by Mike Shoule
My brother and I were not naïve — just young kids who loved spending time with our dad. So, filing and making copies for him seemed like a fair trade-off. In exchange for a few hours of “work” in his downtown New York City office in the historic Woolworth Building, we would get to spend a Saturday afternoon playing in the fort at Battery Park.
I remember quite well the three black-and-white framed photos that hung on the wall of my father’s office. One was of a white-haired man in a suit. Another was of a somewhat younger man in a tuxedo, and the last one was of my grandmother.
She died when I was 6 years old, so my recollections of her are limited, but her loving smile and beloved cookie jar will forever be emblazoned in my memory.
I came to learn that the man in the tuxedo was the first Robert Carson in a line that included my father ( junior), brother (the third), and now, nephew (the fourth, affectionately called ‘Cuatro’). It was his father in the suit who worked for the company’s founder and then passed the business down to my grandfather, who died of cancer several years before I was born.
My dad was 20 years old at the time and in the U.S. Army. My grandmother was a high school history teacher who took the helm of the company while her son got discharged from the Army. She, too, died of cancer 10 years later, which left my father as a 30-year-old orphan trying to run the family business while still making time for a wife and three young kids at home.
Those same three black and white photos still hang today. During family business meetings, I sometimes catch myself staring at the pictures as if waiting for one of them to chime in and share their thoughts. More often, though, I’d like to talk to them instead, specifically to my grandfather, and thank him for leaving me with such a wonderful father.
I wish I could be a photograph on the wall of my father’s childhood home to see how my grandfather went about instilling such a strong value system into my father. Somehow, in what I (and likely my father) consider to be an unfairly short 20 years together, my father had enough examples of consistency and strength to become the greatest father a boy, and now a man, could ever want.
For someone who barely even started college, my father possesses a wisdom that he has never hesitated to share with me, my brother, and my sister. What a shining example of fatherhood my grandfather must have been that, to this day, I am frustrating my own children with the same words that once frustrated me — “Mark your work with excellence.” I cannot be sure at what age I finally understood the importance of those words, but I am forever grateful that my dad has never stopped sharing them with me.
There is so much wisdom to be gained in the Bible for us fathers, and there is a tremendous amount of collective knowledge to be garnered from our own fathers, as well. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Instruct a child in the way he should go, and when he grows old, he will not leave it.”
Someday, my children will understand why we don’t applaud until the end of the national anthem. They will learn to love our great country as it was likely taught to my father and his father before him, and they will learn a sense of pride in our family name. The same pride I feel every time I walk into the church where I was baptized, and they were baptized, knowing my grandparents were one of the founding families of this great parish.
If I could ever host a “dream dinner” party, my grandfather would top the guest list. I suspect, though, that I would not be very surprised at what I heard as I sat and listened to the greatest man I have never known.
Michael Shoule is the program director and Past Grand Knight of the Father John J. Murray Council 14666 at American Martyrs Parish in Bayside, and founder of Read Together Books.