My Dad
Ĵohan Ĵosip Ĵaneš
Dad was born into the looming Great Depression in 1928. By ‘29 and the stock market crash, he was used to not having what he needed, so he learned in the ‘30s to be what we now romantically call “Self Reliant,” but then there was no silver lining.
It was survival.
His legal name is John Joseph Janes, but Grandpa emigrated from Ravna Gora, Croatia years before, settling in Joliet, a Chicagoland suburb at the time, so dad’s actual name is Ĵohan Ĵosip Ĵaneš.
When I say he made do, one story his cousin once told me stands out. Patsy lived across the alley from him, his three sisters, and my grandma and grandpa. The entire neighborhood once was all Croatian, and spending time there as a kid always felt like we were traveling in a foreign land with a foreign tongue, food, music, and so much more. “Obitelj,” aka “family.” Anyway, one day she found dad and his hoodlum gang hunkered down over a small fire in the alley. They were roasting song birds on sticks so they had something to eat. That was his childhood.
Did you know Dandelions are edible? I do.
Somehow Grandma and Grandpa could eventually afford to send all of their kids to the Catholic cathedral school, where he continued his education in the fine arts of survival, and faith. Growing up in such economic hardship molds you.
I know.
My formative years were the ‘70s-’80s, as Camelot gave way to be beginnings of what arguably is now the death throes of the “great” American empire. I never expected to earn a decent living as did Dad, who is exactly 40 years older than me, exactly as I am with my son, João Pedro (his Mamãe is from Brasil).
So when he turned eighteen, against the wishes of his folks, in 1945 he enlisted and was stationed in an Army Airforce base in Japan during the occupation after WWII. The war was technically over, but hostilities ran hot for years and many Japanese solders fought on, or were so deeply embedded that they did not know it ended and simply were doing their jobs. That meant Dad and the base were frequently targeted by snipers from the surrounding hills.
Dad’s M.O.S. was airplane mechanics, so he often took to the skies. But one too many crashes around him left him with an ironic lifetime fear of flying, which I caught myself and keep to this day.
He recalls being tasked with picking up body parts from the runway.
By 1950, back stateside, he worked first in a steel plant, one manufacturer among many well-paying jobs in the then booming post-WWII America. He married in 1957. Soon he made his way to the floor of the local Caterpillar plant, where he spent the next thirty-two years working, having and raising his own family in the growing now City of Joliet.
The family remained tight and as the photo albums attest, spent most of their time together. At some point in the ‘60s he purchased a Chris Craft wood speed boat kit and with my uncles, built a craft that turned eyes each time we’d all go water skiing on one of the many strip mine lakes in the area.
I don’t know how the hell he did it, but he and my Uncle Jack could ride ”The Disc,” nothing more than a round, flat piece of wood, towed behind the boat. He was always physically a sight to see in action.
In fact, Dad joined the baseball team formed within his platoon in Japan, and he developed quite the arm as a pitcher, mitt as a fielder, and he claimed he never batted a season under .400. He even participated in a walk-on recruiting for the St. Louis Cardinals and reportedly wowed them, until a wild pitch caught him in the nose, sending his to the hospital. The team apparently liked what they saw in him as they visited him there and signed a ball for him, which he proudly displayed at home for years.
I personally think he could have gone pro if not for the broken nose, and I think that was one of many things that haunted Dad for decades.
He retired from Cat in 1985 and declared he was “Big Toe,” a reference to “Stripes” and a warning to us four kids to shape up or ship out, on the home front. I think that was the only time he bit off more than he could chew as Mom returned to her bank job, leaving him to wrangle my criminally insane siblings and me.
Within a couple years, Mom was back at her domestic post, and Dad went back to Cat, which he understood and excelled at, becoming one of the plant managers. He was always good with his hands, not so much his well-defended heart.
Like him, I was out the door at eighteen, but I spent three years traveling the school of Earth and being abjectly poor, like Dad once was. Eventually I wisened up, enrolled in college, and promptly disappointed him as an English major.
“What the hell do you plan to do with that degree, TEACH?!?” Yes, Dad, I wanted to teach, and learn. We might not have been perfectly aligned in some ways, but he was an ideal father, as well as my guardian.
Mom was not the ideal mother. She’d had it rough as a child too, and more, and once told she could not conceive, adopted my sister first, then me a year later in 1967. She miraculously got pregnant with one of my brothers a couple years later, and then another, so I no longer was the boy she wanted, and that was daily illustrated.
Dad eventually put me in nursery school at three years old with the manifest rationale to get me out of her hair, but the latent reality was he could no longer stand watching it all and again, protected me. Mom is still… difficult… to the point I was eventually told I had to cut her toxicity off. But that is another story.
By ‘93 Dad joined the throng of “Snowbirds” in Florida, building another home north of Tampa. Florida was nothing like Joliet, and I loved visiting them there, but if I am honest, I am now glad I never moved there. But they would winter down south and summer up north.
I married in 2003 and as teachers, with summers off, now living in Nebraska, raising our own country boy, we could easily return to Joliet each late May to clean/fix/stock the house and pick them up at O’Hare before later spending time with friends and family, basking in the still almost Utopian light of Joliet with our son.
Those were such very good times, especially before we’d go to the airport and have the house, MY house, all to ourselves. I loved the homestead. Last year we sold it when we kids decided it was a liability empty, as we’d moved Mom and Dad into a retirement facility in Iowa a few years prior. Mom has MS. Dad has Alzheimer’s. It simply needed to happen.
Over time, Dad forgot me. I eventually stopped calling myself my name, Jerry, his oldest son, as it only stressed him to struggle to remember me. I would tell him I was Ĵohan and he would light up, telling me that was his dad’s name. He liked Ĵohan. I loved that we could finally have that bond, even if Dad was largely unaware of the reality of it all. Somewhere then I buried the label “Jerry” and adopted my stage name, JJ, or as my Brasilian family once called me, Jerónimo João.
But in reality, I am and always have been Ĵaroslav Ĵohan, the Croatian, blood or not. The Croatian flag is in one of the photos, by the way. I’ll always be my dad’s son.
His “boyšk.”
As dad ebbed, I mourned him, and learned to let go. He no longer remembers the Great Depression, World War II, Camelot, and the decades that followed. He no longer remembers having a family. He no longer remembers Mom. He no longer remembers his own name. He was moved to “Memory Care” a while ago as he needed the extra attention in the final stages.
Two nights ago Dad fell in the middle of the night. It took ten staples to close the split back of his head. He has been moved to the hospice facility, but he was not taken to the ER, as we long ago decided to hopefully allow him dignity at the end, but we know it is time.
For the past two days he has been singing to anyone in earshot. I believe his soul is at peace. I know he “forgot” everything, but I truly believe he is still there, and the walls around his heart can now come down as he transitions.
I am agnostic. I wish I could faithfully pray for him, but I did pray last night for the first time in forty-five years. If you pray, please say a prayer for my dad, Ĵohan Ĵosip Ĵaneš from Joliet, Illinois, as he transcends to join Grandpa, Grandma, my aunts, uncles, and many more family and friends on another plane, whom I know, deep in my bones, all await him anxiously and lovingly.
His soul is at peace; I hope yours finds some too
What a history of a man who accomplished so much. I'm sorry for your loss. and I love how you memorialized your father.