Recollections of my Father, Willard N. Overing

How I met my Dad.

I am writting about my memories of my Dad for some very special people.  So that they may know him as I do, a loving father.  I hope you understand.

When I was 12 years old my older brother had a paper route. I helped him on Sunday mornings with putting the papers together and delivering them. We would wake up at 4:00 am to begin the process of assembling, or stuffing, the different sections of the paper together, then go off into the dark morning to deliver them. It was a long and tiring task that usually took from 4:00 am until after the sun came up to complete. For this I was supposed to get paid some amount of money, probably 50 cents, which actually happened on occasion.

One Sunday morning we awoke to find a strange man sleeping on the couch. Now you have to understand that our mother was divorced, and this was 1958 in small town southern Indiana. Not the usual occurance to say the least. The day prior had been Kentucky Derby day. Cause of much celebration and bourbon consumption in our neck of the woods. My Mom could party with the best of them, and had apparently brought someone home after the party was over. This is how I met the man who would become my Dad.

My brother and I stuffed and delivered the papers as usual, talking about the man on the couch. Who was he?  Where did he come from?  And why was he sleeping on our couch?  When we returned home, my Mom and her new friend, hiding their hangovers, were fixing breakfast.  Mom told us that she had meet her friend at a post Derby party at a nightclub the night before.  That he was a soldier stationed at Fort Knox and that his ride back to the post had abandoned him at the party.  Mom had kindly offered to bring him home to sleep on the couch, and would take him to Fort Knox the next day.  We ate our breakfast and talked to this stranger.  His name was Willard Overing, a Sargent First Class in the Army, but he said we could call him "Sarge".  He was a cook in the Army and he was friendly.  He told us that he had been stationed in the Orient, Japan and Korea, for 7 years, before being stationed at Fort Knox.  He told us that he had a daughter in Japan, and that her name was June.  Quite exotic for a young boy in southern Indiana.

"Sarge" and my mother continued to date for over a year, and then got married.  For the first time I could remember, I had a father.  What a change in my life, but more on that later.