what you don't know about your Father
fiction
edward w pritchard
You don't know that your Father visited a whore house or two back when he was in the military or that your Father loved the blues music particular to the American Negro and more than anything your Father wanted to play blues piano and have his hair piled up and wavy on his head like a colored man from Chicago singing at a Rent party on a Saturday night and before he met your Mother your Father wanted a woman built from the ground up.
Sad how we never really know anybody even those closest to us and most people are remembered only by what the Preacher who never knew them says at their funeral. Naturally no one tells the Preacher when they went to Whore houses, or gambled day and night for five years or lived off base with a local girl back in World War two.
So many generations come and go and before you know it your on your way out too and you haven't told anyone your sins and no one knows what you originally wanted to do and you don't look like yourself even to you anymore, in fact there is no more you just a compilation of edited memories passed on to a few off springs.
Truth is neither you, or your Father or his Father or any of your great grandfathers ever became that wickedly cool character they wanted to be but back then there was a lot of unique stuff about your Relatives that now everyone has forgotten or whitewashed for reasons of respectability.
Here's what I wrote about my Father who I never knew at all who once wanted to be a professional piano player and a few times would play a little boogie woogie piano and always liked and respected Black people way before it was politically correct to do so.
how Elmore James and my Father integrated the US military
how Elmore James and my Father integrated the US military
fiction
edward w pritchard
note- my Father would never discuss his military service, so this story has a lot of surmising in it, no proof exists to collaborate things.
Guam in the Pacific Ocean in 1944 smack in the middle of the air war against Japan. My Father then 20 years old was company clerk working in a Quonset hut on the edge of the jungle and he had a big problem. The company's radio was on the blink, there was no one to fix it since all the engineers were working on the bomber planes, the Captain was about to have the privates head [my Father], and drastic measures were necessary to fix the radio to allow the war effort against the Japanese from Guam to move forward.
That's how my Father Ed Pritchard Sr. US Air force company clerk came to meet Elmore James radio repairman US Navy. The radio was duly fixed by James and the two enlisted men became friends over a joint interest in music. Pritchard wanted to be a classical piano player and James played guitar, an electric guitar amplified by his own secret methods, across the American South before the war.
After a fight between white and black soldiers at the local off duty bar Pritchard, who studied piano and violin at University before he was drafted, found himself ordered by his Captain to play boogie boogie piano under the direction of Elmo James who had experience leading several pickup bands in the American South before the war. For several months Elmore James would sing and play backed up by my Father on piano as lonely white and black soldiers listened to the new style of blues music from the Mississippi delta. There were no more racially motivated fights among the American soldiers on Guam. Some credited it to the music played at the local enlisted men's club.
Later after the war both men would die early deaths from heart problems perhaps suffered from the stress of world war two, and neither received any veterans benefits. Elmore James strongly influenced world wide music in the 1960's although he never received top billing or star status and fame during his lifetime. Ed Pritchard sr., never became a classical piano player, but once in a while he fooled around with boogie woogie piano for his oldest son before his death in 1969.
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