This Fathers' Day post is the companion to one I wrote last month outlining my mother's life on Mom's Day.  If you missed it and are interested, click here

Herminia Tejeda was born before the turn of the twentieth century in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, the illegitimate daughter of a white lawyer and his Afro-Caribbean mistress.  Raised and educated in a convent school, she became a servant in the household of an American diplomat who brought her back with his family to Philadelphia.  In America, she met and married Manuel Jimenez, a Spanish immigrant.  They lived in Harlem, where the first of their eight children, Miguel, was born in 1917.

Miguel was still a young child when his father moved the family across the continent and acquired a small farm near San Jose, in the rich and fertile lands that now lie under the pavement of Silicon Valley.  Manuel pulled his son out of school after the eighth grade to work full-time on the farm.  It was the last formal education Miguel was ever to have.

The farm and the family's fortunes didn't survive the economic cataclysm of the 1930s.  Manuel and Herminia moved with their six remaining sons and one daughter back to her country of origin, where they survived hand-to-mouth in the slums of Santo Domingo.  After the replacement of the Spanish monarchy by a constitutional republic, Manuel managed to move his family one more time, back to Spain where he became a minor official in the city government of Barcelona.

My brother Mike in front of the building in Barcelona where Manuel Jimenez and Herminia Tejeda lived with their family in the 1930s

With the outbreak of civil war in 1936 Miguel, still a teenager, along with his younger brothers Manuel and José, took up arms in defense of the republic against the fascist takeover led by Francisco Franco.  It was a lost cause, and in 1939 Miguel, his father and his brother Manuel were among the refugees who fled over the Pyrenees to be interned in French concentration camps.  José was a prisoner in a forced labor camp in Spain, the next oldest brother Daniel was in Barcelona helping his ailing mother with the three little ones.  His father died in the camp, but Miguel managed an escape, made his way to the American consulate in Bordeaux and was repatriated to New York.

Mike -- he'd Anglicized his name on his return to the US -- dedicated himself to getting his family out of Spain ahead of the coming European war.  His brothers and sister were all native-born Americans, and though his mother didn't live to make the trip, Mike got the rest of the family back to America, even the two brothers who were imprisoned in Spain and France.  At the age of twenty-three, he was the patriarch of a family, including three who were still schoolchildren.

It was around this time that Mike met Mary Walton, a politically active artist from a long Pennsylvania Quaker family line of abolitionists and suffragettes.  The world was going to war around them, and after Pearl Harbor Mike joined up to become a paratrooper.  Mike and Mary tied the knot and had a son on the way by the time Mike shipped out for North Africa with the 82nd Airborne.

Legion of Merit, awarded to Capt Michael Jimenez personally by Gen Eisenhower

When peace finally came, Mike and Mary moved to upstate New York and started growing their family.  Mike became a labor union organizer and ran for congress as a socialist.  It wasn't a good time to be a leftist in the US.  A labor activist whose service in Spain in the '30s made him a "premature anti-fascist", an open socialist and a rumored communist, Mike was a target of HUAC and the McCarthyists.  Even his service behind enemy lines in Italy was used against him, since the resistance against Nazis and Italian fascists was known to be riddled with communists, socialists, anarchists and their political ilk.  The persecution continued for years, until finally the national leadership of the AFL-CIO caved in to pressure to purge all accused leftists from their ranks.  In his forties with six kids to support, Mike found himself without a job and blacklisted from employment in organized labor.

Mike scrambled.  He got a license as a labor arbitrator, he sold life insurance, he went into partnership on a carwash.  The last venture was the one that led to the payoff.  Mike was charismatic, charming, intelligent and hard-working.  He convinced the sales rep from the heavy equipment company that sold him and his partners their carwash machinery to take him on as a partner, with a guarantee that half of what Mike would bring in would be more than he could make on his own.  Mike delivered and that was the start of his life as a capitalist.  Within a decade he owned a lakeside house in the Finger Lakes with a private dock and a waterskiing boat, another on the intracoastal waterway in Delray Beach with a deep-sea fishing rig tied up in the backyard, kept an apartment just off Harvard Square, had two Lincoln Continentals, one for Florida, one for his sales territory in New England and upstate NY, and a twin-engine Cessna that he piloted himself to commute between them.

Mike's success as an entrepreneur didn't come without its costs.  The strain of financial struggle was reflected in strain between him and Mary.  Mike had always been a charmer and a ladies' man, and as they grew apart he began an affair and didn't try to hide it.  It was more than Mary was willing to take and they divorced after a twenty-two year marriage.  Mike married Helen as soon as she could get a divorce.  They were well-matched and happy together, but Helen had an unsuspected heart condition that killed her suddenly before they'd been married a year.  Grieving and on the rebound, Mike remarried too quickly and ended up with a wife, Ginny, who alienated his children and his oldest friends, a drinker, a liar.

The high ride couldn't last forever.  The economic downswing of the Carter years caught Mike financially overextended, and as he scrambled to hold on to as much of his business as he could salvage, he found that Ginny had been embezzling from his company.  It was the end of the marriage and the millionaire lifestyle.

But it also marked the start of a new kind of life for Mike, more relaxed, less demanding of himself and others, more modest in his lifestyle and expectations.  He courted Megan, a widowed Brit living in New Hampshire with three children, two of them still at home, and when they married he took on yet again the responsibility of fatherhood.  His stepson Tom had an easier Dad than myself or my two brothers remember, and Tom loved Mike to the end of his life and beyond.

Mike and Megan visiting his daughter Anita at her home in Pepicou, France, 1989

The fifteen years Mike and Megan had together were comfortable, loving, enjoying children and grandchildren, traveling.  After Franco's death, amnesty made it possible for Mike to revisit Spain for the first time in almost forty years, they also traveled to Mexico, China, New Zealand, Britain, France.  Mike was fit and active to the very end, which came suddenly.  He'd been subject to occasional attacks of asthma for several decades, and on Columbus Day 1991 he was alone in the house on Cape Cod where he and Megan lived.  He must have suffered a severe attack, one that drove him to get himself in the car to drive to a local clinic where he could receive treatments when necessary.  He dropped dead in the clinic parking lot beside his car.

When Megan came home from shopping the television was on and tuned to the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings.  I half-jokingly decided that it was something Orrin Hatch or Arlen Specter said that day that drove Dad into the fit of respiratory spasms that ended his life.  After years of trying and failing, the Republican sons-of-bitches finally got him.

Have a great Fathers' Day, all you fathers, sons and daughters out there in OpenSalonland.