given a small allowance for his efforts. The family lived in a small travel trailer with an added on lean-to just large enough for Harry’s bed. They continue to live there long after Harry graduated from Anchorage High School. Harry found a job and moved into a small rental house with a huge stone fireplace on a lake. He said it was great to impress the girls he dated. On a trip to Anchorage for his 40-year class reunion, he located the lake, but the only part of the house still standing was that fireplace.

He attended a small college in Anchorage for one semester. They still expected him to show up for classes which he said interfered with his social life. He and his friends like to race cars in and around Anchorage. Although he never identified the exact reason, he said that a judge gave him the choice between time in jail and enlistment in the service. He chose the Navy, and headed off for boot camp, and four years as a torpedoman on the diesel submarine, The Sea Fox. Dad loved to tell stories about all of the ports he saw, and the bars he drank in as a sailor. He admitted that he drank much more than he should have. Years later, he, Mom and granddaughter, Kitana, made a tour of a Russian diesel submarine that was at anchor in Seattle. He explained that submariners needed to be short due to the low ceilings. He also said that because they ‘hot swapped’ a bunk with another crew member, he took naps in the torpedo tubes! Kitana decided she did not want to be a submariner. Dad was proud of that service and had Mom order a cap with the Sea Fox logo. That hat was given to his friend, Steve, after Dad’s passing. During a trip to Michigan, the submarine museum displayed information about the Sea Fox. Dad was delighted. He and Mom got to tour another submarine. He enjoyed explaining about the hardware. Mom said she nodded at all of the correct places. She didn’t want to be a submariner either.

I’ll share more about Dad’s life after the Navy in my next post.