Credit Where Credit's Due

  Picture of what Waikiki Beach in Hawai'i looked like 

in the early 1960's when me and my family lived there.

 
  Admit it, you do it.

  Sometimes you wonder what your life would have been like if you’d stayed on a path and not taken a fork in the road of your journey.

  I don’t really think about it too much because there’s no way for me to imagine what my life would’ve been like if my folks never moved from Hawai’i.

  It’s quite possible that the lessons I’ve learned in life would have been presented to me just the same with the exception that it would have involved different people in a different setting.  Or would I be a radically different person?

  I probably wouldn’t have a Southern accent or an appreciation for Country music or an appreciation for all things Appalachian.

  My dad was “The World’s Greatest Hotel Manager.”

  Well I thought he was anyway, I mean, he was my dad and didn’t a number of us think of our dads as super guys?

  Dad worked for one of the country’s big hotel chains.  Looking back as an adult other people must’ve thought he was a pretty good hotel dude because he held upper management jobs at two of the company’s  top hotels in New York City and in Honolulu.

  My dad died over 30 years ago so I never really got to talk to him about his motivation for leaving these good jobs, well they seemed good jobs to me.  I was a kid.

  It was my brother who told me only a few years ago that dad felt he deserved the top job, the general manager’s gig, at these hotels.  Instead he was resident manager, which means we lived in the hotel and while he held regular office he was on-call for when a manager was needed 24/7.

  So dad transferred from New York City to Honolulu where he was resident manager again.

  Like I said, I was just a kid, so it was one big adventure to me.

  Hawai’I was big fun to me.  The beach was just a short walk away, the food was good, there were palm trees, I got to surf (well, okay, it was just maybe 100 feet from the beach but it was still fun), I walked barefoot everywhere and, and, did I mention?  I was a kid.

  I liked Hawai’i.

  And then after we’d been in Hawai’i for about 2 years we were leaving.

  We were headed back to my father’s home town in the mountains of Virginia where he’d get the top job at a big hotel there.

  I can remember that day in June.  We were waiting on my brother who had just graduated from high school to get in after being out all night.  When he got home we grabbed our bags and headed for the airport.

  A bunch of my dad’s friends were at the airport to give us a send-off and then we got on the Pan Am Airlines 707.

  My mom had tears on her cheeks, my sister was quietly crying, my brother looked sad as did my dad.  Me?  I was excited as any 7 year old would be getting ready for that feeling of the big jet rumbling down the runway and soaring into the sky.

  Sometime later when it was just me and my mom hanging around I asked her why we left Hawai’i.

  “Your father’s boss was always taking credit for ideas your father came up with,” she told me.

  I remember my father’s boss and took an immediate dislike to him, because I had always thought he was a nice man.

  “That’s stealing, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “I suppose,” said Mom.  “But there’s not much to be done about it.”

  It’s something I always remembered:  We left Hawai’i because a man kept stealing my dad’s ideas and my dad finally got tired of it.

  Here in the future it might’ve been handled through a corporation’s Human Resources department or a lawsuit.  But that’s not how it was done back then.  My dad trusted people to be honorable, after all he came from a state where they supposedly said, “All men are presumed to be gentlemen until proven otherwise.”

  As a kid I resolved that when I grew up if someone told me about a great idea I’d say who gave me the idea…the adult words for that idea is “give credit where credit’s due.”

  Because some guy who did it to my dad cost us our time in paradise.

  Well…

  That’s what I thought for years.

  It may have been that the general manager stealing my dad’s ideas was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” but it could’ve been that my dad thought nothing would make his mom happier than to see her boy being the top man at the big hotel in his hometown.

But still…

To this day I give credit where credit’s due.

Because it’s the right thing to do.

And besides, if you do such a thing to someone it may have a bad effect on one person…

…or a whole family.

E P I L O G U E

  Years in the future, my daughter was in college.  One of her assignments was to interview her grandmother, my mother.  Mom was living by herself, this was after Dad had “gone on to Glory.”

  The two of them sat down with a recorder and went through a list of questions that were part of the assignment.

  Among many things daughter asked Mom were the places she lived being the wife of a hotel executive.

  “And,” asked daughter, “Was there a place you liked most of all?”

  “Hawai’i,” said Mom, “I wish we’d never left.”

  Daughter stopped what she was doing, turned off the recorder and put her pen and paper down.

  “But grandma,” she said, “That means I’d never have been born.”

  Mom smiled and patted daughter’s hand.

  “I know,” she said, “I know.”

  Later, when daughter upsettingly told the story to me I told her not to take it personally.

  “One time when I was about your age your grandmother was mad at your grandfather over something and she blurted out, ‘I wish I’d never married that man!’”

  “Mom!” I said, “That means I’d never’ve been born.”

  “Oh shut up,” she said, “This isn’t about you.”

  I reckon Mom was having a bad day.

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