Veterans Day

A veteran, whether active duty, retired or National Guard or Reserve, is someone who at one point in their life wrote a check payable to The United States of America for an amount of "up to and including their life." 
~ Author Unknown ~

There have been many military veterans in my family tree. Today I honor my father who served in the US Navy for 20 years.

My Dad, Ron Hall

Ronald William Hall was born to William Jonathan (Bill) Hall and Frances Minnie Fuhrman in Southwestern Iowa He was a ‘lifer’ in the Navy and he was my Dad. When I lost Dad I never knew I could feel such emptiness. Even though we didn’t get along very well most of time, I knew he loved me and I knew that if I ever needed him to be there for me he would be there. Perhaps it was because he was my first parent to die or perhaps it was because I had just begun to get to know him without Mom or perhaps it was a combination of both.

 Dad was born in Turin, Onawa County, Iowa and grew up on a farm outside of Castana, Onawa County, Iowa. I don’t know very much about Dad’s years growing up, he never talked much about that time in his life and I guess I never asked. Just about all I know is that he graduated from Castana High School and met Mom while he was doing road construction in Minnesota. They were married May 19, 1956 in San Diego, California.

By the time I was born, Dad was cruising around the Orient aboard the USS Hornet. There were several more cruises, all so Dad could be stationed at Los Alamitos NAS and we could live in California except for a few stints in Minnesota, Illinois and Tennessee. (That is a long story about military bureaucracy and red tape.)

Dad retired from the Navy in 1975 and moved to Minnesota. Eventually he divorced Mom and moved from Minnesota to Iowa where he remarried for a short time before he died in 1985.