24 How I Learned to Be True to Myself… Who, What, Where, When, Why, & How. Photos: Brandywine Ski Center/Dover Lake Park. Song: “I Feel Good”.

My father remained living in the second floor living quarters of the Brandywine ski lodge after he moved his family to a rented house. I learned from the employee who just got out of the service, who ran into me on his way in to work, that he was driving the leased Barracuda which had disappeared, because my dad had given it to him after my friends damaged the alignment, and let him take over the remaining lease payments which he started paying when he joined the service, and he was driving it for the first time on the day he finished serving, and had just made the last of the payments when he caused the accident. I was so much kept out of the loop that I didn’t even know that my world history teacher lived right next door to our second rented house, nor realized, at that time, the reason my father moved us again, was specifically because my father heard from me that I was going to start practicing with some horn players from my school band who lived close enough to our first rented house, that I wouldn’t have needed to drive, in order for us to practice. He moved us all for the sake of preventing any more of my musical endeavors. I figured that out when my mother was flabbergasted over having to move us all over again, and she commented that it made no sense moving us again even further away from school, and from Brandywine.

When I first arrived at Brandywine, I got to drive with my father to the flats in Cleveland in the army truck where they loaded some sample drums, which facilitated the arrival of thousands of pounds of plastic pellets in 50 gallon drums which we dumped on the ski slope for a possible way to ski in the summer (see photo of fellow ski instructor Steve Dorner).

He is demo skiing on millions of plastic pellets which was like imitation snow, but the pellets were too expensive, and would have had to be replenished way too often to keep doing.

Besides the pellets being too expensive, and having to be constantly supplied, when you fell, it wasn’t at all as forgiving as falling on snow. Grass skiing (also see photo) was a failure, too.

During one of our first winter seasons, I worked 7 days a week in the rope tow hut, and I still had less opportunities to drive because my father still held me responsible for the Barracuda damage I knew nothing about. Everything about me continued to disturb him, in the same way that my presence always seemed to bother my gym teacher at school. I think that my gym teacher didn’t want to permit me to TRY OUT for his baseball team, just like my father didn’t want me in the safety- patrol, or even in a band. The only time my father seemed happy with me was when I stayed glued inside that little rope tow hut, and because of that, plus the fact that no one else would stay working there, that’s where I stayed working, all winter, for the whole first two winters. And, that was why, and how, my father made it impossible for me to get to the downtown Cleveland recording studio on time for the only chance of me ever having for recording my original songs using professional quality studio time which band manager, and Brandywine stock holder Otto Newberg paid for. (That was also when organist Kevin Raliegh prevented me from even getting inside when I arrived at the studio door late.)

My father tricked the shareholders by suddenly owning 51% of the business, and my mother, and others, made me realize that even the shareholders had no say anymore at Brandywine. This was when I couldn’t help but to begin to see, myself, how my father was using his cars for controlling employees, and eventually I would witness how others who suddenly acquire power, and/or money, suddenly become completely different people. Thus, it has become ingrained in me to unquestionably believe 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”. (See photo of a Brandywine torch light parade)

When another one of my dad’s brand new leased cars, a Dodge Challenger – (see photo)–

showed up, it was parked conspicuously in the employee parking lot by the maintenance garage as if it was being showcased just for all of the employees to see. And, when several guys (all employees) were gathered around admiring it

with my dad there announcing something to them, I excitedly ran over and looked, too. My dad turned around toward me, and greeted me by proclaiming, “This is the car that YOU could have been driving!” Hearing him say that to me, made it sound as if he wanted others (even employees) to understand that they were the ones who could/would be the ones driving his awesome new leased cars from then on, and NOT his own son (me). What my father’s brazenly expressed embarrassing proclamation meant to me, was that he didn’t seem to care if even his own children, and even his wife, too, became aware of what his actual needs were all about. It was maddening, suddenly sickening, and astonishing, to suddenly realize something so sad like that about my own father.

What I think, now, is while my father may have gone through life learning to accept his own childhood abuse, eventually, somehow, he must have financially benefitted from it. I had already developed a bad attitude toward some authority figures, especially the ones who I believed had shown me often enough, that they had no business having so much power, and authority. Then, it quickly became 100% my father’s way, or the highway, even for his wife, and children.

On the day when my father’s newest leased car arrived, I realized something about my own father while his outside employees were all gathered around admiring it. It was a brand new Dodge Challenger (photo above). It was when I suddenly became keenly, and undeniably cognizant of what the serious need in my father was all about, and I suddenly understood how his need had always driven him. He was at the threshold of having so much money, and power that he simply didn’t care about hiding what that need was, even from his own employees, wife, and children. If my father could have just told me about himself on one of our dozens of three hour car trips back and forth from MI and OH, I would have kept anything he would have asked me to keep in confidence, confidential. He usually just slept the whole way, and only had to wake up when we first started, and “we” were pulled over for speeding.

Right after showing his latest car lease to his employees, I saw that there was a visitor (one of my father’s acquaintances), and I noticed that he had only briefly visited upstairs with my dad. On that same day, I had walked out on our mile and a quarter road in order to make my way hitchhiking back to Kent, and was when my father’s friend stopped on the road outside of the Brandywine gate, and picked me up hitchhiking as I started walking up the long hill. While driving up that long hill, he showed me what he wanted me to do for him, while assuring me that it was entirely okayed by my father. I thought, “Was THAT the way my father wanted me to get the message about my father?” It was obviously more than just a coincidence that this man said that he happened to be going straight to Kent. I calmly asked this man (my father’s friend who picked me up hitchhiking) to pull over when we reached the top of that hill. I politely got out while sincerely thanking him for the ride (as if I was going to my friend’s house who live up there) but I continued walking, and hitchhiking for hours until finally getting back to Kent. Whether my father was trying to get his message to ME that day, I hoped that my father got my message to HIM that day. This was how I learned about the “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “When”, “Why”, and “How” I learned to be true to myself.

I always remembered the following joke my father told me the very next time he spoke to me after I showed up at Brandywine unannounced, then got picked up by HIS friend on my way back to Kent. (It was as if it was his way of making a joke about what he knew had happened between his friend and me that day, and/or in his mind he was treating it lightly, as if it wouldn’t have been wrong, or immoral of a thing for me to do)…”A man walks into a bar with a shaggy dog, & asks the bartender, “Can I have a free drink if I can show you that my dog can talk?” Amused, the bartender says, “Okay, but no funny business.” The man says, “okay Fido, what’s on top of a house?” The dog responds,”ROOF”. Before the bartender has a chance to get mad, the man says, “Hold on… okay Fido, what’s sandpaper like?” The dog responds, “RUFF”. The bartender starts around the bar to kick the man, and his dog out, but the man says,”Wait, wait”, then turns to the dog, and says, “Fido, who’s the greatest baseball player who ever lived”? When Fido responds, “RUTH”, the bartender takes the man by the scruff of his neck, and throws both the man, and the dog, out into the street. The man stands up and brushes himself off. The dog shakes off his whole body head to toe, then looks up at his master, and says, “DO YA THINK I SHOULDAH SAID DIMAGGIO?”)

One of my father’s leases was his 425hp GTX Roadrunner, and he left it parked at the airport during his many trips, and upon his return from one of those trips, he found that it had been broken into, and the stereo system had been stolen. But, he didn’t want to take his valuable time to report the theft to the police. He had become so busy “jet-setting” that he wanted to continue using his “Roadrunner” as his airport shuttle car, so left it at the airport even after the stereo had all been

ripped out. Unfortunately, just days later the whole car was stolen!

I remember exactly where I was when my dad’s GTX Roadrunner was stolen… It was when I happened to be able to get through to talk to my mother on the phone. It was during the third busy winter between my working times that I was left somewhere with a weeks rent paid, and then had no choice of coming back to Brandywine to work, but left to wander around Cleveland with my 12 string Martin guitar which my father was furious about my mother buying for me. This time, I was in a bitter winter storm, and my father had definitely won the war over me with our mother.

Having my 12 string guitar with me made my life more of an adventure while homeless, and broke walking around trying to find somewhere to stay, sleep, and/or work. I had the thought to go to my grandmother’s house on 77th Street on Cleveland’s west side, so made my way to grandmother’s riding buses, and walking through the snow. I arrived on a late heavy snowing winter afternoon. Her house had been a boarding house

(see left side in the photo). I remembered that she had rented her two rooms upstairs for many years. And, I also remembered that my dad had insisted, long ago, that she was too old to keep renting her rooms upstairs out to anybody, so I didn’t press her about it, even though on this visit, I had nowhere to go, let alone sleep. Our family had spent a few Christmases at Grandmother’s, when my brother and I played together with trains on train tracks which I’m sure had stayed set up for decades in Grandma’s large, and wondrously comfortable attic. Our father, incidentally, never said a word about his childhood. Neither did our grandmother. But, he obviously grew up there, and there was just enough space next to those cool trains in the attic, to set up our Christmas gift of dual electric race cars which went around on a figure eight black plastic track which had two electric slots down the middle for each race car powered by controllers for each race contestant to guide them with, and if you drove them too fast around the corners, your race car would fall out of the electric slot, thus crash. Fond memories.

Grandma was always happy to see me, but on this day she seemed sad, and disconnected. During my visit, I asked if she would allow me to stay overnight. She answered, “Oh, Douggie…”, and continued (using dad’s real name) “Clarence would kill me.” She fed me chicken and mashed potatoes after her normal devoted prayer (she was a Jehovah’s Witness, and always led our family’s dinner prayers whenever she visited while I was a child). She always offered seconds on her mashed potatoes, and I can never forget how she would repeat, saying sometimes even more than twice, “They’re G-O-O-O-D”. She almost always forced us all into eating more of them. I still jokingly repeat her familiar phrase I often heard her say,

whether any of us wanted more, or didn’t. We always talked about those unforgettably delicious mashed potatoes of grandma’s (photo of grandma, left) whether we visited her, or she visited us. I also fondly remember how funny it was when I was a child, to see her dentures fall out when she spoke, and how at night, she kept them in a cup of water. After dinner, she urged me to leave before it got dark, knowing way better than me, the exact last moment I had better start walking in order to get to the main road on the bus route before it turned pitch black. It was still snowing heavily as I left, and it was quickly turning dark.

As I walked through an almost once in a lifetime unusually bright, thick, heavily falling white snowflake scene, the sidewalks, cars, and houses had freshly covered layers of deep clean snow all over again making the darkness brighter, and strangely lit the way to wherever it was that I was heading (although I had absolutely no idea where that was). In the midst of walking back on the sidewalk of the street in my grandmother’s neighborhood, a ghostly realization suddenly came over me as it turned much darker, and colder – that I was walking in the same footsteps as my father, undoubtedly, had walked in much of his lifetime. Then, I became eerily aware of being accompanied by a flood of an all encompassing presence of spirits from a whole past family that I knew I had never known. It was a seriously powerful presence that was NOT fooling around, but thankfully my fear turned into knowing only that I was being watched by those spirits lovingly into the darkness. That happened to also be the last time that I got to see my blessed grandmother before she died.

I was out of choices again, and not welcome at Brandywine, which I couldn’t even consider was home anymore. I was wandering through the winter like I had done previously riding buses just to stay warm through sleepless November nights in Detroit, but now it was late December in a Cleveland snow storm. On one of my very recent desperate phone calls from downtown Cleveland when I was able to get through to my father, he told me that if I should ever decide to join the military, that he would match all that I would ever earn working for my parents, as well as double any/all of his investments which he will ever make on my behalf. I had already been to a recruiter’s office, and when my dad made that promise to me again, I happened to have also just spoken to my girlfriend, and she promised to wait for me, and to marry me when I got out of the service.

I ended up sleeping that night in the Case Western College dormitory, and during the night my guitar was taken from under the bunk bed I slept in, but it was miraculously returned to me on the next evening. From there, I began walking around aimlessly near the Cleveland Federal Building (right next to the Cleveland Towers where my father had worked as an elevator operator when he was a young man around my same age). I was riding buses like I did in Detroit at age 15, walking in, and out of buildings again, all day just to stay warm, and because I had nowhere else to go, I happened to walk back into the armed forces recruiters office for the second or third time in two days. It seemed to help the recruiter when I told him that I was a ski instructor, and that my father had worked as an elevator operator next door at the Cleveland Towers. He assured me that there was a dire need for instructors, and he said that he would make a couple of long distance phone call just for me, in order to make sure if they were still needed, and if there were any openings. I think that the recruiter was even pretending that he was speaking to someone in Germany. While I wasn’t able to hear him for quite a while, I continued getting warm, again. When the recruiter was finished on the phone, he told me that there was just ONE INSTRUCTOR POSITION LEFT. I assumed that he meant “ski” instructor, because we were talking about teaching skiing to our troops in GERMANY (like he said), and he was mentioning that that I could, possibly, get stationed overseas, and see Europe. I remembered him saying that I could very likely travel around in Europe, and he specifically mentioned the possibility of me getting a ski instructor position, but warned me if I waited, again, for even another day, that opportunity might not still be available. That sealed the deal for me, I was in (and, I think he said something into the phone receiver like, “okay, he’ll take it”, and he hung up). I was finally happy to have something to look forward to (anything was better than living in the streets). I believed him, just like I believed the story that my father had told me when I thought that I’d be visiting my uncle Ralph in FL, but he turned out not to be my uncle at all, and the trailer that I stayed in wasn’t ON the beach like he said it was, but it was in FL (funny story on page 27). This time, I believed that I’d soon be off to go teach skiing to the troops in Germany, but knew that I had to grab that one position that they had available right then! So he showed me the paper, and I said, “Gimme the pen.”

Volunteering for the service earned me a one day pass to visit home, where I was immediately welcomed by my dad, and overwhelmed with my father’s undivided attention. He lit up happier than I had ever seen him before, and more delighted than I would ever see him again. I had just volunteered for active duty during the height of the Vietnam War. (As for my dad’s, my girlfriend’s, and the recruiter’s promises… none of them happened… but I’m still here, and survived).

I was discharged from the service with a honorable discharge, which earned me a one day pass to visit home… Brandywine/Dover Lake Park which had exploded into a completed full-fledged water park

(see photo). My father still insisted that I could visit for only a one day visit home after the service, but he used the opportunity to inform me that he would pay for a one way plane ticket for me to fly anywhere in the USA except Alaska and Hawaii, and explained that my rent would be paid just like before the service (but I had only the day to choose), and he helped to gently persuade me into choosing going to Florida, and finishing college in Pensacola. So, I got dropped off at the airport on that same day, and went to school in FL to continue going to college on the GI bill, which was/is a fantastic opportunity for anyone/everyone.

I earned my BA in communication after transferring to two more colleges, and my final senior year project in Television Production was titled, “Mankind: From Dawn To Dusk” (proof that I had the idea ten years before the History Channel ever came into being!) Then, I received two (two-year) certifications in Technical Maintenance for Broadcast Studio Operations (and only because I liked the course so much, I took the course two years in a row). I knew that I wanted to work in television since age six, after I got to visit Disney Studios in Burbank, CA on a trip with my dad from where we lived in NY, and I have no idea how he managed (after taking me to Disneyland) me meeting Walt Disney, but I got to shake hands with him when he was eating lunch, as well as went on a tour, and got to see how they made cartoons.

The last photo (below) is of my brother, and his daughter Daniela. Daniela studied social, and political philosophy, then became an assistant professor at UCLA. My brother’s son Mark Dover is an accomplished clarinetist. His group Imani Winds, won a grammy award in 2024 for “Best Classical Compendium”: “Passion For Bach And Coltrane”. Not only is he a part of the group, Mark also helped produce the Compendium. My wife and I have been keeping up on watching his AMAZINGLY AWESOME “free” videos on his Facebook page “Mark Dover” ALL of which leave any listener spellbound, and at a loss for words.