As a young child, I can recall there being a framed photograph sitting on the right-hand corner of the dresser in my maternal grandparents front bedroom. It was one of a very solemn and serious looking young man, dressed in a military uniform. I can recall asking of my mother who the man was. "That's your daddy", she told me. I didn't quite understand that at the time. Nonetheless the photograph captivated me, primarily because he was not smiling. To this day however, it remains my favorite photograph of my dad.

It is not enough to simply say that Haskell LJ Gorham was born on a sweltering Sunday to poor dirt farmers.

Haskell, or 'L' as his mom would refer to him, was the eighth of ten children total - six boys and four girls.

His older sister Zether once related the story, of how one day, their papa decided that Haskell, who was about five years old, was now big enough to participate in the field work. He told Lola to go make a small tow-sack, which Eck afterwards strapped across my dad's shoulder, and then told him to start helping pick the cotton. My dad began to cry in protest, so Eck took a hickory switch to LJ to convince him that his childhood was officially over.

The stock market crash of 1929 had made little impact on a family already struggling to survive. My dad once told me that the house he was reared in had gaps in the walls so wide, that during the winter he would awaken on some mornings to find a light dusting of snow on the bed.

Growing up with four older brothers was tough on LJ. He told me that his brothers Curtis and Brinston would beat him up regularly. But they also assisted in his education, showing him how to harvest ducked cigarettes found outside the church, and then re-roll them. He was smoking by the age of seven.

He told me that sometimes his dad would send him to the hardware store to buy dynamite in order to blow stumps out of the new ground. I've often wondered if he smoked on the way back home.

One day, when a friend of my dad mentioned something about the 'good old days', my dad responded, with conviction, that there wasn't anything good about them.

Eight days after his eighteenth birthday, LJ enlisted in the United States Army. My dad went from plowing behind a mule to being a paratrooper. From Fort McClellan he traveled by train to California, eventually boarding a Naval vessel which was bound for Osaka, Japan, where he was stationed for eleven months and nineteen days. The second world war had ended by this time, however, and the need for paratroopers had expired, so my dad became a cook during the rest of his tenure. He once told me that he quite enjoyed the job, and assured me that, after having done both, cooking was a lot easier than jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

It is worthwhile to note that all five of Haskell's brothers did their pull in various branches of the military, and at one time were scattered across parts of France, Germany, and the Pacific Islands. Curtis lost a leg, but all five made it back home.

After being honourably discharged on 31 Oct 1947, and returning home, only to discover that his steady high school girlfriend Alean Laney had moved to Chattanooga with his sister Dorothy, LJ quickly found an excuse to move there himself.

He secured a job at the Norge Company, located the two girls, who were sharing an apartment together, and commenced to woo Alean for the next two years, until which time she capitulated to his request for her hand. The two were married in Rossville Georgia, 18 March 1950. They would spend the next 67 years together.

The war had ushered in the nuclear age, and new jobs quickly became available. My dad was hired on as a welder by Combustion Engineering, where he would remain employed for the next 25 years of his life, until he retired in 1983. Retirement sounded good in theory, but Eck's hickory switch ethic would stay with my dad, and he kept a garden the rest of his life. However he did finally discard his brothers' childhood influences, and quit smoking for good in 1986.

Gardening was seasonal, as were hunting and fishing, therefore my dad, finding too much idle time on his hands, began to assist a friend in house painting - another occupation that he would come to enjoy, and busy himself at for the next 24 years.

LJ finally allowed himself to relax his last five years on Earth. Taken end to end, that amounts to only ten years of his life that my father wasn't doing something for someone else.

This short biography alone stands as a testament to what kind of man my dad was. To my way of thinking, everything that needs said is done.