Nail Your Samsung Interview: Proven Techniques and Refer Me Referrals
I slumped in the passenger seat staring out the window at the silhouettes of palm-trees smudged against the night sky as Shelley drove me to my bereavement flight.
The call had come a couple hours earlier that Wednesday evening. I had been sitting at our round glass dining room table having a casual conversation with Shelley’s mom and dad, Henry and Dana, who were visiting from the East Coast when the phone rang. It was my younger brother, John. Someone at the hospital had called him. Dad had gone into cardiac arrest while in Intensive Care recovering from a routine hernia operation. It had taken them twenty minutes to get his heart beating again. Twenty minutes? He couldn’t still be alive, could he? I mean really alive? After twenty minutes?
That’s what I asked my father-in-law, who was a doctor. He gave me one of those subtle, sympathetic headshakes TV doctors use to let next of kin know the patient isn’t going to make it.
As I watched the Los Angeles cityscape float by on the way to the airport, I tried to come to terms with the fact that my father was gone.
“Damn,” I thought, “I wasn’t done raising him yet.”
Our father, Clarence Skrovan, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on the fifth day of 1930, about ten weeks after the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression. He was the second of six kids, four boys and two girls. They were poor. His father, Grandpa Skrovan, had an eighth-grade education and worked in a foundry. Dad didn’t quite qualify for membership in what they tell us is The Greatest Generation, those born between 1901 and 1926. His was The Silent Generation, born between 1927 and 1945, the generation who struggled as children during the Depression and World War II.
From Cleveland Hopkins Airport, it’s an hour drive east to my hometown, Chardon, Ohio. I got to Geauga Hospital on Route 44 just a few miles from where I grew up at about six Thursday morning. John had driven up from Ithaca, New York, and had arrived about a half hour before me.
Dad was in the ICU, unconscious, eyes closed, his head involuntarily twitching, as if water were dripping onto his electrical circuits. They had adjusted his bed so he was sitting relatively upright. The tube down his throat was connected to a respirator to help him breathe.
I was amazed he was alive at all. The hernia operation itself had gone smoothly, but the next day his blood pressure dropped enough to move him to the ICU. They had pushed it back up, but in the middle of the night it dropped again, this time off a cliff. Seconds after the alarm bells went off, the staff rushed in and worked to revive him, able to keep enough oxygen flowing to his brain for the twenty minutes it took to jump start his heart. If he had been anywhere else, he would have been a goner. Turns out the ICU is the ideal place to have a heart attack.
As a child, Dad had suffered a serious bout of scarlet fever, which has been associated with heart damage. This was before antibiotics had rendered the disease relatively harmless. He also had had an emergency appendectomy as a child, a procedure his parents were always quick to remind him cost $200, a significant sum back then, which had set the family back for years. This sense of guilt his parents put on Dad was one of the reasons he and Mom never discussed money with me or John when we were kids. They didn’t want to pass on that burden to us. Whenever we asked, they told us it was none of our concern.
Through those difficult years, Dad developed a sturdy work ethic. He and his older brother Dan worked odd jobs throughout their childhood, delivering newspapers, ushering at movie theaters, shoveling snow. Even before his teens, Dad worked every day after school, handing over most of his meager earnings to his parents to help support the household. His report cards were filled with Ds and Cs because all these jobs left him little time for schoolwork.
Because he was tall for his age and had suffered severe acne, which gave his face a more weathered look, people always thought Dad was older than he was. He told stories about how as a fifteen-year-old during World War II, he’d get suspicious looks from uniformed moviegoers at the downtown theater where he ushered. “Why aren’t you in the service?”
Eventually, he did serve in the Navy during the Korean War, although he never made it to Korea. He was deployed on a communications ship that steamed up and down the East Coast and around the Caribbean, never engaging in hostilities. Dad always joked that the only combat he saw was in Boston bars, which he referred to as “The Battle of Scully Square.”