My Dad the ‘Doppler’

(entry for 2/5/2025)

In Scientific terms, there are two ways to create a Doppler effect: 1. You’re standing still and a sound source is moving past you. 2. A sound source is standing still and you’re moving past it.

Of course, both things could be happening at once!

The things you notice as a Doppler effect happens is that the sound changes in pitch. While you and the sound are moving closer together, the perceived pitch of the sound is high. As you move past each other, the pitch moves downward, and as you and the sound source move farther apart, the pitch stays at its lower level.

So what do I mean when I call my dad a ‘Doppler’?

I mean that his way of presenting himself always depended on which way he was going: away from himself or toward himself. I used to think he was ‘bipolar,’ but the symptoms of that disorder are quire different. When a bipolar person is ‘down,’ they’re really depressed. I don’t think my dad was ever really depressed. He was often ‘down on himself,’ so to speak, but it was as a way of emphasizing his importance. Always, whether ‘down’ or ‘up,’ he was the most important person in the room, no matter how many other people were there.

I’ve been doing some research lately, and I think he suffered from what is now called Narcissistic Personality Disorder, though the term wasn’t invented yet when I was young. (Any more than my own problem, Asperger’s Syndrome, had a name yet.)

He had to be the number one in the room. The only exception was my mom, and when he deferred to her he resented the need to do so.

My dad lived at two ‘pitches,’ high and higher. When he was feeling proud of himself, or otherwise positive, the pitch was very high. When he was feeling ashamed or otherwise negative, the pitch was lower, and, just like the Doppler effect, you could hear the pitch change as his feelings changed. But it was always louder and higher than other people’s.

The really scary thing was, the sound could change pitch very rapidly, without warning. You never knew what was happening next. He could ‘get on his high horse,’ as he put it, at work, for instance, and make himself the focus of scorn and disapproval. He would come home ‘down,’ but it was never really his fault (even when it was). It was their fault, and they didn’t appreciate him properly. Later, when he had made whatever amends he had to make to get back in the employer’s good graces (usually by going out and selling a ton), he found self-justification for whatever he had done ‘wrong’ and spoke condescendingly of the boss who had chastised him.

For all of my early childhood, we were rich. My dad’s take-home income averaged $800 per month, which was a lot of money in the 1940s. He paid all cash for a house in 1942. (Thifty-five hundred dollars!)

When through his own arrogance and acting-superior behavior he lost that job in 1947, we went from that income level to less than $2250 a year, but it was never his fault. His employer simply couldn’t see the truth about him, or appreciate it.

Later employers suffered from the same defect, and we were never well-to-do again, but that didn’t matter, because he was right and they were wrong.

He used this view of himself to ‘sell himself’ in many different ways. He was a great story-teller, and very religious, so he became a popular speaker in church, though he remained a lay preacher, never clergy. (Though he often acted as though he were clergy.)

When he owned the Health Food Store in Grand Junction from 1953-1955, he became a ‘health authority’ and expected everyone to believe him, even when the claims bordered on the preposterous. (Interestingly enough, this never worked on our few Adventist customers, who mostly avoided him— only on the non-religious shoppers who came to visit!)

When he worked as a farm-equipment salesman for a company in Auburn, California, in the 1960s, he became a world authority on such devices, and traveled the entire US selling his vision and his product. 

After losing that great job in Denver in 1947, he couldn’t keep a job for more than a year or two, and when he was self-employed he didn’t stay interested in it for more than two years at a time, and usually sold out at a loss. He always ‘knew better’ than his bosses, including himself!

In many ways and by many standards, he was a professional failure, yet the image he left in people’s minds when he moved to the next thing was that he was masterful at what he did, and the strange thing is that that was true as well. He was masterful, while it lasted!

He was never satisfied, not with jobs, not with houses, not with cars. The 1937 DeSoto in the pic at the head of this post was something we kept for an extremely long time— three whole years! Usually, we went through any car in less than a year. We could always tell when we were about to land a new one: we would start driving around at night, after the car lots were closed, visiting every dealer in sight. Eventually, my dad’s attention would get fixated on one particular car, and within a week of that we would own it, having traded in the previous favorite. He never let a car salesman influence the decision, being almost always some kind of salesman himself and knowing how that worked!

The same thing was true with houses. From the day I was born until my sixteenth birthday, we lived in 23 different houses, most of them short-term rentals. They were spread out over ten different communities, some more than four hundred miles apart. Talk about rootless!

The longest I’ve ever lived in one house is eleven years, and that’s the one I’m in now!

Why this fascination with vacillation? I don’t honestly know, unless it was part of his self-importance, combined with a feeling that nothing was ever quite good enough for him. (Along with, perhaps, the feeling that he was ‘never quite good enough’ for anything he wanted?)

And yet, push come to shove, I probably wouldn’t trade him for any other dad in the world. He had so many good things going for him. He was a great musician, although musically uneducated. He was the best story-teller I’ve ever met. He was the best driver I’ve ever known (until near the end of his hundred-year life, when he suddenly became the worst driver I’ve ever known!).

He had insights into reality that many people lacked then and still lack. He theorized that South America and Africa had once been joined together, based on their shapes, long before that became accepted scientific fact. As part of his health studies, he learned that our various nerves connect in ways that astound the medical world to this day, and he knew how to utilize those connections in massage theory, which he learned on his own and applied to hundreds of thankful sufferers.

Though he believed the Bible implicitly, including the story of the Flood, he acknowledged that no matter how big the Ark was, it could never have contained pairs of every animal known. When questioned on this, he said that all dog-like creatures came from wolves, and that wolves were the only canines on the Ark. Likewise, a pair of lions or tigers would have been the only cats.  Some kind of monkey but not more than one kind.  Likewise with deer and horses and cows and sheep. When I pointed out to him (at age twelve) that this amounted to a belief in some kind of evolution, he admitted that it was so. 'But not the Godless kind,' he said.

He was always proud of my educational achievements and bragged on me constantly, to anyone who would listen.

He was always supportive, of both me and my sister, and especially of me. I could, literally ‘do no wrong’ in his eyes. Even when I left his church and went my own way politically, he always respected my choices.

He was a professional failure, but he was a great dad.

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