His family, my family, has been in this country since before it was a country. We are older than the Declaration of Independence; older than the mass migration of the 18th century. We are as old as the soil that fills the land from the Appalachian Plateau to the Till Plain.
My father was born in the middle of central Ohio farmland, growing up rarely wearing shoes and working a variety of jobs, aiding his family as a dutiful eldest child of his generation would, even helping to raise his sister and brother. He was a spectacular student, the first Clements to go to college, as equally adept at mathematics, his favorite subject, as he was in grammar and usage. [He was the proofreader for my dissertation.] He served as a sergeant in the US Army during the Korean War, then became a teacher.
He always took us with him those summers he worked on his graduate degree to exotic places like Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia. For a few weeks, we lived in a hotel in mid-town Manhattan.
My grandfather, a carpenter, once told me how proud he was that his son was addressed at work as "Mr. Clements".
He showed a remarkable combination of patience and fortitude with his son, even during that obstreperous son's years of wildness. When the son told him he wanted to be a teacher, he smiled. When the son told him he wanted to be a priest, he smiled some more.
He prayed with more sincerity than anyone I have known. I think he read a book a day. I have taught in four schools, a college, and a university, and I can objectively state that he was the best math teacher that I had ever seen.
His favorite hymn was #412, which we sang at his funeral.
While I didn't inherit his facility with equations, I did receive his sense of humor. In times easy and hard, that's made all the difference.
(Yes, it's anticipating Father's Day by a week, but I kinda missed him, so....)