Happy Father's Day Pop!

~~There are so many pictures that I'd love to post - but my scanner isn't working. mw

My Pop (Carl McMillan, Sr.) died November 30, 1997. All four of us kids (Martha, Carl Jr., Mary & Molly) stayed with him the night before (Saturday), and talked all night long. After we all went home that Sunday evening, Pop died. I feel that since that day, our family has forever changed. Pop held us all together...LITERALLY.
Pop was 45 years old when I was born, Mommy was 35. I was their little "accident"...or as Pop always called me "The Caboose". (Lots of my friends thought he was my grand-dad.)


Pop was a semi-pro basketball player. Isn't he so handsome...and that curly black hair! (After seeing this picture - you can tell where I get my thighs from! hahah!) Pop was also an incredible golfer. I didn't know about a lot of his golf stories until he got sick, and was in the hospital. One of his friends came to visit and started telling us stories. Back in the late 1920's and 30's, he would be at his job at Stovall Hardware, working on tractors, and men would ask his boss to let him go play golf "with" them. What they would do would be bet on him and make a lot of money. One of the stories this man told was that at a Country Club in Longview, Pop wouldn't just hit the ball to go around a "dog-leg", he would hit it OVER the trees.

This is Pop's team, The Loreco Lions. Check out those shoes and socks they wore...you can sure tell that times were hard.

Pop was the strongest man I knew...not only in the physical body - but spiritually also. He had a Bible that he carried to church.....but he didn't just carry it - he READ it. He led the singing at church.
Farmers and collectors would bring their tractors to Pop. If they couldn't bring them to him, he would go to them....wherever the tractor was, to work on it. A lady once told me that she remembers when I was a baby, Pop brought me with him to her farm to work on her tractor. He brought a diaper and a bottle and put me under a tree and went about his work.

He was called the "Tractor Doctor". He could work on any type of tractor - but his specialty was John Deere. He could take an old "Poppin' Johnny" and restore to where it looked like new. I've seen him take Q-Tips and paint little tiny parts, just perfect.

Pop had lost most of his hearing early in his life, from working on tractors. He ALWAYS wore a hearing aid. (If you've ever known anyone that wore an "old school" hearing aid, you would know that you could run your hand over a certain part of the ear and make it "whistle". That was one of the first things that the grandkids learned about Pop when they were babies...they'd make it whistle and then they'd just laugh and giggle.) When Pop whispered, he did it in his OUT LOUD voice. At night when he would pray, he would think he was saying it quietly, but we could all hear it....and stop what we were doing and listen to him pray his rote prayer... and then at the end of it he would pray for each of us kids.

When I was about 3, he dropped the manifold of a John Deere on his foot. He worked the rest of the morning, never even checked on his foot. Came home for lunch, took off his boot and it was full of blood and his big toe was almost severed. He ended up having to have it completely cut off.

Then, when he was in his 70's, still working on tractors, he got his right thumb popped off on a fly wheel of a tractor. He dipped it in coal-oil, wrapped it in one of those red grease rags, locked up the shop, went in the house and told Mommy he thought that he needed to go to the clinic! Can you believe that? He was just a strong ol' coot! haha!!

Pop wasn't a very vocal man...he wouldn't tell us, but we knew he loved us. But the older he got, he finally started TELLING us. We 3 girls would tease him about who was the favorite. I KNEW I was the favorite...and for some reason, Martha and Mary "thought" they were the favorites.

Pop called me "Baby Doll"....I've not heard those words in almost 12 years and I miss that. I've been told that it "gets easier after a while"....but it hasn't. I was Pop's "Baby Doll" and I'll never be anyone else's......