Finding My Father

I find my father in museum exhibits. Dad and I were not especially close. He was, at least for me, easy to admire but hard to love. Maybe that’s why, since his death in 1997, I keep looking for him.

In 1955, while visiting Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack during his first term in office. He recuperated in Fitzsimons Army Hospital in the suburb of Aurora, and my father was one of his caregivers. Once Ike was well enough, there was a photo shoot on the hospital roof. My father can be seen in many of the photos, standing in the background: hair almost black, hawk-like profile. He was thirty years old, a master sergeant, and already a veteran of two wars as a combat medic.

The photo shoot is how I find my father in museums. In the Smithsonian’s American History Museum I’ve even found a film clip from that day.

Recently I took a long-postponed road trip to Abilene, Kansas, to the Eisenhower Center. There in the museum, sure enough, was a tiny display of the 1955 photo shoot. And there was my father, forever young, the image of him I always carry in my mind from childhood. It’s rare to find my father credited—or any of the other bystanders, for that matter. But I know who they are. (In the photo above, Dad is on the far right, sharing a moment with First Lieutenant Lorraine Knox, one of Ike’s nurses.)

Apart from his military career, I guess I’m less sure who my father really was. There were swaths of time when he was away on duty throughout my childhood and adolescence, and somehow the time never got made up. I sometimes feel as though he was a stranger who just happened to live with us now and again. He wasn’t, of course. But between him and me, there was a disconnect. He even missed the wedding of my wife and me because he was overseas, serving a tour of duty in Vietnam during that war.

A couple of days after Abilene, my road trip took me to Denver. It seemed reasonable to look at where our family lived in the mid-Fifties. The Army post at Fitzsimons has been closed since 1999, and much of the old military facility has been bulldozed. But the soaring old hospital remains, now repurposed as a centerpiece of the sprawling and ever-expanding University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Originally Army Hospital 21, as it was first called, the building where that long-ago rooftop photo shoot took place was formally dedicated in the autumn of 1918. In July 1920 the facility was renamed the Fitzsimons Army Hospital after Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, the first U.S. casualty in World War I.

Little else of the Army post remains, except for the original gates and the post chapel. Long gone are the housing areas where Army brats like me lived, played, and went to school a half-century ago. Indeed, my sister was born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. According to what I’ve read, the Eisenhower Suite, where Ike recovered in 1955, has been restored to that period. I didn’t try to visit it. I wonder if they have any images of the photo shoot. If so, I bet I’d find my father in them.