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Boers: Father's Day Reminds Of The Value Of A Lesson Learned

By Terry Boers--

(CBS) I'm fairly certain that as an 11-year-old I didn't have much of a work ethic.

I'm absolutely positive that at no time in my life to that point had I ever put those two words in the same sentence.

But please don't get me wrong here. I did start cutting the grass at our small home in Steger a year or two before that. Thing is, I was bad at it. Even though we didn't have all that much of a yard, it always seemed bigger thanks to our ancient push mower. I don't know if I couldn't walk straight or see straight or if it was a combination of both, but I never completed that particular chore to my dad's satisfaction.

He wasn't much for yelling at me, choosing instead to ask why the yard looked so terrible.

That was a great question. I didn't have a great answer. As a matter of fact, I didn't have any reply.

After a couple of months, he stopped asking what was wrong with me, apparently believing that I had officially been placed in the lost cause category. So be it. There were times when I would see him out there with the mower, getting the lawn to his satisfaction after I had done it earlier that day.

It wasn't long after that my dad suggested to me that it might be time to start earning a little money of my own.

While it caught me completely off-guard, that seemed reasonable. Only on rare occasions would I have anything more than a quarter in my pocket. Besides, who knew when the cost of a candy bar would skyrocket?

So here was the battle plan. On Sunday mornings, even though it wasn't technically a work day for my dad, he would head down to Dixie Dairy in Chicago Heights, where he was employed as a mechanic.

I recall vividly that he made that trip every Sunday, taking away from his own time to make sure that every truck in the fleet would be ready to go on Monday morning.

There was never enough time to do that on Fridays, he'd told me, too many problems and too little time. Each day brought some mechanical issue to a fleet that was mainly comprised of aging vehicles that had piled up some serious mileage.

I had made the Sunday trip with him before, but I knew this time it was going to much different.

As we walked into the fairly decent-sized garage, my dad flipped on the switch for the overhead lights. And there, bathed in that super-soft glow from the lights were three of the dirtiest, filthiest milk trucks I'd ever seen.

I believe I was still staring the mess when my dad presented me with a hose, a big bucket of soapy water and a long-handled brush.

"I'm not going to be here that long today,'' he said. "Each one you clean is worth $3 dollars. You'd better get going.''

I don't know how many people from the present generation have even seen a milk truck, but believe me, the first one looked as if it had escaped from the pack and spent the afternoon rolling around in mud for an hour.

It also, at least to me, looked like it was about 20 feet tall.

I had the long-handled brush, but I knew that I was never to going to reach those hard-to-get places, in this case roughly two-thirds of the truck.

But I gave it a shot, squirting as much of the truck as I could see with the hose and then going after it with the soapy brush. I believed I was putting my heart and soul into it, that I was going to clean this puppy.

Roughly 45 minutes later, I was sure my project was just about done, that the truck looked a lot better. I was certain my dad would agree.

He didn't. He looked at the truck with a sour expression and asked me when I was going to start on it.

I remember there was part of me that wanted to note that I been working for almost an hour, that I was tired.

Then I looked a little closer.

The truck looked worse than it had when I started. The sides were totally streaked with the brush strokes. It appeared as if I had just pushed the grime from one place to another. Sadly, the truck had apparently mated with a zebra.

"Try doing it again," my dad said. "Just keep in mind that I'm almost finished, and you're still on the first truck."

My next attempt wasn't much better. Washing a truck, no matter how big, shouldn't be that darn difficult.

But it was.

After about another 30 minutes of futility, my dad finally picked up the hose and the brush and made the truck respectable.

I told him that I wanted to come back and try next Sunday.

"Good,'' he said. "You were going to one way or another.''

And so it went for months of Sundays. I felt like I was going to make the breakthrough sooner or later. Nobody was going to come back and inspect the trucks with a white glove to my knowledge, and it certainly didn't seem a matter of life or death. I never figured out if even slightly dirty milk trucks turned people off. I didn't know if company policy said the trucks had to gleam. All I knew is that I loved their chocolate milk.

We actually continued to make that trip for the next few years, even as I continued to be way too slow on the uptake.

I can happily say that I eventually got the better of the job, churning out sparkling truck after sparkling truck, no easy task considering many of them had more than 125,000 miles on the odometer.

Better yet, my dad actually smiled the first time that one of the milk monsters was done to his exacting specifications.

"Finally, you put a little elbow grease into it,'' he said.

I mention that only because a few years later, one of my friends' dads had told him to put some elbow grease in it, and he spent two hours in his garage looking for the elbow grease. True story.

My dad has been gone for more than 40 years now, but I still think about those nasty old trucks every once in a while during some of my quiet moments.

I can't say for sure that was my dad's way of telling me to reach a little higher in life, to keep trying, to always make sure that you get things right no matter how trivial it might seem.

As I've noted before, he was a man of few words, so maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

But I know I'll spend a couple of minutes this Father's Day weekend, as I do every year, thanking him for a life's lesson well-learned.

A longtime sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Terry Boers now co-hosts The Boers and Bernstein Show, which can be heard Monday-Friday from 1 p.m.-6 p.m. on 670 The Score.

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