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.

Mom and I have struggled with this next chapter of Dad’s life, not because she didn’t know his stories, but because she struggled to organize them chronologically. We decided to only state the dates that we could verify. His stories may not be in order but we did want to share as many of them as possible. He enlisted in the Navy in March, 1963 and was discharged in February, 1967. He had enlisted in Anchorage and was honorably discharged in San Diego. At that time, he listed Gresham, Oregon as his permanent address. While in the service, he received the National Defense Service Medal and the Vietnam Service Medal. The latter was important years later when he applied for medical VA benefits. He didn’t consider either metal as being significant, because he never set foot in Vietnam. San Diego was his home port whenever the Sea Fox was not patrolling in the Pacific. He did talk about shore leave in Hawaii and in Japan.

While in San Diego, he renewed his love of cars. At that time, he owned a 1956 Ford Crestline Victoria that he entered in formal drag race competitions. Also at that time, he had participated in a racecar training program. After his strokes decades later, that training allowed him to continue driving because it was an automatic function. He often talked about his love of that Ford, and the fun that he had racing.

While still in the Navy, Dad had started dating his future wife, Kay. They married in San Francisco in April, 1967. Their first son, Robert, was born later that year. After the wedding, they made their first drive to Iowa for Harry to meet his in-laws. Dad liked to say that subsequent trips from Washington to Iowa were straight through drives, stopping only for gas and food. Mom was always quick to say that would never be how we would travel. Kay and Harry had their second son, John, in Portland four years later. Harry had a number of jobs during the years of living in Portland, but he spoke most often about being manager of a Western auto store while he was still in his mid-20s. He told of resigning that position when he refused to lay off most of his staff. The new manager, of course, followed the directive, and laid off the staff, but Harry was proud of standing by his principles.

Part 3 will move on to Dad’s time as a father to his human sons and his career in automotive repair.

I haven’t been posting because Mom has put her energy into moving all of Dad’s belongings (and a lot of other things) to the carport. She then set up tables in an attempt to organize the things. She explained that people would be coming to look at Dad’s old red and white car and the rolling tool chest filled with tools. She hoped that they would also buy lots of the other things she put out there. She said it was time to get serious about reducing the stuff we have in our house. I hope she doesn’t decide to remove the things that she parks on the end tables and mantel in the living room, because I really like to watch them hit the floor as I push them off. It is a game I like to play with her. If she had let me go out during the sale, I could have pointed out some of the good stuff by doing the same thing for shoppers. She didn’t think that was a good idea. Silly woman.

I plan to continue writing about Dad’s life this coming week. I’m almost up to the good stuff of when he met Mom and the best part of when they added me to the family. Stay tuned.