Write By Me

In honor of Father’s Day, and of this week being my two-year anniversary at the Los Angeles Times, here’s the personal essay I wrote that helped get me in the door at the paper. I wrote it about my father, my hero.  

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My dad would work from early morning until twilight, sawing thick pine logs to specific lengths and then stacking them into a home, into our home. He is a barrel-chested man with ursine hands and a body that, even now at 61 years old, looks like a stack of cannonballs. I remember sweat pouring from him during the ruthless Oklahoma humidity, and his loud gulps of ice water.

When it got too dark to work, he retired to join my mom and three brothers in our temporary home – a 24-foot diameter tipi, which at the time was the most efficient and available housing situation. It also connected us to our Native American heritage, which was the point of our family moving from Snohomish, Wash., to Tuskahoma, Okla., in the summer of 1994. (Our four-acre plot was so deep in the woods that we had a telephone box placed on a tree near the road. We told friends and family to give it a few rings, especially because we had no voicemail.)

We moved into the house on Nov. 2 that year, and it was finished the following spring. But my dad would tell you he wasn’t born to build log homes. He came from a middle-class neighborhood in Kansas City, Mo. No one in his family worked with wood. His dad was a city kid, and so was his grandfather.

Still, Jack Holmes desired to build log homes. He attended a log home workshop in Redmond, Wash., near where he and my mom met, and at night he pored over books about building them. He had already been in the professional woodworking trade as a regional sales manager for a power tool company and had built another home from practically nothing, so his dream was feasible. The one in Tuskahoma was his first. He would build two more and restore a third.

“I don’t know how this all folded out,” he said, looking back on it all.

Like Dad, I inherited no experience or wisdom toward my passion – journalism. I discovered it at 16 when a local sports editor asked if I’d freelance high school sports stories. I said yes when he said he’d pay me, but I soon found I loved it.

I’ve been a reporter for seven years now, and like my dad, I don’t know how this all folded out. I just know I wanted it that bad, probably as bad as my dad wanted to build log homes.  

Which brings me back to him.

To be sure, my dad always preached hard work. But he also said in life all anyone can truly control is their effort. Much of what we stress about – poor weather, congested traffic, economic uncertainty – is out of our control. But hard work, he said, is something we can always control.

Part of that effort is learning about that which we desire. So as he collected books about log homes, I’ve built a respectable library of journalism books, and I always carry one or two with me. (Mark Feeney of The Boston Globe told me there are three keys to life: Always have something to write with; always have something to read; and never leave before the movie is over.)

Opportunity plays a key role in success, but to me, and my dad, effort is all you can really control, and it should be your signature characteristic. Anything I’ve done is a credit to my dad and his lessons, most of which came from watching him build something from nothing because it was his dream.

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