I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about my Dad’s treasure hunts and decided I’d prefer to write about them instead of the dreary experiences I’ve been enduring on the School Board of late.
My Dad had a fraught relationship with his father but a close one with his Mother. It was so close that he could listen to her with great earnestness and then discount everything she said that didn’t accord with his thinking and do this without causing a stir. That is the very relationship I had with him much to my new wife’s consternation. Claudia was appalled at how easily I could tune out his good advice to me on things like how to run for political office.
My Dad’s Dad was several things that my father was not. He strayed from his marriage. He was an alcoholic although, according to my Dad, he was a happy one. He was a salesman. He believed manhood required good mechanical skills. He was also quick to get into a fight if necessary to protect his friends. And yet despite my Dad’s embarrassment over some of these qualities or aversion to others of them he was sufficiently proud of his lineage that he named me after his old man. Well not exactly. Grandfather was Henry Harrison Welty but everyone called him Harry. I’m not a Henry.
There was one quality of Henry Harrison that my Father adored. He loved to organize fun things to do for his family. He enjoyed the Roaring Twenties with the best of them and although the runt of his own family’s litter he and his siblings and spouses all had a dandy time before the Depression getting together and having great fun. At home Henry painted a shuffleboard court on his driveway and all the neighborhood kids came round to play this and other fun things that Grandfather organized.
My Dad also loved to organize parties, non or nearly nonalcoholic parties. I remember being ushered upstairs with my brother and sister to be out of the way. I was in high school when he organized a murder downstairs. The lights were turned out and when they went back on his guests had to figure out who killed the victim. It was great fun even for the deceased.
He good naturedly offered himself up in a faculty slave auction to raise money for some student organization. His act of “slavery” promised his purchasers a party. He threw them a good one and the intimidating fellow who had bought my Dad’s services ended up being very friendly to me when I was elected to the College Student Senate a couple years later.
But it was my Dad’s Treasure Hunts I remember most fondly, or at least the stories I’ve heard about them. These took place in my elementary school years in Topeka, Kansas. I was never witness to the actual parties but he took me along with him as he planted clues around town for his invitees to hunt down. The guests were, as I recall, members of the very active young adult Sunday School class at Westminster Presbyterian Church.
He broke his guests into small groups and set them off with instructions to find the first clue of the night at some hinted at landmark in town. I recall his placing clues at various parks and at our neighbor’s worksite at the City Waterworks. Dad would find accomplices and good sports to hand out the clues at all sorts of places. He talked his father in law, the former State Auditor of Kansas, into letting him place a coffin up in his dimly lit attic for his search parties to examine. Then found a friend to dress up as a mummy to rise up when the coffin was opened to hand the treasure hunters their next clue. A couple of the hunters had a good scare as well as lots of laughs.
At Gage Park, Topeka’s big municipal park with a zoo, he placed squirt guns at the site of one of the clues with instructions for the hunters to lie in wait for the next search party to blast into watery oblivion. That one raised somebody’s hackles and they called the police to come have a look. The partiers had to explain to the investigating officers that their guns were plastic and just part of a harmless game.
Things didn’t always go as planned on these party nights. He once gave directions to his Mother’s home which was dark and unoccupied for the night. Hunters were supposed to “break in” and find the next clue. One of the hunters was a lawyer who refused to let his search team break in because it was against the law. My Father, a lawyer himself, was quite chagrinned at this fussiness as it brought a halt to one group’s hunt for a time.
While I’ve never measured up to my Dad and his Father’s penchant for parties I have adopted his conviction that fun and play are an instrumental part of human nature and learning.
As a teacher, he organized his business law classes into law partnerships and had them retry contract law cases four days a week through the semester. When students weren’t lawyering they acted as judges. The class wasn’t for shrinking violets but it was no run of the mill class and it was one of only three business classes I took myself. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The other business classes I took were typing. I got a D. My economics class was all arcane mathematical formulas. I got a C in that one. My Dad’s class didn’t much improve my paltry grades in the Business School. I squeaked out a C much to my Dad’s chagrin and relief. I nearly got a D. That’s a long story I’ve told elsewhere. The relief for Dad came when I aced the final examination to earn a middling grade.
In a sort of homage to my Dad I once put a treasure hunt together for my Presbyterian Church in Duluth. I set clues up in the Woodland neighborhood with information about the good Scottish settlers of Oatmeal Hill where Glen Avon was built. One of my search parties took the clues they found with them much to the consternation of the last search party which wandered around aimlessly for some time not quite sure of what they were supposed to be looking for. It’s a good example of why people are always being told to “get a clue.”
