A Father's Story.

As often as my schedule and my left ankle will allow, I make my way down to Riverside Park near where I live in New York City to slog (slow jog) around and around an eighth of a mile track. At the entrance to the park stands one of only three statues of women in this whole bust-loving city. The greeter, Eleanor Roosevelt, sits pensively, looking up 72nd Street, arms crossed loosely on her waist, hand held lightly to chin, long legs crossed in front of her. Often someone places a small bouquet of flowers by her feet. Next to the statue is a plaque that reads: "Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home. Such are the places where man, woman, and child seek equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity."

My father is eighty-seven years old and lives in upstate New York in the four-bedroom house we called home for forty years. He still removes and replaces windows with each change of season. He still shovels snow. And after a Labor Day tornado uprooted trees in his backyard, he wanted to take out his handsaw and "clean up a bit" (though we prevailed on him not to).

As I thought about this anniversary article, I thought of my father's almost ninety-year history. Can I get an eyewitness? I called and asked him what events he felt were particularly important in his lifetime. Besides having me as a daughter, of course.

As he has done so often, he completely surprised me. The first thing he mentioned was working for Niagara Mohawk Power Company. He started in a summer job as a utility pole digger and was promoted to data processor. The company's huge, room-sized, temperamental computer had ruined many family dinners and cut short many vacations. He still shakes his head and says, "How about that?" when I show him what my five-pound p.c. can do.

When I was ten, he was transferred from Buffalo, where both he and my mom grew up, to Syracuse. It was a personnel job, and he was to oversee employees as the company changed from hydroelectric to nuclear power. We had taken a family vacation up to the St. Lawrence Seaway to admire the huge river pouring through the turbines, through generators, through power lines to our lights at home. The day is documented in a bleached-out color photo of our modest family clustered proudly before the huge dam, faint rainbow in the turbine mist behind us.

The family never visited Nine Mile One, the nuclear plant on Lake Ontario, perhaps because we all were dispersing into summer jobs, sports, and college, but I suspect it was because, despite the perky Reddy Kilowatt mascot and the reassuring "Our Friend the Atom" pamphlet, we never trusted it. In fact, that plant and Nine Mile Two never really worked and drove the company into debt and downsizing. My father attends monthly retiree luncheons but is saddened by the devaluation of his company stock and the change to business by bottom line from what we used to call "Mother Mohawk."

When he finished telling me about Mohawk, he recalled when Jack, his oldest son, my brother, went to Vietnam and returned more quiet. Then, in a perfect sequitur, he remembered being a kid during World War I. He said they had to go down to Holy Family Church for canned goods. "Some of them were dented; others were swollen; you had to be careful."

During blackouts and nightly curfews, people claimed to see a light hovering over downtown Buffalo. Some thought they were about to be attacked, and he laughed when he said, "That's when lots of people started going to Mass again."

He also talked about how proud he was when I graduated college and started to support myself. This knocked me out. He mentioned that he had just watched an ESPN special on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs Battle of the Sexes tennis match, and that he was amazed there was so much sexism back then. He admired Billie Jean: "She was a tough lady." This from a man whose wife, my mother, hated Betty Friedan and thought she was a dangerous troublemaker and homewrecker.

When I called Dad, I must have had expectations about what he would talk about--FDR, the Depression, the W.W.s. All caps, big concepts, big music. The themes of migration, family, work and technology, war and hunger, and feminism are all there but the small details of home and family, the slow unfolding of justice, opportunity, and dignity, are his story.

Kate Clinton is a humorist.