Gordon Hazen Senior Story

An Account of the Life and Salvation of

Gordon Bradford Hazen, Senior

 by Robert Griffin Hazen

On Sunday, October 8, 1989, less than a month before his death, my father - Gordon Bradford Hazen, Sr. - accepted Jesus as his Savior. At the end of his life, he died knowing peace with God and forgiveness from his Maker. This is my own account of just some of the circumstances and significant events in the life of a man who spent most of his adult years addicted to alcohol - a man who said repeatedly, “I want to drink till the day I die.” Many of the details of the final weeks of his life  I wrote down in the days between his dramatic conversion in early October and his death about a month later on November 3, 1989. That portion of this account are from contemporaneous notes I made at the time. The main reason for this record is so the next generation of Hazens - my sons and my sister’s four children - have an account of the remarkable work that God did in the life of their grandfather. And it is my hope that these six cousins will show this document to their own children and others, until Jesus comes back and sets things everything right and makes all things new.

Chapter 1. Dad’s Family Background 

Gordon Bradford Hazen (later Senior) was born in 1909 in the small rural town of Larimore in northeastern North Dakota. Larimore is about 30 miles west of Grand Forks, which itself lies on the Red River of the north, the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota. Grand Forks is my home town, where I was born and raised. [For more genealogical detail about Dad’s ancestry, see Appendix C at the end of this blog.] 

The Hazens, December 1911, clockwise from left: Anna, Charlie, Ronnie, Ora, Larry, Dad (in center)

Dad was the youngest of five sons born to Ora Addison Hazen and Anna McKean Hazen in Larimore, North Dakota, a small town about 30 miles west of my home town of Grand Forks.  The five sons were: 

 • Arthur Alan Hazen (born April 16, 1896); 

 • Ronald McKean Hazen (October 3, 1897); 

 • Charles Addison Hazen (January 19, 1900); 

 • Lawrence Hyde Hazen (June 24, 1906); and 
 • my father Gordon Bradford Hazen (December 13, 1909). 

Note that Dad’s oldest brother Arthur - who was called by his middle name, Alan - doesn’t appear in the photograph above, which was taken in December 1911. Alan died on January 23, 1909, just before his teen years. According to my dad’s account - during a recorded interview I conducted with Dad in 1989 -  Alan died from diphtheria. 

My grandmother Anna took Alan’s death quite hard. In the 1989 interview, Dad mentioned that both his father Ora and the family doctor thought that if Anna had another baby, that might help assuage her grief. Apparently, Anna agreed with this advice, and the following December of the same year (1909), she gave birth to my father. Alan was so loved by his family that Dad’s older brother Charlie Hazen some years later named his own son after Alan. 

Ronald Hazen served in the Army in World War I. Somewhere in our family archives is a black-and-white photograph of Uncle Ronnie in his WWI Army “doughboy” uniform. He settled in the Indianapolis area as an engineer for the aviation firm of McDonnell-Douglas. At least once when we were kids, he sent my brother Gordy and me a model airplane for us to assemble using glue, decals, and paint - it was a model of an airplane that he helped design. Charles Hazen went into the newspaper business in Shreveport, Louisiana and became a highly regarded managing editor and later executive editor of the Shreveport Times newspaper. Lawrence Hazen went into the practice of law and became a respected lawyer in St. Paul, Minnesota. I believe all four Hazen brothers (Ronnie, Charlie, Larry, Gordy) served in the military in World War II, with Ronnie also serving in World War I, as noted above.   

Dad graduated from Larimore High School. He turned 18 in December 1927, so (I’m assuming) his high school graduation was some 5-6 months after that, in the spring of 1928, about a year and a half before the start of the Great Depression. From what I can tell, he must have been a pretty good athlete - playing football, basketball, and tennis in high school. From the team photo below, the Larimore basketball team apparently won some sort of championship, and Dad also won an individual trophy for best free throw percentage. 

Dad (front right) with the 1927 Larimore High School Basketball team

Dad, ca.late 1920's.

He went on to attend the University of North Dakota (UND) in nearby Grand Forks, where he graduated with a degree in economics. He also played varsity tennis at UND for a while - I’ve seen a photo of Dad in his UND tennis uniform. Dad was at UND his freshman year in the fall of 1928 when his father died unexpectedly in late November. The photo at left was probably taken about this time. In those days, many public universities were small enough that administrators often knew quite a few of their students. Dad was living on campus at this time, and the president of UND was the one who contacted Dad to inform him of his father’s death. 

Two elements of the circumstances surrounding my grandfather Ora’s death are unclear. First, there is some uncertainty about the year he died. When Dad told me about his father’s death, he mentioned that the Great Depression was already underway. But according to official records (https://apps.nd.gov/doh/certificates/deathCertSearch.htm) at the North Dakota Division of Vital Records/Public Death Index, Ora Hazen’s death certificate shows that he died at the age of 62, on November 20, 1928 - almost a year before the Great Depression began. The Great Depression is considered to have started in the early fall of 1929, almost a year after Ora’s death. It’s possible the North Dakota records are wrong, but I believe it’s more likely that Dad just got his dates blurred.

Second, there is some uncertainty about the nature of Ora’s death. Dad told me that it wasn’t clear whether his death was intentional (i.e., suicide) or accidental. He died in the front seat of his Model T Ford inside the family garage, asphyxiated from carbon monoxide poisoning. According to Dad, Ora had gone to his garage to warm up his car on a cold morning and was overcome - asphyxiated - by the exhaust fumes. The garage door opened sideways (somewhat like a bifold closet door, except from my recollection, it had three or maybe even four hinged panels), but the door was pulled only partially open to the side. Ora was found with a pliers in his hand in the front seat of his vehicle. In those days, Dad explained, it was a common practice to use a pliers to adjust the carburetor of an automobile engine. Perhaps Ora was accidentally overcome by the fumes, since the garage door was only partially open. But this partially open garage door is puzzling. If Ora was just warming up the engine on a cold day, why didn’t he open the garage door all the way? And if his intention was to commit suicide - perhaps even adjusting the engine to kick out more of the deadly fumes - why leave the garage door even partially open? On the other hand, perhaps placing the garage door into that partially opened position was a way to mask the fact that he had intentionally taken his own life. Ora worked at the First National Bank in Larimore, and Dad had mentioned that perhaps the Great Depression was part of the reason for Ora’s death. But Dad’s remark doesn’t fit with the dates of the official records of the state of North Dakota, that Ora Hazen died almost a year before the Great Depression began. It appears that Ora’s death simply wasn’t related to the Great Depression, although it may have been related to some failures and perhaps even indebtedness from both his business and his personal life [see additional notes about Anna Hazen in Appendix C, part VIII on Ora Hazen]. 

Both during childhood and adulthood, Dad had told me several times about my grandfather’s death, usually in response to my asking about his family history. Sometimes I wondered if Dad was intentionally presenting the story with some ambiguity - maybe Ora really had committed suicide, but Dad related the story with the accident possibility because of some embarrassment that his own father had in fact killed himself. But in the last year or so before Dad died, I wondered if perhaps he might want to “come clean” about Ora’s death. So I asked him about it again in that final year. Dad very calmly recounted the details in a very matter-of-fact fashion and again said that he just didn’t know - that nobody really knew - if Ora’s death was a suicide or an accident. Given Dad’s demeanor and tone, I took him at his word.

But either way, the loss of his father was surely an understandable blow to Dad, who was not quite 19 years old at the time. He told me toward the end of his life that it was during these college years that that he started using alcohol. His drinking continued for almost all of the next 60 years of his life. 

In the mid-1930’s Dad married a fellow Larimore high school graduate named Catherine Ellen Vassau. Catherine and Dad had four children - Judith Ann Hazen Karr (born January 21, 1936), William Addison Hazen (January 16, 1938), Susan Trinette Hazen Callahan (February 9, 1941), and Thomas Gordon Hazen (August 19, 1942). For a while in the early 1940’s, he worked at a hardware store in Larimore. When in his later years Dad mentioned the hardware store to me, he said that he owned it, but that may have been an embellishment. 

Chapter 2. World War II

Dad's World War II U.S. Navy tunic.

At some point during World War II (1941-1945), Dad enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Dad told me it was 1944, but that might not be accurate. Bill Hazen - Dad’s older son from his first marriage and my half-brother - believes it was closer to 1942. Bill was almost 4 years old when the U.S. entered the war in December 1941 and says that he just doesn’t remember Dad being around very much before, during, or after the war years. Bill, his mother Catherine, and his three siblings lived in Bemidji, Minnesota during the remainder of World War II. Meanwhile, Dad ended up being stationed at Adak Island, Alaska, as a Lieutenant JG (Junior Grade). Adak Island was about two-thirds of the way to the westernmost end of the Aleutian Islands chain that arcs southwesterly from Alaska toward Russia and Japan. I remember Dad saying that the weather on Adak Island was miserably windy and cold, and the fog came in so quickly and so thick that planes couldn’t land or take off for hours - sometimes days - on end. 

For interested readers, two books in my possession provide more detail - a lot more detail - about the Aleutian theater of the Second World War. The first book is from the 39-volume Time-Life World War II series, entitled War in the Outposts. It has an entire chapter about the conflict in the Aleutians (“Theater of Frustration”) and a separate photo essay section (“The GI vs the Elements”). The second book - The Thousand Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians by Brian Garfield - is a thorough and descriptive account of the only military campaign during World War II that was fought on North American soil. Dad isn’t mentioned by name in either book, but both contain a lot of fascinating, little-known history. Although Dad didn’t see direct combat, there was significant danger for the United States and for the U.S. armed forces in this region of the north Pacific. Adak Island is about as close to Tokyo as it is to Seattle (!). Two other islands in the Aleutian chain - Attu Island and Kiska Island - are even further west than Adak by several hundred miles of open ocean. Both Attu and Kiska were invaded and occupied by the Japanese for several years of the war. These islands held military value for two related reasons: as possible launching sites for a Japanese attack on the U.S. mainland - and as launching sites in the other direction for a possible American invasion of Japan. Although these islands can barely be seen in the map below [click on it for a closer view], they were large enough to support a military presence. Adak Island is roughly 30 miles from north to south and about 20 miles from east to west - a rugged, windswept island in the shape of an asymmetrical Rorschach inkblot, with a sleepy, mountainous volcano but enough level terrain for the U.S. to build a military airfield there. 

Adak Island and the North Pacific theater of World War II.

Lieutenant JG Gordon B. Hazen, U.S. Navy.

Several times, Dad told me about a situation that occurred near the end of the war. The conflict in the European theater of World War II was over on May 8, 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. But the war with Japan continued through the summer of 1945. As Lieutenant JG, Dad was an assistant to the admiral of the naval forces in the Aleutians and the northern Pacific. He was often the first to receive messages from other bases, ships, and planes in the Navy. Dad had been trained to memorize the Morse code (he used to challenge us when we got older to translate simple Morse code messages he would tap to us with the dots and dashes of the system). He said that in late August 1945, very late one night, a message arrived for the admiral that the Japanese were going to surrender the next day on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. But the admiral was asleep. Dad chuckled as he said that he wondered at the time, “Do I wake up the admiral in the middle of the night and get him mad at me for waking him up? - or do I not wake him and get him mad for not rousing him for this important message?” We both laughed, and I asked, “So Dad, what did you do?” He said that he did awaken the admiral - and the admiral told him he did the right thing. The Japanese formally surrendered the next day in Tokyo Bay. World War II was finally over.

Historical Note: In the several times that Dad told me about the message to the admiral, he always said the message arrived “in late August” and that it said the Japanese were going to surrender “the next day.” History says that while the Japanese announced their surrender on August 15, they didn’t formally surrender until September 2, 1945. But September 2 isn’t “the next day” from an early morning in late August. What’s going on here? 

The discrepancy here in the timeline could have been faulty memory on Dad’s part. But there’s a more intriguing - and more satisying - explanation for this apparent discrepancy. I believe the International Date Line (IDL) solves the problem. Tokyo lies on the western side of the IDL. Adak Island is on the eastern side. A message from American command in Tokyo that was sent on September 1 in Japan would be received on August 31 on Adak Island. The reference in the Tokyo message to “the next day” would mean the date of September 2 in Japan, which is the proper historical date for the Japanese surrender. So Dad was correct in saying that he received a message “in late August” about a “next day” surrender of September 2. Because Dad just didn’t mention the IDL factor, it sounds like he made a mistake. But taking the IDL into consideration, Dad’s account was accurate as far as it went - he just didn’t mention how the International Date Line played into the situation. I think this is the best explanation of this minor timeline puzzle.

Footnote: At the end of this account, I have included in Appendix D several more photos and a handful of website links for even more photographs and more detailed history of World War II in the Aleutian Islands. 

Chapter 3. Dad, Mom, Us 

After the war ended, Dad finished his service in the Navy and returned to his family. Sadly, Dad and Catherine divorced sometime not too long after the war. Dad eventually moved back to the Grand Forks area.

A few years after the war, Dad met my mother, Vera Margaret Griffin (born February 13, 1915) of Gilby, North Dakota. I believe they met in Fargo, North Dakota, where she worked in a wartime-postwar agency (something like the “Office of Price Controls”). They were married in June 1948. Mom said that they eloped by running off to Minneapolis to get married. The picture below may have been taken at about this time, since Larry Hazen - Dad’s nearest-in-age older brother, pictured below - lived in the Twin Cities, on the east side of St. Paul with his wife Leona. It’s difficult to tell whether this photo was taken before or after Mom and Dad got married. There’s no wedding ring on Dad’s left hand - but in the next photo, taken in 1951 when they were married, shortly after I had been born, it’s hard to tell if Dad is wearing a ring there either. 

Mom and Dad visiting Larry and Leona Hazen in St. Paul, ca.1948.

Over the next six years after their wedding, Mom and Dad had three children - Gordon Bradford Hazen, Jr. (born April 24, 1949); myself - Robert Griffin Hazen (May 7, 1951); and Polly Anna Hazen Lilleboe (March 9, 1954). As kids, we thought it was cool that our birthdays were in consecutive months - March, April, and May. For Gordy and me, our birthdays were close enough to each other to often be celebrated at the same time. Being only 2 years apart in age, Gordy and I did everything together as young kids - building with Lincoln logs and erector sets, playing with toys, exploring outdoors, building model planes, playing cops and robbers, fashioning forts on Saturday mornings in the living room out of blankets and chairs, playing board games, drawing things (especially after Gordy learned about vanishing points and perspective from his art teacher). 

Mom holding Bob, & Dad holding Gordy, 1951.

Dad worked as a salesman at the Sears store in Grand Forks. At a time when most mothers stayed home with their kids, Mom kept her job at the U.S. Bureau of Mines (now renamed the Energy and Environmental Research Center) near the University of North Dakota campus in Grand Forks. We were a one-car family. Dad would drive Mom to work, then drop us kids off about a mile away at the home of a woman named Amy Cady, before going to his job in downtown Grand Forks. Amy Cady had her own children but also took in other kids as well. This arrangement started when I was about a year old, so from my earliest memories, we spent our days - and later, our after-school times - at the Cady home. When Gordy and later I were old enough, we attended the local school near the Cady house - Winship Elementary. Even though our family moved repeatedly around Grand Forks - we lived in several other parts of town over the course of these moves - as kids we had an offsetting measure of stability because we always attended Winship during our time at Cady’s home, even though we lived closer to other schools wherever our own home was. 

Amy Cady was like a second mother to us. We called her “Cady” - we thought that’s what her name was! - just like “Katie.” In the years that followed, throughout high school and college, the four of us - Mom, Gordy, Polly, and I - would often stop at Cady’s house at Christmas to say hello. Polly named her second daughter Amy after Mrs. Cady. In the photo below, taken in front of the Cady home, Gordy is 6 years old, Polly is 1, and I’m 4. 

Bob, Polly, & Gordy at Cady's house, May 1955.

Unfortunately, Dad and Mom had a stormy marriage. Dad’s drinking had become a problem. He had a temper even when he was sober, and he got meaner and more ornery under the influence of alcohol. Dad would pick us kids up at Cady’s house at the end of his work day before supper time, and then we’d go get Mom from her work. One time, when I was six or seven years old and Dad came to pick us up at Cady’s, we piled into the back seat of the car, I could tell from Dad’s demeanor - even though he hadn’t said anything - that he was going to start an argument with Mom that evening. I leaned over to Gordy and whispered as quietly as I could, “There’s going to be a fight tonight.” Gordy nodded in silent agreement. And I was right - Dad started arguing with Mom when we got home - or maybe even in the car after we picked her up. I should mention that with the loud arguments Dad would start with Mom, both Gordy and I always referred to them as “fights,” even though there wasn’t physical violence. That’s just the word we used. Dad’s drinking apparently was a concern for Mom even before they got married. That’s why she kept her own job in a day when most wives were stay-at-home moms. As an adult, I once asked Mom if she knew before they were married about Dad’s trouble with alcohol. When she said she knew, I asked why she married him. She replied, “I thought I could change him once we were married.” She acknowledged in her later years that the most leverage and influence she ever had was before they got married. It was a lesson too late for the learning.

Grandma Anna Hazen, Gordy, Bob, Polly, Mom, ca.1957.

As I have mentioned, we moved frequently during those childhood years. I hated moving. By autumn of my third grade year (when I was 8), we were in the fifth place I had lived in since birth (for Gordy, age 10, it was his seventh place). Early in their years together, Mom and Dad separated twice before Polly was born. Their marriage was difficult, and Mom had to move several times to cope. But after Polly was born, the moves were for different reasons: twice Mom and Dad found a larger home for their growing family, and once the owner of the house we were renting wanted to move into the house herself. Perhaps our many moves were compounded by not having the money to go into home ownership. Maybe Dad’s drinking was eating up too much of his paycheck so as not to be a reliable source of income. Maybe Dad didn’t want to make the commitment to home ownership.

Gordy, Polly, & Bob, ca.1957.

Given all that, we still had that important base of stability for us kids: we were always at Cady’s on weekdays, and we always attended Winship Elementary a few blocks from Cady’s home. Our time at Cady’s spanned seven years for Gordy and me, and five years for Polly. This arrangement continued through my second grade year. But the three of us kids were growing up, and Mom and Dad eventually stopped taking us to Cady’s. From my third grade year on - Gordy’s fifth grade - we were old enough to be on our own after school at our house till Mom and Dad got home from work. Mom gave house keys to Gordy and me. She thought we were responsible enough - especially led by Gordy, who was a very mature ten years old - to come home from school on our own to an empty house and be there on our own till Mom and Dad got home. We were latchkey kids before that phrase was even coined, with Gordy the oldest sibling as the leader of the pack. Thanks, Gordy, for being a good big brother.

It was at about this time - when I was 7 or 8 years old - that I first realized that my parents might sooner or later divorce. I knew with divorces that parents split up everything they shared. Since there were three of us kids, in my childlike thinking, I thought even us kids would be split up between the two parents, so then two of us would go with Mom and one of us would go with Dad. In my mind, there was never a question: I myself would be the one to go with Dad. Obviously such a custody arrangement of splitting up three kids didn’t happen (and never would have happened either, with custody rulings almost always in favor of keeping siblings together). My point is that as a child, I felt linked to Dad in this strange way that I could never quite put my finger on. This unusual sense of connectedness to this man stayed with me throughout the years - neither Gordy nor Polly felt the same bond - and it was something that made a lot more sense in light of the events at the end of Dad’s life. 

In 1959, early in the fall of my third grade year, Mom and Dad decided to buy a house, instead of renting anymore. I was thrilled and so relieved. So we had to move again - but finally: it was a house we would own - and we wouldn’t have to move anymore! We’d be living in the newest area of Grand Forks on the south end of town - and we wouldn’t have to move anymore! We would be in a great neighborhood, with lots of kids our age all around - and we wouldn’t have to move anymore! 

Our own house on 19th Avenue South in Grand Forks - we wouldn't have to move anymore! [2019 photo].

During this time at the new house (ca.1959-1962), Dad’s drinking took a turn for the better - and then a turn for the worse. He did try to give up alcohol one summer (I believe it had to be 1960). Instead of having beer in the house, he had lots of Coca-Cola and Seven-Up in the fridge. All those soft drinks seemed to help Dad - the pop bottles were something “to have in his hand,” Mom explained to me. He was around home more often, he was nicer and less ornery, and he even grew a mustache (probably to try to mark the change he was trying to make). But for reasons that I as wasn’t privy to as a 9 year old, Dad’s experiment in giving up alcohol didn’t last, and he went back to his drinking. 

As an adult, I know now that alcoholism is more than just excessive consumption of liquor. It’s a way of medicating one’s pain from the slings and arrows of life’s misfortunes. Dad was too often using alcohol to fight the demons and wounds in his life. He wasn’t winning very many battles.

So Dad’s alcohol consumption returned. The arguments between him and Mom got more frequent, late in my 4th grade year (1961) and all through my 5th grade year (1961-62). I hated waking up in the middle of the night to hear them arguing and Dad shouting. I always got the emptiest feeling of dread in my gut. Dad was the one who was loud during these arguments. Mom wouldn’t raise her volume but simply get a distressed tone of voice with the unexpected and jealous accusations Dad would throw at her. For me as a 4th and 5th grader, I could rarely tell what they were arguing about. But Gordy - being two years older - could discern more. He recalls Dad wanting Mom to quit her job, because he thought (incorrectly) that Mom was having an affair at work. Gordy added that in these arguments, Mom of course refused to quit. I think she saw the writing on the wall regarding Dad and his drinking, and she wanted to protect herself and us kids by keeping her job and income.  

Chapter 4. Mom, Dad, and the Divorce 
Dad’s drinking grew worse and worse. When the two of them came home from him picking up Mom at work, he would sometimes drop her off and then leave to get groceries or “do errands.” Mom said years later that if he didn’t come back pretty quickly for dinner, she knew he’d come home drunk and angry and ornery.

With one exception, there apparently was no physical abuse of Mom in the marriage, despite Dad’s drunken spells. The exception was late one night when we kids were already in bed and Dad was arguing with Mom in the hallway leading to all our bedrooms. He grabbed Mom’s right thumb and twisted it - and broke her thumb. Gordy says that he witnessed this from his bed in the bedroom that he and I shared. She was in a cast for some weeks. Mom always told me in subsequent years that her broken thumb was an accident and that Dad hadn’t meant to hurt her. That explanation was part of Mom’s co-dependency as an abused wife. I didn’t learn the truth - that Dad intentionally meant to hurt her - until many years after she died (in 1992), when Gordy mentioned this for the first time during my writing of this account.

But this apparently isolated instance of physical abuse didn’t keep Mom from being afraid for her own safety - and for our safety as well. There were other ways Dad could be abusive and intimidating. There was his size - Dad was 6 feet tall, Mom was a full foot shorter at an even 5 feet of height, and we were kids - 7th, 5th, and 2nd graders as their marriage entered its final year. There was his anger. He could erupt out of the blue. And there was his caustic wit - the verbal abuse of his harsh remarks. Whoever said “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me” must not have had much experience with verbal abuse.

Because we were afraid of Dad, the three of us - Gordy and Polly and I - didn’t like sitting near him at the dinner table. Mom and Dad sat at opposite ends of the table. Two of us kids sat on one long side of the table, and the third sat alone across from the two siblings. With those three positions, the least favored position was on the side that had two of us, in the chair sitting closest to Dad. The second least favorite position was sitting alone on the solo side. The best position was on the side with two of us, sitting in the chair next to Mom and as far away from Dad as was possible. None of us wanted to sit close to him.

The three of us used to argue about where to sit at the table - nobody wanted that least-favored chair position on a permanent basis. Then one of us kids - or maybe Mom - suggested that the fairest thing would be to have a rotation schedule. To start the rotation, for example, Gordy would spend the week sitting closest to Dad, Polly would spend the same week sitting closest to Mom, and I would sit alone on the other side of the table for the week. Then we would rotate for the following week - I would sit closest to Dad, Gordy would sit closest to Mom, and Polly would sit by herself. For the third week, Polly would sit closest to Dad, I would sit closest to Mom, and Gordy would sit alone on the other side. We kept this arrangement to ourselves, and we followed it in unspoken mutual agreement. Mom might have known about it, but it was something we never would have let Dad know about.

It was during this last particular seating arrangement - with me closest to Mom, then Polly on my left closest to Dad, and Gordy by himself on the other side of the table - that an incident occurred that may have been the proverbial last straw for Mom that prompted her to initiate the process of divorce. We were having supper at the table in the kitchen, and one of us asked Gordy to pass a dish of food. Gordy delayed just a moment or two to finish bringing his next bite of food to his mouth. Dad thought Gordy was being inattentive and impolite, and he reached out to his left and slapped Gordy - hard - in the face with the back of his hand. An absolute pall of silence and fear fell over all of us. My mouth probably fell open in shock. I didn’t even dare look over at Dad. Out of the corner of my eye, I peeked at Mom to my immediate right to see what she was going to do. To my complete surprise and confusion - and even some horror - I watched her slowly and very d-e-l-i-b-e-r-a-t-e-l-y put the next forkful of food from her plate into her mouth, looking down the whole time.

Years later, I asked Mom why she didn’t do anything that night. She said she was so terrified that Dad would do the same thing to her if she said or did anything at all.

That dinner scene was the only time I recall Dad being physically abusive with any of us kids. Gordy and I would get an occasional spanking from Dad when we were quite young. But spankings were pretty normal in those days, and none of us considered them abuse. As I’ve said, there were other ways he could be intimidating - other ways that the frustrations of his own life manifested themselves to those around him. He was jealous of Mom and at times suspicious of almost everyone, including us kids. 

Dad: Gordon Bradford Hazen, Sr., ca.1962.

But that face-slap incident was one of two times I believe Mom called the police. After we finished dinner that night, Dad went down to the basement, apparently to cool off. We could hear him tinkering with his tools at a work bench he had down there. Mom gathered us at the table and she had the four of us play a game of cards together. I kept looking at her, with an expression of “What are you going to do, Mom?” One of us kids may have even said that aloud. For about ten very weird and empty minutes, the four of us played cards. It was uncomfortable and awkward, and playing this stupid card game seemed to me at the time so dumb. But Mom was trying in her own way to gather us under her wing. And none of us kids wanted to be anywhere else either. Finally, she turned to the phone stand by the table and called the police. She spoke calmly (but I could hear the fear tremors in her voice) and said something to the effect, “I’d like a police escort to take my children and me from my home. My husband is in a drunken rage, and we have to get out of the house.”

A police squad car did show up, and the officer came to the front door. He was tall, in his police blues, and he was very kind. Mom was terrified that Dad would come up from the basement while the officer was there. But fortunately, Dad stayed downstairs till after we left. I’ve often wondered what Dad thought when he came upstairs from the basement to find nobody home. He wouldn’t know exactly where Mom had taken us. She came from a huge family - she was one of the twelve Griffin brothers and sisters, all of whom lived in the general vicinity of Grand Forks, with numerous cousins and aunts living right in town. Keep in mind: the era of cell phones was still a long ways away, so at that time, with land line phones, you didn’t call a person - you had to call a place. So Dad couldn’t just “call Mom” - he didn’t know the place where she had taken us. I wonder now if that was why I remember Mom only once taking us to her twin sister Verna’s home. Mom and Verna were very close, and Dad knew where Verna lived. Mom was probably trying to protect Verna by not going to a location Dad already knew.

This wasn’t the only time we fled the house in fear. There was another time Mom called the police. Several times she even called a taxi to take us away, while Dad had either gone out for errands or was in the basement cooling off. Gordy remembers one time when Dad dropped Mom off at home after work and then went out for groceries. Mom was concerned about Dad’s mood when he left and was alarmed that he was going to come home drunk and in a much worse mood. We got into the taxi as soon as it pulled up in front of our house, and the cab driver asked, “Where to, ma’am?” To this day, I still can hear the trembling in her voice as Mom said, “Just get away from the house as fast as you can…” These situations had to be gut-wrenching occasions for Mom. They were weird and stressful for us kids, of course,  but they must have been far more difficult for her. 

The Ambassador Motel wasn't far from our house. 

We usually went to the home of a relative somewhere in Grand Forks. As I think about it now, the relative was usually a more distant relative that Dad probably didn’t know well and so he also probably didn’t know where this relative lived. It was such a hollow feeling, walking into the home of some aunt or cousin for the night. Several times we went to the nearby Ambassador Motel on the south end of town, not too far from our house. We’d watch TV in our motel room, and sometimes we even went swimming in a small, pathetic outdoor swimming pool they had in the middle of the parking lot. The whole motel thing felt so cold and strange. I hated those times of going to the motel or staying with relatives - it was so awkward, and the adults never knew what to say. Understandably, whatever they did say was never helpful - what could they say? But I think the three of us kids had an underlying sense of appreciation that Mom was trying to protect us. The main thing I realize now about wherever we went, there was a sense of feeling safe. It was weird being away from home, but we were safe because we were with Mom and we were away from Dad. Mom and her love was the glue that held the four of us together. And it really was starting to become “the four of us” - lumped together in this tragedy of alienation from Dad. Whenever and however we ended up back at the house a day or two later, Dad had usually moved out for a while. A few days later, he would be back at the house. Looking back on all this, I don’t recall Mom or Dad ever explaining what was going on to us kids or processing any of this with us. I also don’t remember Dad ever apologizing to us for his frightening behavior. Another curious aside here: I don’t recall us ever missing school for the handful or so of times Mom took us from the house to get away from Dad.

Mom initiated divorce proceedings in the winter of 1962. At that time, divorce was a legal trial - not like the no-fault process it became years later - complete with plaintiff, defendant, lawyers, witnesses, and a bench verdict from the judge (not from a jury). As plaintiff, Mom and her lawyer had to prove her claim that a divorce was warranted. Mom had wanted both Gordy and me to testify. But for myself, testifying against my dad felt terrifying. I was not quite 11 years old and in 5th grade. On the day before the court appearance, I was sick and stayed home from school. The next day - the day of the court appearance - I felt fine physically but I still stayed home from school. I vividly recall Mom very kindly asking me if I felt well enough to testify in court. I looked her straight in the face and lied and said No. Mom calmly nodded and said okay.

But Gordy (in 7th grade at age 13) did agree to go to court, and he testified about Dad’s verbal abuse and drinking. Mom always said she was proud of how well Gordy did in court. Years later, as an adult, I confessed to Mom that I had lied to her that day, and I asked her forgiveness. Also, I asked her if she knew I was lying that day. She said she did know, but she also understood how scared I was.

Years and years later, well into my adulthood, I realized another underlying reason for not wanting to testify. It connected back to this very odd bond I felt with my dad: in spite of all the damage Dad had done and was doing to our family and to me, I also had a deep sense - which lay unarticulated inside me for decades - that if I testified against Dad, I’d be betraying him. Whether this was accurate or not isn’t the point. Deep in my gut, I didn’t want to have to choose between my mom and my dad. 

So in the spring of 1962, the judge ruled for Mom, and the divorce was granted. The four of us would have to move, because Mom knew she couldn’t afford to buy a car. Mom wanted to find a place close to her job at the U.S. Bureau of Mines near the University of North Dakota campus on the north side of town. So we would have to move, again. Dad would fix up a place for himself in the basement of our house and rent out the main floor.

The two-bedroom apartment that we moved into after the divorce is in the upper left [2019 photo].

On August 1, 1962, the four of us - Mom, Gordy, Polly, and I - moved into the two-bedroom, upper-left, second floor apartment of a four-plex shown above, on the other side of town, not too far from the UND campus. It turned out to be a very good location for us. We were right next to a large park. West Elementary School for Polly (3rd grade) and me (6th grade) was one block away. Valley Junior High School for Gordy (8th grade) was three blocks away. The Bureau of Mines was 10-12 blocks away, so Mom could walk to and from work - and did so, rain or shine - or even in the cold, blustery North Dakota winters. 

But with having to move because of the divorce, I was heartbroken - and it wasn’t about the divorce. My heartache was much more about having to move - again! - and move from a great neighborhood. The divorce itself wasn’t so painful for me. I’d seen it coming since about 2nd or 3rd grade, and I was tired of all the arguing between my parents and all the harsh comments from Dad. By 1962, the damage in my life from his ornery outbursts had already been done. For me, the divorce was a relief. After we moved, one day I realized that before the divorce, there were three things I had to deal with: Dad - and Mom - and their marriage. Now there was largely only one of those three I had to deal with: Mom. That was a lot better.

At West Elementary, we had a full hour for lunch, from 12:00 to 1:00. In order to save money, Polly and I wouldn’t stay for school lunches, instead walking the one block to come home to the apartment for a homemade meal. Gordy didn’t come home for lunch because he had just a 30-minute lunch break at the junior high. Mom made a point of leaving work long enough before 12:00 noon to walk home and have the time to have a nice lunch waiting for Polly and me - usually soup and a sandwich (with her great homemade bread). The three of us would eat together, then Mom would head out at 12:30 on her walk back to work, and Polly and I would finish lunch on our own. I remember watching re-runs of Father Knows Best on TV from 12:31 till 12:58, then sprinting the one block back to West Elementary to beat the 1:00 bell. I thought it was cool that I was never tardy with my little race back to school. As was typical of Mom, she walked the round-trip distance from the apartment to work and back, twice each weekday for my 6th grade year - no matter what the weather. Polly thinks Mom continued that habit for her own 4th, 5th, and 6th grade years too. 

Looking back on everything, I see now that Mom very intentionally did several things to help us make the transition to our new life. One was leaving work and walking back to the apartment to make us homemade lunches during the school year. Another was all the raking and shoveling and lawn mowing she had us do (more on that in a moment). Before the divorce, she had read aloud to us other books - the main one I recall was the classic by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind. So at the apartment, she continued this read-aloud time for the three of us at bedtime, with the epic 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. In some ways I’m a little surprised now that both Gordy (in 8th grade) and I (in 6th grade) didn’t feel “too old” for this kind of thing. But we didn’t - I think we enjoyed not just the story, but also the effort she was making, and the togetherness as well. Years later, after college, I came across these lines by the poet Strickland Gilliland: 

       You may have tangible wealth untold - 

       Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold. 

       But richer than I, you never can be: 

       I had a mother who read to me.

We were rich, too. When I became a father, I very intentionally passed that same wealth on to our sons. Mom, your warmth and time and presence really stabilized our lives - look at the fruit of your love: three pretty much normal kids, six great now-adult grandkids, and a couple handfuls of great-grandchildren too. You really did leave the world a better place, Mom. Thank you. Again. 

In the apartment, things were tight for the four of us, in more than one way. We were tight on space. Gordy and I shared one of the two bedrooms, each of us with a twin bed. Mom and Polly shared the other bedroom and a large queen-size bed. As Polly got older, Mom started sleeping most nights on the couch. She would lay out bedsheets and a blanket for herself every night and put the bedclothes away every morning. I always admired her simple discipline on that.

Gordy, Polly, Bob, & Mom at the apartment, ca.1964.

We were tight on transportation. We didn’t have a car, so for the most part, the three of us kids walked or biked everywhere, while Mom walked to and from work. She ordered groceries from the one store in town that would make deliveries. On Sundays we took a taxi to church. On Wednesdays Mom gave me bus money my 6th grade year to get downtown to church for afternoon choir and then back home again. Every now and then, someone from church or Mom’s work would give us a ride somewhere. We made it work without a vehicle for those first four years. When I was entering 10th grade, Mom was able to afford a Volkswagen bug (and then we were tight on space in that little vehicle!). That VW was a welcome addition to our family, after four years of living without a car. We were all glad to finally have wheels. 

We were tight on money. From the very start of our life at the apartment, Mom arranged for us as a family to take on the position of building caretaker to reduce our rent, in exchange for shoveling the snow in winter, mowing the large lawn in summer, and raking the leaves from all the huge backyard trees in the fall. Gordy and I did the shoveling and mowing, but raking the leaves from the many enormously tall trees in the backyard was a whole family effort [they can be seen in the background of the earlier photo of our apartment building]. On a Saturday in October, the four of us would spend the entire afternoon raking up the hundreds of thousands of leaves on the lawn. One year, I made a mathematical estimate of the number of leaves in the backyard. I picked what I thought was a typical square foot of leaf-covered lawn, counted the number of leaves in that square, and multiplied that out (all by hand, long before hand-held calculators were available) by the dimensions of the yard. I don’t remember my calculated result, but it had to be several hundred thousand leaves that we raked up. It’s kind of funny that neither Gordy nor Polly nor I can remember what we did with the leaves. Did we bag them up? Or shovel them into a dumpster? I’m pretty sure we didn’t burn them. But it was autumn, and we usually did the work on a beautiful, crisp autumn day. Many times in the distance we could hear the roar of the crowd at a Saturday afternoon UND football game not too far away. This was work, raking up all the leaves for such a huge yard with so many trees. But we were in this together, working together, being a family, and it brought a sense of togetherness and purpose. Raking the leaves was reducing our rent and helping Mom out. Then after all the raking was done, we’d all go inside for hot chocolate and probably some of Mom’s fantastic homemade bread or cookies.

Gordy and I each took up newspaper delivery routes, delivering on foot the morning Minneapolis Tribune in the larger neighborhood around the apartment. Although we really were tight on money, Mom always insisted that Gordy and I save our money for college rather than contribute to household expenses. This was in the days when homemade bread was made by hand-kneading the dough. The whole process of mixing the dough, letting it rise twice, and then baking the loaves took hours to complete. Mom would stay up late at night - often past midnight - making her delicious bread and rolls once or twice a week. She would also stay up late ironing our clothes. Then in winter she would get up extra early to make hot chocolate for Gordy and me before we went out in the cold of pre-dawn hours before school started to walk our routes delivering the morning newspapers. In those early hours of first waking up, when I stumbled into the kitchen barely awake, she would always greet me with this irritatingly cheerful “Good morning!” I was so groggy I usually felt like punching her out. Years later I asked her why she was always so cheerful in those awful, dark, winter early mornings. She said it was because she wanted her sons to remember that their mom loved them enough to get up so early in the morning to make hot chocolate for them. Well - it worked, Mom. I’ve always remembered that. 

Nothing in these previous several paragraphs is a complaint. These areas of tightness were manageable. They brought us together. We weren’t poor and were nowhere near destitute. We always had clean clothes. Mom fed us well - she was a great cook and a great baker. We weren’t perfect kids. Gordy and I had fights like many brothers that age did. Our fights were often slugfests - body blows to the torso and arms (never to the face or head) with headlocks and shoving and wrestling. Polly and I fought verbally like cats and dogs for several years after the divorce. Then in my 9th grade year, I somehow realized on my own that my taking the initiative to be nice to my little sister might make things better. So I very intentionally made a point of being kind and encouraging to her and interested in what she was doing. Somewhat to my surprise, this idea of being a nice older brother - wow, it worked! She started being nice to me in return. Polly and I became friends, and she is one of my closest friends to this day. Despite these sibling conflicts, in the midst of all that was going on, for the most part I think all three of us realized life would be a lot easier for Mom if we would be good kids. So we tried. And Polly, I have always been so delighted and thankful that we became friends and have remained so even now.

There was another reason we were tight on money. In the divorce settlement, Dad was supposed to pay both child support and alimony to Mom. He never paid alimony at all - and Mom never took legal action on that. He paid child support only for about four years, till he left town in 1966 and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. At that time, Gordy was entering or about to enter his senior year at Grand Forks Central High School, I was about to join him there as a sophomore, and Polly was entering seventh grade.

For the four of us, post-divorce life at the apartment had become a lot more stable. No more caustic remarks from Dad at the dinner table. No more waking up late at night to hear my parents arguing. No more foreboding sense of Dad picking a fight with Mom. So without Dad’s daily in-house presence, our lives were a lot less unpredictable. On top of that, we didn’t move again. The three of us kids lived with Mom at the apartment until our individual high school graduations and then some summers during college. Mom lived there for a total of 24 years until December 1986, even living alone for several years after her retirement from the Bureau of Mines in 1981.

One other note about the divorce: in 1962, divorce was rare. In a town with a population of about 40,000 at that time, I knew of only one other family where the parents were divorced. For me, the divorce felt like a black mark against us and - somehow - against me. Even though I was relieved that Mom did divorce Dad, I felt like it shouted to the world that there was something wrong with our family - and somehow - something uniquely wrong with me. 

Mom: Vera Margaret Griffin Hazen, ca.1981.

Gordy, Polly, and I grew up and finished high school - Gordy was class of 1967, I was class of 1969, and Polly was class of 1972. We each went away to college - Gordy to Michigan State for two and a half years, returning to UND in Grand Forks to finish his undergraduate degree; I was off to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota; and Polly went to Denver University in Colorado. By 1986, Gordy was living in Evanston, Illinois; I was married and living in St. Paul; Polly was married and living in the Lansing, Michigan area - and Mom had now been an empty-nester for several years. She was in ill health with emphysema, frequent bronchitis, and general weakness. She just wasn’t taking good care of herself. The woman who gave so much of her own life for the needs of her kids didn’t handle her own needs as well. Then in November 1986, my wife Sarah and I visited her at Thanksgiving with our then 2-year-old son Brandon. She was so weak and frail, we put her in the hospital.

Then at Christmastime several weeks later, Polly arranged for an air ambulance to fly Mom to Okemos, Michigan, to live with her and her husband Tim Lilleboe (who was also from Grand Forks) and their kids. We all admired and appreciated Tim’s willingness to have his mother-in-law move in with them. Mom’s health perked up being around her daughter, her grandkids, and the whole family. Mom was literally a farmer’s daughter and a Depression-era/World War II woman, all her life used to hard work and pouring herself out for others. Polly lovingly joked, “So I treated Mom like Cinderella - making her work, work, work!” - cleaning, vacuuming, baking her great homemade bread and cinnamon rolls and cookies, doing laundry, making meals. Mom rose to the occasion and got healthier too. She felt a part of things. She felt needed. Gordy, Polly, and I often said during that time that we thought Mom moving in with Polly and her family probably added five years to her life. Ironically - and in a way, happily - this was pretty accurate. Mom did live for a little more than five years at Polly’s home in Michigan, before her death at age 77 on March 11, 1992 - five days before her youngest grandchild (Sarah Margaret Lilleboe) was born. 

Historical footnote to the early years of Mom’s life: After Mom died (in Michigan), I arranged for a memorial service in Grand Forks for the many friends and family members who knew her there. At the service, I re-connected with a woman named Lyda. She was about the same age as Mom, and I recognized Lyda, since Mom frequently talked about her and saw her so often over the years. But I never understood exactly who Lyda was - a distant relative perhaps? or a lifelong friend? So I asked her at the memorial service, “Lyda, who are you? Are you one of Mom’s relatives? I’ve never understood how you and Mom are connected.” She smiled very warmly and explained that she first met Mom during the Great Depression (1929-1939) when they were both in their teens. Mom was one of the twelve children (six boys and six girls) of my maternal grandparents - Hector and Andrine Griffin - who had a farm about 30 miles west of Grand Forks. With so many mouths to feed during this economically difficult time, Andrine had to send several of her daughters to live with nearby farm families to earn room and board by helping with kids, cooking, and cleaning for the host family. Lyda explained that Mom came to live with her family during the Great Depression and that they became close friends. “Your mother was like a sister to me,” she said. That was the first I’d heard of how the well-known historical era of the Great Depression had impacted this particular aspect of Mom’s life. I don’t recall Mom ever mentioning this to me. It added a fuller dimension to understanding Mom - her work ethic;  her exceptional homebuilding skills of cooking, baking, cleaning, sewing; and to some extent even her love language of service to others. 

But back to Dad and Grand Forks - after the 1962 divorce, Dad continued to work at Sears the next several years. The three of us kids would see him once a week on Sunday nights when he’d bring us to his basement apartment. He was always sober during these visits, which made the visits a whole lot nicer. He had a color TV - a rarity in those days - and we’d get to watch shows like Bonanza and The Wonderful World of Disney in living color! He would also take the three of us kids camping several times each summer to Itasca State Park - the headwaters of the Mississippi River - in northwestern Minnesota, where we’d go fishing a lot. Gordy and I would take off and go exploring the woods and shorelines of Itasca. 

The headwaters of the Mississippi River, at Itasca State Park: Dad loved the outdoors, which we learned to love too.

Then during the 1965-1966 school year (the year the Minnesota Twins first went to the World Series!), Dad had some sort of dispute at his job at Sears over a sale. He had to choose either a demotion or resignation. He chose to quit, and this was the beginning of a long downward spiral that lasted for the rest of his life. He worked elsewhere locally for a short while, but apparently he started drinking more heavily. By the spring of 1966, he must have been getting desperate. In the aftermath of losing his job at Sears, he gradually sold everything he owned - his childhood home in Larimore (which he had bought out from his brothers after Grandma Hazen’s death), all his belongings including some classic antique furniture from Grandma Hazen, and eventually the house where all of us had last lived before the divorce. Then he moved to the Twin Cities, and he never came back to Grand Forks.

Dad was 56 years old when he moved to Minneapolis-St.Paul in 1966, and there, his life got harder still. I graduated from high school several years later in 1969 and headed off to Macalester College in St. Paul. There I found that Dad worked as a night guard for a security firm, sometimes even right on the Macalester campus. This was one more link in this strange bond I kept sensing between my father and me. Why were our lives intersecting? Why was there this unexpected connectedness I seemed to have with this man who was essentially a stranger?

Later during my freshman year of college, Dad was fired from his security guard position for drinking during work hours. The extent of his alcoholism at that time showed in what he said when I asked him why the company let him go. He said, “They didn’t tell me I couldn’t drink on the job.” Equally reflective of my own “warped normal” of growing up with an alcoholic, I didn’t think anything about his remark at the time. Later, I passed his comment on to Mom over the phone one night. She gently chided me and said, “Bob - there’s no line of work where you’re allowed to drink on the job…”

That was one thing we always admired about Mom - she never criticized Dad himself. She criticized alcoholism, and she criticized his drinking, but she always said that she still loved Dad and divorced him not out of anger or hatred but for the sake of us kids. We learned a lot from her integrity.

The Minnesota Veterans Home in south Minneapolis.

From the early 1970’s until his death in 1989, Dad mostly lived at one of the Minnesota Veterans Homes - either the Vets Home in Hastings (about 25 miles southeast of the Twin Cities) or the Vets Home in south Minneapolis at a very scenic overlook of the Mississippi River and the Ford lock and dam. Dad’s drinking was a problem that haunted him for his entire life and surely contributed to the demise of his two marriages. From the mid-1970’s through the late 1980’s, he went through alcohol treatment centers at least four times. But they never worked for Dad, as he said repeatedly, “I want to drink till the day I die.” Sadly, for the most part, that turned out to be true, except that a medical condition arose toward the end of his life. In his last few years, Dad developed diabetes, which I believe made it physically difficult (and physiologically dangerous) for him to drink. So Dad did spend the final year or so of his life without alcohol.

Dad had a great sense of humor. He could make us laugh so often, and there were so many times I cracked up at funny remarks or teases he made. In fact, the frequency with which he (and other adults) could make me laugh made me wonder to myself, “Is there something like a Funny School that people go to when they grow up, to learn how to make kids laugh?”

But Dad’s quick wit could also be harsh. His short temper, even when he was sober, far too often turned a pleasant situation into an unexpectedly painful one. But something good was developing here at the same time. From early on, I often told myself, “When I’m a dad, I’m not going to make fun of my kids. I’m not going to laugh at them. I’m going to be there for my kids. I’m going to be there for my family.” Some good things - some really good things - came out of this bad dream that we were living through. 

While Dad’s mark on my life was largely negative, it wasn’t completely so. Dad took us camping often, and we learned to love the outdoors. He came to the annual Cub Scout dinner with me one year, and I was so happy that to have him sitting next to me at the dinner table as we sang songs and heard corny jokes together. He brought home sports equipment from his job at Sears. Gordy and I spent countless hours with sporting goods that he gave us. We played catch with the baseballs and gloves from Sears, we shot baskets with the basketball he gave us, we played tennis and badminton with the racquets he’d surprise us with. One of my favorite memories was when Dad would take us out in the countryside to shoot at gophers and pop cans with his .22 rifle. It was great training, and Dad seemed to really enjoy teaching his kids how to use a rifle. Dad was never drunk during these times and was usually in a better mood, too. I think that was partly because he was such an outdoorsman himself, so being outdoors, he was more in his element - more “in his sweet spot.” 

There was one such shooting session that I remember in particular. It was one of the first times I had fired a bolt-action rifle, where the manual backward-forward movement after firing the bullet would eject the empty shell casing from the round that had just been fired. We were shooting at pop cans he had set up a ways away. I had just fired the rifle and completed the bolt-action maneuver, and in my excitement, I wanted to pick up the ejected shell casing on the ground. So with the rifle still in my hands, I leaned over to pick up the shell casing. Very unintentionally, the tip of the rifle barrel brushed against the ground. Dad immediately - but very patiently, kindly, gently, calmly - corrected me. He showed me how the tip of the rifle - the muzzle - could have gotten some dirt in the barrel and how that was so dangerous, since dirt could block the fired bullet from escaping. 

There were two things I remember so vividly about this. First, I noticed how really nice it was that he was patient and kind - not snarly and caustic like he so often was. Second, I noticed - even in the moment - that I could pay much more attention to what he was saying, simply because of how he was saying it - calmly and gently.

Another pleasant incident occurred during my 9th grade year, when junior high was 7th-8th-9th grades. I was one of the starters on the 9th grade varsity basketball team. Dad came to one of our games. It was one of our better efforts as a team - even though we lost, we played well together. And I had one of my better games myself - not that I scored a lot of points - just that I played a solid game with few mistakes. When the mid-afternoon game was over, Dad came to the apartment for dinner. I think I was mentally and emotionally expecting the usual sort of harsh, criticizing remarks from him about my game or my team. So I was very much taken aback - and pleased - when he complimented me on how well I played. Then he said simply (and this is a verbatim quote), “You should shoot more.” Like his kind correction during the rifle incident, it was such a relief to hear positive, encouraging remarks. That was nice for a change. Really nice.

Gordy, Bob, & Polly at Itasca State Park, ca.1963.

With all the camping and fishing we did at Itasca State Park, there were also several positive things going on. Dad had fishing rods for each of us. We would go fishing in a row boat Dad rented, then he would clamp on his modest outboard motor, and we would troll for fish - his preferred method of fishing. Dad was, of course, the expert fisherman in the family. But no matter which one of us caught a fish - that fish was just as big, it weighed just as much, and it tasted just as good whether Dad caught it or one of us kids did. There was a sense of accomplishment, shared and achieved. Dad was happy for us when we’d catch and land a fish. Being outdoors did something positive for him. The great outdoors was his sweet spot, so he often was mellower during these times.  

At the campsite, Gordy and I learned over time how to pitch the large, old-fashioned canvas family tent by ourselves. When it was time to break camp, the two of us developed a very efficient procedure of bringing down the tent. We’d sweep the inside of the tent clean of sand and dirt, then remove the interior poles, lay the tent flat, fold it carefully and smoothly, and then roll it up while meticulously brushing the dirt off the bottom surface of the tent so that there wasn’t any trapped soil getting rolled into the canvas to create rot. At first, Dad gave us a few pointers, but pretty soon Gordy and I did it entirely on our own. I remember many times seeing Dad out of the corner of my eye, just watching us silently as we rolled up the tent - not having to say anything, not having to correct us, not yelling at us. During these post-divorce camping trips, both Gordy (ages 13-16) and I (ages 11-14) were well into the adolescent process of becoming young men. From the way Dad was watching, I think he was proud of us. 

The camping and fishing vacations, however, weren’t all sunny and rosy. Dad still had his caustic tongue. Although he usually wasn’t drinking while we were camping, he still lashed out at us from time to time. In some ways, the times of camping were worse than home life, simply because we were around him more often. What was going along swimmingly as a very pleasant situation could turn awful with just one harsh remark. I hated that.

So in the grand scheme of things, my father was a man who spent most of his adult years on the sidelines of his own life. Two marriages each lasting less than 15 years, two painful divorces, seven children for whom he was essentially a stranger. His four adult children from his first marriage lived on the west coast of the United States, and after his divorce from their mom, he had very little contact with them. Polly attended Denver University in Colorado and then UND med school in our home town of Grand Forks during her young adult years. She would see him when she was in the Twin Cities, which wasn’t too often. Gordy was far enough away at grad school at Purdue University in Indiana and later in teaching on faculty at Northwestern University in the Chicago area, so seeing Dad for him just didn’t happen very often either.

For the three of us kids, Dad was pretty much this stranger all our lives. Unintentionally, he became too much of an afterthought for us. He was absent from us so much even before the divorce that our lives went on for the most part without him after the divorce - far too often without his involvement, without his participation, without his presence. 

For example, during my senior year of high school I earned a significant college scholarship. I remember telling family and friends about this good news. Although Dad had already moved out of town by this time, I don’t recall even thinking of trying to contact him. 

Another example is when my future wife Sarah Jane Hein (born February 25, 1953 in Stevens Point, Wisconsin) and I got engaged in the spring of 1980. In my delight, I called Mom with the news, then Gordy, then Polly, then all my friends. It wasn’t until the very next day that the thought even came to mind, “Oh, I should call Dad, too.” Even though Dad and I both lived in Minneapolis at the time, only 6-7 miles apart from each other, it just hadn’t even entered my mind that first day to call Dad about this momentous occasion. This wasn’t intentional on my part. Dad’s predominant absence from my life had created an emotional blank spot in my own mental checklist. It wasn’t that I never thought about my father. It was more that he simply wasn’t part of the daily ebb and flow of my life. 

Despite the largely (but not entirely!) negative impact he had on my life, the tragic fruit of his own absence from home was that he simply wasn’t high on the list of important people in my mind. His position in my own consciousness was a hole, a gap that had become the norm of existence. My own life’s “normal” was that no father came to the events of my life. I had no father present for my games and track meets, for my awards and achievements, for the various milestones and markers of life. No dad was there for me to turn to for advice or questions about life or cars or girls. Decades and decades after my own high school graduation, I was looking at a photograph of Mom and myself in front of our apartment, with me decked out in my graduation cap and gown. As I looked at the picture, I said to myself in sudden realization - some 50 years after the divorce and more than 40 years after graduation - “Dad, you were supposed to be there for this, you #@*&%.” It took that long for me to realize that what I grew up with as “my normal” wasn’t the ways things are “s’pozed to be.” But I learned to forgive Dad for the many hurtful things he did and the many good things that he didn’t do - for the ornery, unpredictable man that he was and for the good father that he wasn’t. Forgiving him was a major step in my life. 

Chapter 5. Dad and My Own Married Life  

Throughout college and in the years before my own marriage, that strange and inexplicable bond I felt with Dad continued. I would visit Dad from time to time - sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes because of the tug of that bond I felt for him, sometimes out of guilt, sometimes out of concern and love. And sometimes I went to see him out of wanting more - I wanted my dad to be the kind of dad a father should be. I don’t ever remember when this wasn’t disappointing in one way or another. 

So I’d see Dad at various times and places - at the Veterans Home in Minneapolis, at the occasional treatment center where he resided from time to time, in court once during a legal situation he faced, a few times when he was at the more distant Veterans Home in Hastings, and once or twice at an apartment he had on his own for a short while in south Minneapolis. A few times I had him over for dinner at wherever I was living. Once we sat together on the covered front porch of my house, watching a marvelous rainstorm sweep through the neighborhood where I lived, near the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota. He enjoyed us sharing nature’s show of the thunder blasts and lightning strikes.

Dad just wasn’t very talkative throughout all these times. Some of this was his generation - that Depression-era, World War II generation that didn’t engage in much self-revelation. So even when we got together, Dad was still a stranger to me. Far too often, in my own nervousness around him, I felt like I was supplying both sides of the conversation. But I wonder too if his silence wasn’t simply the silence of a defeated, broken man who was himself hurting and confused about the failures and losses in his own journey, who was wrestling with his own demons and inner struggles, who didn’t know what to say, who didn’t know how to respond to an adult son, who didn’t know how to be a dad, who didn’t know how to relate.

During this time, in his own late 60’s and throughout his 70’s, Dad was living a tough life - sometimes out on the streets, sometimes in alcohol treatment centers, sometimes at the Veterans Home in Minneapolis or Hastings. He mentioned how once or twice he had gotten “rolled” in downtown Minneapolis - street lingo for getting beaten up and robbed. Several times after a get together he had me drop him off on the streets of that same downtown Minneapolis area.

In 1980, I married Sarah. By that time, I had been a born-again Christian since 1975, after a dramatically answered prayer brought me out of the atheism and moral relativism that I had embraced during my college years. It was after we were married that I got to thinking a bit more closely about this situation with this father of mine, this stranger in my life. I didn’t feel close to him, and he didn’t seem to respond very much during our times together. Then another thought came to mind: whatever kind of dad he was or wasn’t, he still was my father, and the Bible said in the Fifth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.” This commandment didn’t say, “Honor your father if he’s a good dad.” It just said to honor your father. So I got convicted - in a good way - that regardless of how I felt about about this quiet stranger who was my dad, I still had a duty to obey the Fifth Commandment. Regardless of who Dad was or wasn’t, regardless of my usual indifference toward him, regardless of this void between this man and me, I had an obligation to honor him in whatever way I could. This wasn’t so much a deep, insightful breakthrough on my part - it was pretty much just a conclusion. He’s my dad. The Fifth Commandment says to honor your father. Therefore, I would honor him. 

Sarah and Dad at our wedding in 1980.

So Sarah and I very intentionally decided to include him in our family as much as we could. He was in our wedding party, and then we had him over to our house for all the special days - Christmas,  birthdays, Thanksgiving, Father’s Day, Fourth of July, and other occasions, too. These times were invariably awkward and stilted for me, and they were awkward for Sarah too - having this quiet stranger around the house. But she supported both the idea and the reality of honoring him. She was a gracious and kind hostess. If too much time had passed since I’d seen him, she would say to me, “Honey, you need to go see your dad.” Thank you, Sarah, for what you did in all this. The role you played was vital. 

After several years of having Dad to our house, with lots of awkward silences, the entire tone of these visits improved when Sarah and I started having kids (!). Quite naturally - and with utter adorability - kids can often act as a buffer in social situations. Now when we’d see Dad, we had our adorable first son Brandon - and then four years later our equally adorable second son Trevor - running and crawling around. Quite a few times, I would take Brandon with me on the drive along the Mississippi to see Dad across the river at the Minneapolis Vets Home, as Brandon and I sang, “Over the river and through the woods to Grandfather’s place we go...” It was easier to be with Dad, because now we had these kids to talk about. Both of us now had something besides each other to focus on. The boys would crawl up on Dad’s lap and hug him. Sometimes he’d read a book to one or the other. 

Through all of these visits, Dad didn’t speak much, and from time to time I questioned if it was worth it - for him or for us - to keep bringing the boys over to see him or even having him over to our house. Occasionally I wondered, “Why even bother? Is he even getting anything out of this?” - he was so quiet, so uninvolved, and so unexpressive. But both Sarah and I still believed firmly in the importance of obeying the Fifth Commandment. We believed we were doing our part, and we decided we’d trust that God was doing his part, even if we couldn’t see it. So we kept up the visits. As it turned out, those visits with Dad had more influence than any of us knew at the time. 

Now Dad had two adorable grandsons to enjoy: Trevor in my lap, Brandon on the right; August 1988.

It was only after his death that one of the attendants at the Minneapolis Veterans Home told me just how much impact Brandon and Trevor had been having on their grandfather. She told me how Dad was thrilled that “Bob has a son” - and later that “Now Bob has two boys of his own” - and that he always jabbered on after a visit about how proud he was of his family and how much he enjoyed our get-togethers. I was stunned. Dad had never said anything about this. It was rewarding and encouraging to hear how much our boys affected him, just by being kids. And I believe God was at work, weaving the love and attention and presence of Dad’s grandkids to soften the heart of this crusty, old, silent, alcoholic sinner. 

Chapter 6. The Salvation of Gordon Bradford Hazen, Sr.   

So - back to that Sunday in early October 1989, when Sarah, Brandon (5 1/2 years old at the time), Trevor (15 months old), and I went to see Dad at the Veterans Hospital in Minneapolis. His health had been deteriorating quite a bit the previous month or two. He was in the hospital because of some significant swelling in his abdomen. As we approached the room, I told Sarah it might be better if she took the boys down the hall to the waiting room till I knew how he was doing.

In his room, Dad was sitting in a wheelchair, obviously in pain as he groaned from the discomfort in his abdomen. He asked me, with anguish in his voice, “Why does this have to hurt like this? Why does the pain have to be so bad?” I told him that medically I didn’t know why but that Biblically and theologically, I did know. “Dad, your pain came from sin - the sin that separates us from God and that has ruined everything that God made.” This seemed to get his attention. Curiously (but in retrospect, not surprisingly), Dad’s pain subsided during the entire ensuing conversation.

I explained further that God never intended us to die or suffer, but our sin which separated us from God has brought death and suffering to this world. Since we can never un-do this mess we’ve created, I added, then God did what we are incapable of doing. God did what was necessary to restore us to a right relationship with the Creator - he sent his Son Jesus to bear the punishment of sin, to die in our place, and then to rise again in his resurrection as confirmation of what he had accomplished.

Then Dad said, sincerely but with some vagueness, “If I’ve ever sinned against Christ, I hope he will forgive me.”

As I sensed the urgency of the moment, I pressed the point - “Dad, have you sinned against God?”

He said, “Well, yes, I have.”

Then I replied boldly, firmly, and gently, “Then what you need to do is admit your sins before God, ask Jesus to forgive you, and accept Christ as your savior.”

Dad lowered his head and much to my surprise, without my prompting or leading, said aloud, “Jesus, I humbly ask you to forgive my sins…” and he went on praying other things that I can’t remember now, except that it was essentially what is called the sinner’s prayer - admitting one’s sins and asking God for forgiveness through Christ and accepting Jesus as Savior. Looking back on this all these years later, I wonder if Dad was familiar with the sinner’s prayer from something I didn’t know about till after his death. [see Appendix A, below].

So after Dad prayed, I assured him that God had indeed forgiven him. Given his current condition, I also pointed out that Jesus might not take away the pain he was in now - but that in the next life, he’d be in the presence of Jesus where he’d have no pain at all.

Dad mentioned something about not understanding how God could do all this - “I just don’t understand how God could forgive me…” I assured him that it was hard to understand, and I mentioned the song “Amazing Grace” and how God’s forgiveness was indeed an amazing thing. During this time, Dad was very emotional - lots of tears, and going in and out of sobbing. Something very impactful was happening here. This wasn’t (as someone later alleged) an old man “just mouthing some words.” This was real, raw, and deep. I saw his tears. I heard his sobbing. I felt his hand shaking in my hands. 

We talked about all this for a short while - about this whole notion of undeserved favor from God - and then Dad said, “I’ve never felt so loved in my life.” This was a very touching moment - so filled with an intangible, otherworldly, ethereal presence of God. At that moment, I thought that my next remark was belaboring the obvious, as I said, “You mean loved by Jesus, right?” 

He said, “No - by you, Bob.” Needless to say, his words surprised me. He still had tears in his eyes, and I told him that I was glad he was my father. Then Dad initiated a prayer of his own - a genuine prayer from the heart, thanking God for loving him and thanking God for me being there. Whether he did this consciously or not, he essentially had given me his blessing as he was praying. 

After this, I asked him if I could pray for him and ask God to bless him too. He readily agreed, as he said he had just given me his blessing. I believe this was a very profound moment for Dad - to give me his blessing. When his own mom (Anna McKean Hazen) died in 1959 several years before the 1962 divorce, he was very bothered that she hadn’t given him her blessing before dying. How significant this must have been for him that here we were, father and son, exchanging blessings for each other.

Then I told him how if one of us happened to die before we saw each other again, then the next time we met would be in that next life - either in heaven or after Christ’s return to earth - in the new bodies Jesus would give us. 

As I prepared to leave,  he started to feel pain in his abdomen again. What a “coincidence” that his physical pain had vanished during our entire conversation (!). So I got up to call the nurse to assist him. As I was about to pass through the door to leave his room, I heard God whisper a really, really clear thought to me - Was it worth it? 

I knew instantly what the question meant: for all the pain and grief and uncertainty and self-doubt this man had created in my own life - for all the searching and seeking I had done in my youth for significance and meaning and healing and truth and identity - for all the turmoil and wounds I had experienced because of my own dad - for all the tough things that God let me go through - was it worth it, to end up being here with my dad in this moment?

Yes, I said. Although I can’t recall if I said that aloud or just silently to myself, I was surprised at how immediate and firm my answer was. Yes, if going through all that was the price to pay to be here on the edge of eternity with my dad today, it was worth it. Back then, those many years before, in the middle of all the turmoil that I had gone through because of my father, there wasn’t much clarity for me then - as I was going through it. It sure didn’t seem worth anything then. But what happened that day in that hospital room made it all worthwhile. Yes, it was worth all that, to be here today. Yes - this moment, this hour, this day suddenly made sense out of all those years. All those years, God had been taking things that were painful and confusing and hurtful - and weaving together something beautiful and profound and true.  

The nurse came in to help Dad with his pain. I said goodbye and found Sarah and the boys down the hall. I told Sarah what had just happened, and her eyes lit up. Then we went home. Shortly after that, I called Polly with the good news. Both Polly and I had become Christians after our respective post-college years, and I knew she would be delighted to hear about all this.

Two days later - the first opportunity I had to get back to him - we saw each other in his room back at the Minneapolis Veterans Home. In the short aftermath of the 48 hours since that dramatic Sunday afternoon at the hospital, I candidly wondered how much he would remember. So I asked him, “Dad, do you remember what happened on Sunday at the hospital?”

Dad nodded and said, “Yes, I remember.” Period. Silence. These Great-Depression-World-War-II veterans just didn’t do much self-revelation.

I waited a few moments and then asked, “So what do you think about it?”

After a pause, Dad said simply, “I think it’s pretty amazing.” Period. Silence. Still no return of volley.

So after another few moments, I asked, “Dad, what do you mean - ‘amazing’?”

Then Dad just said so simply and profoundly, “I think it’s pretty amazing that God would love a man like me.”

Something amazing had indeed really happened.

That fall of 1989 turned out to be a tumultuous time for our family. Sarah’s brother Tom Hein was killed in a car accident late at night the very next day after we visited Dad at the hospital. We attended Tom’s funeral the following weekend in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

Not long afterward that same month, we ended up having an unexpected Hazen family reunion. Polly and her kids had come to visit from Michigan. She brought Mom along too, as Mom was still living with them. Gordy also drove in from the Chicago area to join us. Right in the middle of this visit, our realtor called and said, “I know this is a hectic time for you right now, but I just saw a house that I think you should look at.” All of us toured the place. Sarah and I ended up buying this great home near the State Fairgrounds in St. Paul - hectic indeed! This was the house that our sons grew up in, and we lived there for almost 20 years.

While all the Hazens were together, we went to see Dad at the Minneapolis Veterans Home, and somewhere in the family are a few photographs of Dad, Mom, Gordy, Polly, Sarah, and me - along with Dad’s five grandchildren at that time - from oldest to youngest,  Christi Anna Lilleboe (born December 3, 1982), Brandon Timblin Hazen (April 12, 1984), Amy Marie Lilleboe (March 25, 1985), Eric Michael Lilleboe (January 23, 1988), and Trevor Addison Hazen (July 11, 1988). Polly’s fourth child, Sarah Margaret Lilleboe (March 16, 1992) wasn’t with us yet - she arrived just 5 days after Mom died on March 11, 1992. 

As all the Lilleboes were about to drive away, Polly realized she had left her jacket at Dad’s table and went back to get it. Dad was in his room, with her jacket on the bed, and he said he was glad she came back. Polly asked, “Dad, Bob says you asked Jesus into your heart - did that really happen?” Dad replied, “Yes, it really happened.” 

Sensing that she would never see him again in this life, Polly said, “Dad, this is so amazing. That means I don’t have to say goodbye to you today, because I can just say ‘See you later.’ God is so good to have done this with you.” 

Dad replied - just like a World War II vet would -  “Yes - and if I had known that getting saved was this damn easy and wonderful - just asking for God's forgiveness - I would have done this long ago.” Polly thought Dad’s remarks clearly were very sincere. Then she said the kids and Vera were waiting in the car, so she and Dad exchanged hugs and heartfelt I-love-you’s. Then she grabbed her jacket and left, so thankful that she had forgotten it in the first place. 

A week or two after our unplanned Hazen reunion, in early November 1989, Dad underwent abdominal surgery. I was at the hospital during the operation. When they brought Dad out of surgery at 3 in the morning, he was unconscious. But I spoke to him anyway and told him that I loved him. Very gently, I stroked his hair and then kissed him on the forehead, telling him I’d go home and come back as soon as I could. But Dad’s body couldn’t handle the trauma of the surgery, and by the time I got home, the hospital had called to report that he died shortly after I left. His death was early in the morning of November 3, 1989. He was six weeks shy of his 80th birthday. 

Dad's grave, Ft. Snelling National Cemetery 

Chapter 7. Aftermath 

We arranged a memorial service for Dad at the Minneapolis Veterans home a few days later. Sarah, Brandon, Trevor, our pastor and his wife, one other veteran, and myself were the only ones at the service. I gave a brief account of this man’s tough life - an account that in the end had a very happy turn of events. 

At the graveside service a bit later that day, several veterans gave a three-gun salute to Dad. One of the vets approached me, holding three empty shell casings and a large U.S. flag folded into the classic triangle. He spoke those words that still bring tears to my eyes: “On behalf of the President of the United States and a grateful nation, we present these as tokens of appreciation for our fallen comrade.” Dad’s body was cremated, and his remains are buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Bloomington, Minnesota.

It was only after Dad’s death that I saw something in some words of Jesus that I had never seen before. In John 11:25-26, Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” This passage had long confused me, as it seemed a mixed-up jumble of death and life, all scrambled and unclear. But as I was pondering this passage after Dad’s death, for the first time I saw the time sequence in it - one who believes in Jesus can indeed go through death and yet still be alive afterwards, in the next life - never to die again.

All my life, I could never quite make sense out of that intriguing and unclear bond I sensed with Dad. But it kept showing up in different ways. As a young child, I thought - years before the divorce - that if my parents split up, I would go with Dad while Gordy and Polly would go with Mom. Dad and I looked more alike than he and Gordy did. Dad and I liked a lot of the same things, like baseball and camping and the outdoors. In some ways, I had a temper like his. Sometimes I wondered if this bond between us meant that I was going to become an alcoholic like he had been. His job as a security guard brought him to the college that I attended. Then after my college years, when he went through alcohol treatment programs at the Veterans Hospital in St. Cloud and later at Bridgeway Center in Minneapolis, I was the family member that was contacted to meet with program counselors at the facilities. When the Bridgeway treatment center staff started to arrange for a family intervention on Dad, I was the only family member to attend. When Bridgeway invited family members to attend regular Al-Anon meetings in the building, I was the only one able to participate.

I didn’t always like this bond. But now I see that this strange connectedness I felt with my father was a God-given link that was designed to keep Dad’s life and my life in overlap - that throughout Dad’s life, he and I would be tethered in these odd and various ways, so as to bring about this connection and redemption at the end of his life. 

There was one strand of this cord in particular that was stronger on Dad’s end than it was on mine. And this particular strand wasn’t strengthened on my end until many, many years after Dad’s death. In the early 1980’s, Dad was at Bridgeway Center in southeast Minneapolis, going through an alcohol treatment program - again. I was visiting him in his room. As it came time for me to leave, he said to me, “You’re a good son, Bob.” 

When he said that, my first thoughts (but I didn’t say anything out loud) were pretty skeptical - thoughts like “You’re just saying something to fill the silence” - “You don’t really mean that” - “You don’t even know what that means.” That was my reaction at the time. My brushing away those words indicated how little weight they carried for me in that moment - and for many years afterward, too. 

But I believe those words meant a lot more at that moment to Dad than they did to me. Quite some time after his death - a good 15 or 20 years later - I was thinking about those five words on that day. Something started to sink in. How many a man has ever heard those words from his father? How many a man has never heard his dad say that? For how minuscule those five words were in the overall flow and impact of my dad’s mostly ruinous life, at least he spoke them. At least I heard them. To whatever degree he was capable, he meant them. And if he had never spoken those words, isn’t it possible that I would be wishing all these years later to have heard such words from my father? 

It took me years and years to realize the value of having heard my own dad say to me, “You’re a good son.” As the years went on from that realization, those few words took on a weight far beyond any expected proportion. My dad blessed me. My father told me something valuable and profound. There is something weighty - and it’s meant to be weighty - about the relationship between a father and son - because only masculinity can bestow masculinity. For whatever I didn’t receive from my dad over those many years, in the end - even before the end - I did receive these five words. And those five words my father spoke were my dad at his best - he was sober, he had been assessing his life, he was appreciating the time we had spent together in recent years. Those words were like seeds planted a long time ago that finally showed some growth only decades later. Thanks, Dad - this was you at your best. 

The solidity of those words, sadly, stood in stark contrast - but in rich contrast - to the fact that though all of these events - during childhood, in high school, in college, after college, during my marriage, and even in his final days and weeks of his own life - my father was always a stranger to me. But now I have this great anticipation of one day seeing Dad again, in the next life, in his resurrection body, on the new earth. He’ll want to spend time with me. And I believe Dad will have some adventures planned for the two of us. Maybe he will say, “Hey, Bob - let me show you…” Maybe he will have an assignment from Jesus for us to explore some distant planet in a galaxy far, far away. We will have much to talk about and much to do, and I look forward to seeing him again - to being with this man who will be in his right mind and right heart, restored to the man and the father he was meant to be. Our time together will be great and wondrous - far beyond all that we can ask or imagine. The Bible says, “What no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, nor the heart of man conceived, God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthian 2:9).

Dad lived most of his adult years on the sidelines of his own life - in the ditches of anger, despair, pain, hopelessness, and wounds. But for all the destruction he left behind - like the wake of a boat repeatedly careening out of control - Jesus achieved an amazing victory, to pull this man back from the jaws of hell. This is not to dismiss or minimize the damage done - two marriages, two divorces, seven children he barely knew. This was the life of a man bound for hell. But as Corrie Ten Boom once wrote, “There is no pit of hell so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” 

Chapter 8. Epilogue 

Dear reader, you too can have now what Dad only had at the very end of his life: forgiveness from the Creator for all one’s moral shortcomings, whether small or large. This forgiveness is what God sent his Son to do - to pay the penalty of all our moral shortcomings - to pay for the guilt of sin - so that we can be free of a debt we could never repay anyway. This is what the crucifixion of Jesus was - the forgiveness of my sins and Dad’s sins - and yours. This accomplishment was and is so monumental and so enormous that the only thing we can do is simply accept it - or refuse it. You can possess something you could never earn: the gift of forgiveness, the gift of being right with your Maker, the gift of a clear conscience. Accept what Jesus has done for each of us. Ask him to take away the guilt of your moral shortcomings. Dump all the crap of your life. Talk to God about this, right now - in what is commonly called prayer. Tell God that you accept what Jesus has done on your behalf. Tell God you want in on this. Start immersing yourself in the God-told story of the Bible. Get to a Bible-believing church - sadly, not all churches take the Bible seriously.

For this is the second reason why I’ve written this account, that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing this, you may have life in his name. The Bible emphasizes that for the enormity of what God has done on our behalf, the only proper response for us is to believe - believe what God has achieved for us in Christ. What Jesus accomplished in his life, teachings, death, resurrection, and ascension is so monumental that we can only accept it and believe it - or refuse it:

• In John 6:29, when the people asked Jesus what they must do to be doing the work of God, Jesus said, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he was sent.” 

• In Romans 5:1, Paul writes, “Since we are justified by faith [by believing], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

• In Hebrews 11:6, the Bible says, “Without faith, it is impossible to please God.” If we turn this double-negative [...without... impossible] into a positive, it becomes, “With believing, it is possible to please God.”

So, dear reader, you can pray that type of prayer that Dad prayed: “Lord Jesus, I confess that I’ve sinned against you. I accept your death for my life. I trust you now that you forgive my sins, and I acknowledge you as Lord of my life.” Get right with God if you haven’t done so already. Do it now. It’s never too late. There is no pit of hell so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.

Robert Griffin Hazen

Holland, Michigan

May, 2020

Many thanks to my brother Gordy Hazen, my sister Polly Lilleboe, and my half-brother Bill Hazen for their suggestions, corrections, and added information in this account.

Bob, Polly, & Gordy, 2018.

Appendix A: Two Intriguing Anecdotes

There are two intriguing situations involving Dad that are worth mentioning in this account. The first regards a phase of Dad’s life that must have occurred in the early 1930’s and probably before his first marriage. After Dad died in 1989, I made contact with one of my cousins I’d never met - Alan Hazen. Alan was the son of Dad’s brother Charlie Hazen. After leaving Larimore, Charlie had moved to Louisiana where he became editor of the main newspaper in Shreveport. Charlie’s son Alan had joined the Navy and had been the captain of one of the Navy ships that was assigned, at least once, to the duty of retrieving the NASA astronauts after their splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. 

After Dad’s death, I somehow found Alan’s telephone number. He was living in Houston, Texas at that time and had retired from the Navy. I called him out of the blue, introduced myself, and told him I was calling to let him know that my father - his uncle and the last of the five Hazen brothers of that generation - had recently passed away. As we chatted cordially, Alan mentioned something that I had never heard of. He related that in his own growing-up years in Shreveport, Dad had lived either with them (Charlie Hazen’s family) or near them, selling Bibles door to door. Wait - what? What!? My dad sold Bibles? My dad sold Bibles door to door? My dad knew the Bible enough to want to sell it? 

This shocked me. I was floored, because I had noticed in all of my own years around Dad that he was generally hostile and cynical toward church, God, Christianity, Christians, and the Bible. When we were kids, he would drive us to church for Sunday school at First Presbyterian Church in Grand Forks, but he wouldn’t come inside for the worship service. He several times made snide comments about pastors who “put their noses in other people’s business.” Also, after my dramatic conversion of accepting Jesus Christ as my savior in 1975 in my first year out of college, Dad was skeptical of and resistant to what I tried to tell him about Jesus and God and Christianity and the Bible. 

In light of Dad’s own equally dramatic salvation in the final weeks of his life, this experience of selling Bibles explained to me several things about my father. Perhaps as a young man he had some zeal about the Bible and God and Jesus. But perhaps he also had some sort of disillusioning experience that created his general cynicism with Christianity. In any event, Dad’s experience with selling Bibles meant that he had more familiarity with the Bible and Christianity than I ever knew in all our years together.

The other intriguing situation was a tragic automobile accident that Dad was involved in. I’m not sure when this occurred. Gordy says that Mom told him about it, and he says the way she spoke of it gave him the impression that the accident had occurred in the timeframe in which she knew Dad. If Gordy’s perception was accurate, then the accident had to be after World War II, rather than during his first marriage or even before his first marriage. For me, I heard about this accident directly from Dad. I don’t remember how old I was when Dad told me - I’m pretty sure it was before the divorce in 1962. We were driving through the countryside west of Grand Forks. Because I was sitting in the front seat, I don’t think Mom was with us. Gordy and Polly must have been in the back seat. I had previously asked Dad about his wartime experience in the Navy during World War II, and in childlike fashion, I asked him that day if he had ever killed anyone. The context for my question, in my mind, was that he was in a war, where killing occurs. I was wondering to myself whether he had perhaps shot and killed an enemy soldier. But Dad took my question in an unexpected direction. He got very solemn and said that yes, he had in fact killed someone - in an automobile accident. He explained that he was driving in the countryside (near Grand Forks, I assumed), and he approached a farmer driving a horse-drawn wagon. The wagon was filled with hay, and there was a boy sitting on top of the hay. Dad honked at the farmer as he drew close to the wagon. The honking startled the horse, which reared up on its hind legs. This in turn jostled the wagon, and the boy fell out of the wagon and was struck by Dad’s car. The boy was killed. 

That’s about all he said, and there was an awkward silence for a while as we drove on. For however old I was, I didn’t have the wherewithal or the maturity to know what to say. I also lacked the awareness of asking other questions - questions which I now wish I had asked at that time - questions like, When did this happen, Dad? Were you approaching the wagon from behind or from the front? Was anyone else in the wagon with the farmer? Was anyone else in the back with the boy? Was anyone else with you in the car? Was Mom with you? Was this considered - or perhaps ruled - to be a tragic accident, or was it ruled to be negligence or recklessness on your part? Did any legal action come from this? Were the police involved?

Although I remembered this incident for quite some time, by the time Dad was in his later years, this accident had become a distant memory even for me. Also, for the times I did occasionally remember the accident, I felt too awkward about bringing up the situation again with Dad after all this time. So - to my regret - I never asked Dad about it again.

But there’s a reason I have included these two incidents in this appendix: Are they connected? 

Was Dad’s involvement with the death of this boy a disillusioning experience that explains at least some of the transition in his life from being a Bible salesman to becoming a Bible cynic? All of this is something I only started wondering about well after Dad had already died. Regardless of whether there was any official ruling about negligence, Dad must have felt guilt about his role in this boy’s death. I wish now that I had asked him questions like: Has this accident haunted you, Dad? Did this accident contribute to your drinking? Or was it more the other way around: did your drinking contribute to the accident? Had you been drinking when the accident happened? Were you drunk? Did you politely honk your horn to let the farmer know you were passing him from behind? - or did you blare your horn in irritation or foolishness? Have you ever asked God to forgive you for the part you had in this? Did you know the farmer or ever see him again? Did you ever ask the farmer for forgiveness? Were you arrested or were charges ever brought against you? Did you ever ask God why he let this happen? Is this accident related to your long-standing resistance toward God? Was this accident a disillusioning experience that played a part in your transition from Bible salesman to God cynic? 

Of course, I won’t know the answers to these questions until I see Dad again in the next life. But I have often wondered since Dad’s death if his alcoholism was (among other dynamics) an attempt to assuage the guilt he must have felt from this incident. How often did Dad go to the bottle to try to medicate himself from his own trauma of causing a boy’s death? And all of these unasked questions make me wonder: What are the questions that I still haven’t asked in this life, that might be good for me to ask? What are the painful issues in my life that I’m still trying to medicate myself from? What fears am I afraid to face up to? 

So it’s good to remember what Dad realized and personally experienced in the final days of his own life - that God’s mercies never come to an end, that God still keeps seeking after us in love, that God’s love is so deep that we never get away from it. Too often, we have to only slow down enough to accept what he has done in coming after us out of love - in coming for us out of love.

There is no fear so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. Dad’s life is a testimony to that. 

Appendix B: Another Impact  

There is one very profound and positive long term impact that Dad’s life had on me. To explain this, I have to go back to Sarah’s first pregnancy, in order to link this back to my father.  

When Sarah got pregnant for the first time in August 1983, we were thrilled. For some reason that I couldn’t put my finger on, I really wanted the baby to be a boy. People sometimes asked me why I wanted a boy, and I just couldn’t identify any particular reason - I just wanted a boy. I so wanted a boy. I just did. It’s a little embarrassing to admit something further. I realized that if the child turned out to be a girl, I knew I would love my daughter with all my heart, yes. At the same time, somewhere in the midst of that, I felt there would be a part of me that would be disappointed that I didn’t have a son - and I didn’t like that about myself. What I kept coming back to was that I would love this child whether it was a boy or a girl - and… I really wanted a boy. 

As Sarah’s first pregnancy progressed, female friends and relatives kept bringing up what are called old wives’ tales about various aspects of a woman’s pregnancy - “You’re getting morning sickness early in the first trimester? That means it will be a girl.” Ignore here whether there is any accuracy to these various predictions. There simply was something odd about all the old wives’ tales that people would mention (and there were plenty of them) - every single time, the interpretation was, “That means it’s going to be a girl.” Even in the last few moments before delivery, the attending nurse put a monitor on Sarah’s belly to measure the baby’s heartbeat. The heart rate was 152 beats per minute - and  the nurse said, “Ooh, that’s high. That usually means it’s a girl.”

Given how much I wanted a boy, the pessimist in me steeled myself for disappointment. To be candid, I didn’t like feeling like having a girl would be a disappointment. I knew I would love a daughter, and I had already heard from other dads that with girls, a father will often find himself head-over-heels crazy about his baby girl.

Nevertheless, I wanted a boy. I really wanted a son. 

A mere few minutes later, still in the delivery room, as I was adjusting myself to the apparent news that we were going to have a daughter - much to my surprise, this… boy… emerged. I was ecstatic. Since we had to wear surgical masks in the delivery room, the photos from those minutes after the birth don’t show the biggest smile I’d ever had in my life. It was a son. It felt like I had just opened the best Christmas present ever. 

There were several aspects to God’s mercy in giving me a boy. First and foremost, I was profoundly grateful that God had fulfilled this deep, deep desire in me to have a son. The second aspect of God’s mercy landed on me sometime later. I realized God was also merciful in that neither my child (if it had been a girl) nor I had to deal with my anticipated “disappointment” of having a girl. Thank goodness neither of us had to manage that.

Now Sarah and I had a son. A few years later, she was pregnant again. My first wish had been granted - I already had a son. But even though I told people I’d be happy for this second child being either a boy or a girl, I still had a deep desire to have another boy. It wasn’t as strong as it was with our first-born, Brandon - but that desire was there. Months later, our second son Trevor emerged from the womb, and I was once again ecstatic. 

So now I had two boys, and I was very delighted. But why? Why was it that I so wanted sons? I couldn’t pinpoint anything beyond “I just wanted boys.”

So, why am I including this in my account about my father? What’s the connection here to Dad? 

Three generations of Hazen guys, 1989.

The light didn’t dawn on me till several several decades later, years after Dad had died, and I think it may have been even after Sarah and I had become empty nesters. One day it just hit me like a ton of bricks (in a good way): the reason I wanted boys was in order to put an end to a line of bad fathering in my lineage. Not bad parenting - bad fathering - and I couldn’t put an end to bad fathering unless I had sons - boys who would grow up to be fathers - good fathers. I couldn’t raise girls to be good fathers. 

I wanted to raise boys to be good men who knew how to treat a woman, faithful husbands who knew how to treat their wives, good fathers who knew how to love their own kids well. It wasn’t merely and only that I wanted myself to be a good dad - of course I did. But I wanted to go further. I wanted to cut off bad fathering in my lineage. And this explained so much to me. It explained the strange bond I felt with this stranger who was my father. It explained that deep, deep desire of wanting sons. It also helped me see that I wasn’t alone in my path and in my desires - it was God who had guided and honed and directed my desires.

To pre-empt any thought that this writer just doesn’t like girls, there’s something else I have discovered over the years. Of my sister’s four kids, three of them are girls, and I absolutely love my nieces and have thoroughly enjoyed their personalities and their company. And as of this writing, my first three grandchildren have also been girls, and I adore all three of my granddaughters. Girls are great. So are boys. I really love kids. I wanted sons. I wanted sons for a reason that took decades to discover. 

Appendix C: Dad’s Paternal Hazen Lineage  

Dad’s paternal lineage in the United States can be traced back to the year 1614 in England, with a certain Edward Hazen in east central England, about 150 miles north of London, not far from the eastern coast of Great Britain. The following information has been gleaned from the book The Hazen Family in America, by Tracy Elliot Hazen, PhD. Since Edward Hazen is the first Hazen traced to the early colonial days in America, I have labelled these Hazen generations down through the decades and centuries, starting with Roman numeral I for Edward; Roman numeral II for Edward’s son; Roman number III for Edward’s grandson, etc., and ending with VIII for my grandfather Ora. My dad would be IX, so Gordy, Polly and I would be X - the tenth generation of this line. These numerals are simply for keeping track of our ten generations of Hazens in America, rather than assuming any particular prominence to our lineage.  

I. Edward Hazen (1614-1683) was born in England in the parish of Cadney, Lincolnshire and baptized there on December 14, 1614. In those days, it was common for a newborn’s date of baptism to be recorded rather than the date of birth. Edward’s surname of Hazen was sometimes spelled Hassen, and his last name is listed this way in an undated survey in the colonial town of Rowley, Massachussetts. Rowley is a near-coastal town about 30 miles north of Boston, near the New Hampshire border. This Rowley survey was made sometime close to, but prior to 1647. So Edward Hazen had emigrated to the American colonies sometime before 1647. He died in Rowley on July 22, 1683. His first marriage to a woman named Elizabeth (no last name or date of birth recorded) produced no children, and she died on September 18, 1649 in Rowley. Edward’s second marriage was to Hannah Grant (1631-1715/16) who was baptized October 16, 1631 in Cottingham, Yorkshire in England and died at Haverhill, Massachusetts in February 1715 or 1716. Edward and Hannah had twelve children, including their fourth child and second son, Thomas Hazen. 

II. Thomas Hazen (1657/8-1735) was born January 29, 1657 or 1658 and died April 12, 1735 at Norwich, Connecticut. He was a Lieutenant in the English Army (at this time, the American colonies were all part of the British empire). On January 1, 1683 or 1684 in Rowley, Massachusetts he married Mary Howlett (1664-1727). She was born in 1664 in Ipswich, Massachusetts and died October 27, 1727 in Norwich, Connecticut. Thomas and Mary Hazen had eleven children, including their fourth child and second son, also named Thomas Hazen. 

III. This second Thomas Hazen (1690-1774) was born February 7, 1690 in Boxford, Massachusetts and died in early 1774 in Norwich, Connecticut. On September 30, 1714 he married Sarah Ayer (1690-1753), who was born September 15, 1690 at Haverhill, Massachusetts and died at Norwich, Connecticut on September 16, 1753. Thomas and Sarah Hazen had seven children, including Joseph Hazen, who was their second child and first son. When this second Thomas Hazen died in 1774, the American Revolutionary War was only a year or so away. 

IV. Joseph Hazen (1717-1796) was born June 30, 1717 at Norwich, Connecticut and died September 26, 1796 in Franklin, Connecticut. On December 8, 1740 he married Elizabeth Durkee (1721-1797). She was born October 27, 1721 in Gloucester, Massachusetts and died May 24, 1797 in Franklin, Connecticut. Joseph and Elizabeth Hazen had eleven children, including their first born, also named Joseph. 

V. This second Joseph Hazen (1741-???) was born May 22, 1741 in Norwich, Connecticut. The date of his death is unknown, but both of these Joseph Hazen’s lived through the Revolutionary War. On August 20, 1763 he married Olive Stoddard, for whom there are no recorded dates of birth or death. Joseph and Olive Hazen had ten children, including their youngest child Uriah Hazen. 

VI. Uriah Hazen (1786-1869) was born June 5, 1786 probably in Norwich, Connecticut, and he died May 30, 1869 at North Hero, Vermont. At an unknown date but probably prior to 1809 (when their oldest child was born), Uriah married his first wife Nancy Dodds (1791-1839). Nancy was born in the late winter of 1791 and died May 29, 1839 at North Hero, Vermont at the age of 48 years, 3 months. Uriah and Nancy Hazen had nine children, including their youngest, Addison Hazen, who was born on August 4, 1829. Curiously, Uriah and Nancy had two sons named Addison. Their first child, born in 1809, was named Addison. He died on May 14, 1829 at about the age of 20, several months before Nancy gave birth to her ninth and last child. This last son they also named Addison, born almost three months after the death of the oldest brother. It seems this second Addison Hazen may have been named in honor of his recently deceased brother of the same name. This younger Addison Hazen is my great-grandfather. Uriah also had a second wife, Mary Soule Honsinger (1811-1883) who was born June 18, 1811 in Alburg, Vermont and died May 13, 1883 in North Hero, Vermont. They had three children.

So several generations of Hazens lived in or near this small town of North Hero, located in the very northwest corner of Vermont, on an island called North Hero Island (outlined in red on the map below) in Lake Champlain, about 15 miles south of the Canadian border. North Hero (the town) is approximately at the point of the U.S. Highway 2 icon on the first map shown below. “North Hero” took its name from the actions of the well-known American Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen. On this map, the dark horizontal line is the Canadian border, and the lake is Lake Champlain. The state of New York is to the left of the lake. Almost all of the islands in Lake Champlain are part of Vermont. 

North Hero, Vermont (at the US Hwy 2 icon), with Plattsburgh, New York to the left, 
on the west side of Lake Champlain.

VII. Addison Hazen (1829-1896) was my great-grandfather and my dad’s grandfather. Dad mentioned his father Ora telling him about Addison at one time being a whaler off the coast of New England, which must have been in the late 1840’s or early 1850’s. [Note: this single third-hand factoid still astonishes me: something I’m writing about in 2020 which my Dad told me about in the 1980’s that he heard from my grandfather Ora probably in the 1920’s about my great-grandfather Addison around 1850 - that’s a span of about 170 years (!). The overlapping of generations and intergenerational word-of-mouth knowledge is fascinating.] Addison Hazen was born in North Hero, Vermont on August 4, 1829 and died there on March 10, 1896. In December 1853 in North Hero, Addison married his first wife Jane Hyde Hazen (1829-1868). She was born June 11, 1829, also in North Hero. Addison and Jane Hazen had five children who were all born and raised in North Hero: Arthur Herbert Hazen (March 9, 1855); Emmett Ellsworth Hazen (November 19, 1862);  Ora Addison Hazen (February 17, 1866); James Hyde Hazen and his twin sister Jane Hyde Hazen (both April 11, 1868). James died in infancy on his birthday in 1870. Since Addison’s first wife Jane died on the same date as the birth of her twins (April 11, 1868), she must have died in childbirth. To put some context on the dates of birth for Addison’s children (1855, 1862, 1866, and 1868), keep in mind that the American Civil War was waged from 1861 to 1865. 

In 1870 Addison married his second wife Janett (Dodds) Tassie (widow of John Ferguson Tassie) at Plattsburg, New York. Plattsburg is a small town across Lake Champlain about 10 miles from North Hero. This second marriage produced no children, and Janett died in North Hero on April 28, 1883. On June 23, 1884, Addison married his third wife Margaret Poquette, who was born on October 25, 1866, also in North Hero. Note that my grandfather Ora Addison Hazen and his two older brothers (Arthur and Emmet) were all older than their new stepmother Margaret - Arthur by eleven years, Emmet by four years, and Ora by eight months. Addison and Margaret had three children, also all born in North Hero: Lafayette Hazen (March 23, 1887); Bertram Pearl Hazen (May 20, 1888); and Alton Charles (February 3, 1892).

Closer view of North Hero, Vermont.

VIII. Ora Addison Hazen (1866-1928) was my grandfather. Ora and all three of his full-blood living siblings (Arthur, Emmett, and Jane) left Vermont and went westward to various parts of the upper midwest. Ora’s only sister and youngest sibling Jane Hyde Hazen married a Ben Kirk Stacy of Sioux City, Iowa and settled in nearby Algona, Iowa. Emmett went into business in the Fargo/Moorhead area and later was president of the Castoria Company in Chicago. Arthur was a lawyer and was in business in Fargo and in Sioux City. He later went further west and worked as a broker and promoter in the mining business in Lewiston, Idaho. Ora was in business for a while in Sioux City and eventually settled in Larimore, North Dakota, where he was a cashier at a local bank. He died on November 20, 1928. 

Dad said that he met his uncle Arthur once, which must have been in Larimore. He remembers Ora and Arthur sometimes calling each other by just their initials - “Say, O.A...?” - “Yes, A.H.?” Dad also told me that the family lost track of Arthur when he went west to Idaho. I never met my grandfather Ora, who died more than two decades before I was born in 1951. 

I recall a few interesting anecdotes Dad told me about my grandfather Ora. As he worked at the local bank in Larimore, he invented a paper registry system to record personal checks written by bank customers. He tried to promote and market his invention, taking on a partner. But the partner betrayed Ora, stealing the idea and developing it himself. Perhaps there was a copyright or patent involved, but Dad said that Ora was cut out of the deal altogether. The partnership had been just a gentlemen’s agreement, and my grandfather had no recourse. It’s possible that Ora may have incurred some debt in this attempted business venture [see a paragraph below on Ora’s wife Anna McKean Hazen]. 

Dad also told me about a situation involving a brand new Model T automobile that Ora had purchased. Although I never clarified when this incident occurred, when Dad told the story, it seemed to be from a personal firsthand memory. So it probably occurred between the late teens of the 1900’s - when Dad, being born in 1909, was old enough to remember the situation - but before Ora died in 1928. Ora was understandably very pleased to own one of these new-fangled automobiles. At that time, this was still the earliest generations of cars, and there were quite a few things that were done by hand in those days. Some cars still had to be manually cranked to get the engine started, and carburetors could be adjusted with a pliers to change the air-to-fuel ratio as needed. So automobile security probably wasn’t too highly developed in those days either. 

Ora worked at a local bank just a few blocks from their house in Larimore, so he usually walked to work. One day when he got home, his new car… just wasn’t there. Someone had stolen it. Dad said that Ora found there was nothing much that could be done. This was the first generation or so of automobiles. Authorities didn’t have much to go on - nor were there many means by which to follow up or track down a car theft. Some online research on my part shows that the Dyer Act of 1919 - also known as the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act - made automobile theft a federal crime. This law was passed in order to supplement efforts by individual states to deal with stolen cars. Until the Dyer Act, law enforcement authorities at the state level were hampered significantly by the ability of car thieves to simply transport stolen vehicles across state lines and beyond the jurisdiction in which the theft had occurred. If this car theft occurred before the Dyer Act of 1919, then there wasn't much at all Ora or the authorities could do. Larimore is only 30 miles from the Minnesota border, which was a different jurisdiction for this type of crime prior to the Dyer Act. If the theft occurred after the Dyer Act, it could have still been difficult to pursue the theft - eastern North Dakota is part of a state that has lots of wide-open space, with scattered towns separated by significant distances. The telephone system in that era was not highly developed - long distance calls were made through the telephone company operator, and fax machines were still decades away from common availability. But whenever Ora’s car was stolen - before or after the 1919 Dyer Act - his brand new automobile was gone. Dad said Ora never got the vehicle back and never found out who stole it. 

Dad’s mother Anna Laurilla McKean (1874-1959) was born on February 19, 1874 in Bear Valley, Minnesota, one of six children of Charles Arthur and Francis Maria (Ambler) McKean. Bear Valley today is an unincorporated community that doesn’t even appear on some maps. It’s some 60 miles southeast of the Twin Cities, about 15 miles from the Mississippi River, near several other small towns with intriguing names like Zumbrota, Mazeppa, and Zumbro Falls. At some point as Anna grew older, the family moved near Breckinridge, Minnesota, across the Red River from Wahpeton, North Dakota. 

Grandmother Anna was a patriotic and determined woman. During World War II when her sons were in the military, she wore a red, white, and blue brooch with a star for each of her boys serving their country. Like most women of that era, Anna was a stay-at-home mother. Shortly after she and her husband became empty-nesters (when my dad went off to college in Grand Forks), Ora died unexpectedly that November of 1928. Anna was left with some indebtedness. One of my Griffin uncles - Art Lieberg, from my mom’s side of the family - lived in Larimore during those years. He says that after Ora’s death, Anna went out and got a job in Larimore and worked to pay off the debt. When the last penny had been paid, she quit her job and went back home. Uncle Art was impressed by Anna’s integrity and work ethic. 

There’s a humorous anecdote about Anna. She was a Republican, and once when she baby-sat Gordy, Polly, and me as young kids, she taught us to chant “I like Ike.” I assume the year was 1956, although that may not be accurate. “Ike” was the nickname for Dwight Eisenhower, and the phrase “I like Ike” had been around since the end of World War II. Eisenhower was the Republican incumbent President running for re-election in 1956. When Dad got home and heard our chant, he was very irritated with his mother. Dad was a classic Depression-era Democrat! Anna died January 17, 1959, just short of 85 years of age. 

Appendix D: More Photos and Links

Photos of World War II in the Aleutians (from War in the Outposts, from The World War II series; Time-Life Books): 

Mount Tulik on Unman Island in the Aleutians erupts on June 4, 1945,

A soldier leans into the violent Aleutian windstorms known as "williwas."

Links to more photographs and/or history of World War II in the Aleutians: 

World War II: the Aleutian Island (Pinterest): 

https://www.pinterest.com/fearlessfoe/world-war-ii-aleutian-islands-battle/

Life Magazine: rare photos from the Aleutians: 

https://time.com/22030/aleutian-islands-campaign-rare-and-classic-photos-from-wwii/

Article: “The Battle of the Aleutians”:

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/battle-of-the-aleutian-islands

Aleutian Islands in World War II Photo Collection, with brief history 
(this requires some digging on the website): 

https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv65673

World War II Database: 

https://ww2db.com/photo.php?list=search&sp&startRow=0&keyword&source=all&color=all&foreigntype=B&foreigntype_id=20&dt&image_id

Aleutian Islands World War II National Historic Area (U.S. National Park Service): 

https://www.nps.gov/aleu/index.htm

American Battle Monuments Commission: 

https://www.abmc.gov/news-events/news/remembering-aleutian-campaign-world-war-ii

For more background about the author’s life, see the following links: 

• www.BobHazenStory.blogspot.com 

• www.BobHazenFairytale.blogspot.com.