Chapter 7 - Loving Words from Family

 My Wife’s Story

I was born in upstate New York.  Our family moved to Florida while I was in grade school.  I had never even seen a black person before going to Florida.  I was shocked and confused to see rampant discrimination.  It was beyond my comprehension.

When I was 18 years old I went on a blind double date with Zack and another couple to see an Elvis movie.  It was not love at first sight.  I was looking for a 6-foot blue eyed blonde with broad shoulders.  But as I got to know him, I saw how intelligent he was.  That was the greatest attraction for me.  It was my number one characteristic in a potential mate.  He showed me so much talent, humor and kindness that to know him was to love him.  I also learned about the discrimination in the service and hated what I learned.  I thought it was terrible to waste his talents as a TN.

After falling in love I pondered what to do about it.  I finally decided that we would be very happy together.  We had been seeing each other without my parents’ knowledge because I knew that from their backgrounds they wouldn’t understand how people of two different races could love each other, and would not want me to face the difficulties of interracial relationship in the South.  We thought eloping would be the way to go.  So before I turned 20 years old that is just what we did.  Now 47 years later I have no regrets and we have produced three of the most wonderful people on Earth, our children.

Louise Chavez

3/12/09

 From eldest son, Dave.

Growing up I remember my dad as strong, smart, and funny.  By strong I mean physically strong—he could perform feats of strength on a pull-up bar that other dads could only dream of doing.  I remember he could do 20 pull-ups, a family record that was only broken by my fearless little brother who must have inherited the good strength to weight gene.  

He was smart.  He used to build things, sometimes with the help of my mother.  They built an oscilloscope and a television, albeit from Heath kits, but still, how many other parents assembled the family television, and how many got theirs to work?  He built model radio controlled boats and had lots of fun doing it.  Our family often took his favorite boat out to a lake on the weekends along with a BBQ or a picnic lunch.  

He was into all kinds of things when we were kids.  Chess, ping pong, computers, electronics, model boats and planes, playing the guitar.  

Once or twice he visited Japan.  He came home, after a long time away on the ship, with some of the most amazing things.  He brought stereo equipment, some art, a few things for my mom like a silk kimono and a necklace, and for the kids, a Pachinko machine. I marveled at that machine for hours on end.  I was less interested in playing that I was in the intricacies of how it worked, most of which were viewable and accessible from the normally hidden back of the machine.  This completely mechanical device made noises like an amusement park. A steel ball that randomly entered the correct spot was rewarded with 20 more balls, accompanied by the ringing of bells and the crash and woosh of the balls being dispensed into the tray.  There were moving parts everywhere in the back that make this all happen, and all without electricity.  I was amazed at the ingenuity of the design.  “Some really smart guy made this all work”, I remember thinking.  My dad told me of the Pachinko parlors in Japan, long rooms with Pachinko machines mounted side by side on both walls.  

He used to work on chess problems with my mom.  He’d sit at the table with a chess board, studying a great game, from one of his vast library of chess books or the newspaper.  He’d look at the board, analyze the position, and try to guess the next move.  My mom would check his guesses against the written record of the game.

When I was in junior high he built a video game, Pong, as part of his studies at DeVry.  The year was 1976, many years before video games were going to take off.  We were certainly the first kids on the block to have a home built video Pong game.  We were probably the first kids in the city of Phoenix.  This was way ahead of the curve, and the beginning of a pattern of early exposure to technology at home.  

Both of my parents were generally in a happy mood, my dad usually more outwardly expressive.  He was always laughing, looking around for fun.  My mom was often concerned he was going to do something embarrassing or otherwise socially uncomfortable.  She was usually happy, too, but some of her happiness was hidden somewhat by her instinct, or perhaps responsibility, to keep him in control.  They’re still like that.  It’s fun to experience.  

My dad used to laugh and play jokes.  He used to offer us a dime or a quarter to see if he could get us to do something we’d never done, like jump off the high dive, or hang from the chinning bar by our knees and swing, let go, and land on our feet.  

One time I got in on one of his jokes.  My sister and brother and I hid a jelly bean somewhere in the house.  All three of us held his hand with his finger pointed out.   All morning long he was able to find the jelly beans, no matter where we hid them.  It took my sister and brother a long time to figure out that I was steering his finger.  My dad and I laughed and laughed about that.

Moving around every couple of years or so separates kids into two groups: those who like being the new kid, who learn to adapt and look forward to opportunities, and those who shy away from new environments and change.  My dad always embraced new opportunities, and this attitude rubbed off on me and my sister and brother.  He was always happy to explore and try new things.  

One day when I was five and living in Hawaii, I was playing with matches and caught a field on fire.  My dad was away on a ship, gone for months.  Later that day after my mom found out it was me she gave me a serious spanking.  Years later I looked back and realized that she must have been scared trying to raise three kids with my dad away on a ship.  

Because I was too young I don’t remember my dad teaching me to play chess.  I just remember going to tournaments at a young age and beating all the kids in my age group.  Chess is a great game for kids, and I’m very happy he got us involved.  I think it teaches very important life lessons:

 First, everything happens for a reason.  When your opponent makes a move, he or she was thinking of something, and had some kind of plan.  If you don’t have any idea what he was thinking, you’re probably missing out on something very important.  Maybe your opponent is that good (see the second lesson), but still, he was thinking of something, and if you can know what it was you’ll be able to be much more effective.

 Second, you have to live with the consequences of your actions.  Make a dumb move and there’s often no chance of recovery.  You can’t go back, can’t undo things.   If you make a move and later realize it was a very smart one, you can only watch while your opponent considers his options.  

Since my dad was interested in new things, and since he was involved in relatively leading edge technology in his job, he sometimes brought a gadget home for work and play.  He and I played with one of the earliest commercialized computers, which was in the form of a HP programmable calculator.  It may not sound like much, but in 1978 it was a big deal.  It was my first introduction to computers and programming.  Needless to say that by today’s standards it had very limited resources, but it was able to store programs on magnetic strips which were passed through a motorized slot near the top of the calculator.  So with the ability to store programs on the strips, we could write our own programs, store them, and not interfere with the official function and utility of the calculator.  On that early calculator he and I got the idea to program it to play Tic-Tac-Toe.  I remember he didn’t think I could do it, but I stayed up all night to make it work.  I can clearly remember his delight and surprise.  

As the technology progressed he was able to expose me to more advanced technology.  I remember one of his B.S. projects was to program a computer to play chess.  He wrote it in Fortran, and created and stored the program on punched cards.  Later when I was in college I designed something similar on a silicon chip.  The exposure he offered, and his willingness and excitement to let me explore was a tremendous opportunity. It helped me become knowledgeable and comfortable with the exciting new technology of computers and electronics.  In high school I got a job assisting the faculty in running the school’s state-of-the-art computer center. I went on to study technology in college and subsequently enjoyed a rewarding technical career in the high tech capital of  Silicon Valley.

When I was growing up my dad told me a few times how difficult it would be to get into the Coast Guard Academy.  I think he was trying to both motivate me to go for it and to let me know how proud he’d be if I made it.  As a senior in high school I applied and was accepted.  Before I had received responses from the places I really wanted to go, Caltech or MIT, the Coast Guard Academy needed to know of my decision to accept or decline their offer.  Growing up in military life I had experienced enough to be pretty sure that I wouldn’t be a good fit in the military.  I felt like I belonged in the commercial world of products and markets and technology.  During the weeks I had to make a decision, my dad had been doing a fair amount of work to try to help me decide, setting up an interview with a high ranking graduate, a Captain on base, trying to make sure I seriously considered it.  But when the day came to decide, without an acceptance from a great school as an alternative, I had to tell my dad that I was going to decline the Academy.  He was amazingly accepting, not overly disappointed, and supportive.  I’m sure I wouldn’t have handled that conversation nearly as well had I been on the other side.  

 

Dad’s Discipline

By Christine Chavez

        My father was always a big proponent of discipline, practice and competition.  Everything was rigorous, from our Saturday morning chores (which had to be performed in accordance with a flow chart posted on the inside of one of the buffet doors) to our recreational activities.   And when we played, we played to win.  A former Armed Forces Chess Champion, my father taught my brothers and me how to play chess at an early age and we were expected to compete in (and win) chess tournaments from the time we were four or five years old.  We had weekly round robin chess tournaments at home, too, but the games didn’t stop there.  My father would get my brothers and me to compete against each other in everything from pull-ups to poker.  I rarely beat my brothers in anything that didn’t involve words.

There were some things that I did with my father that my brothers did not.  These were special things, like going for long rides on the back of my father’s motorcycle in Arizona, tucked tightly up against him as we sang songs above the roar of the bike.  Or dancing the tinikling with my father at the Christmas party of the Filipino-American club in Kodiak, Alaska.  Dancing with my father made me feel like a princess, but preparing for our performance was grueling.   He would insist that we practice our dance again and again until I broke down in tears.  Our practice sessions were so relentless that we wore out the reel-to-reel tape of our music.  The tape material had become so fatigued from repeated stopping and rewinding that in the middle of our performance at the Christmas party it broke, bringing the music to an abrupt stop.  Somehow my father managed to splice the tape.  As soon as the music started again, we knew from our many hours of practice exactly where we were in the song and we were able to pick up our routine without missing a slap of the bamboo poles.

While we were in Kodiak, I learned that my brothers and I were not the only ones who were subjected to my father’s strict discipline.  One day at the base bowling alley, I met one of the Coasties who was assigned to the LORAN station that my father commanded.  The Coastie told me that my father was so tough on the crew that one of the men had drawn a caricature of him in the logbook that featured pointed ears, a pitchfork and a barbed tail.  When I mentioned it to my father, he tracked down the image of himself as a devil in the logbook entry and identified the artist as someone whom my father had put on eight on/eight off as a disciplinary measure.

As a child, I did not realize that the reason my father was so tough on us was because he wanted to compel us to achieve great things through hard work.   Growing up, I often thought he pushed us too hard.  As I became older I could appreciate how hard my father had to work to attain his dream of living in the United States and to advance as far as he did in the Coast Guard, and I realized, after visiting Santol, just how far he had come.  Today I understand that all the discipline that my father instilled in us and the competitive spirit he fostered in us was his way of preparing us for the pursuit of our own success and his way of showing us how much he loved us.

Christine Chavez graduated from UC Berkeley Law School in 1997 and is currently a Partner at Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe LLP in San Francisco.

Carl’s Story

I was born on June 11th 1965 in St. Petersburg, Florida with no idea at the time what my father had gone through before this date in order for me to be born in the U.S.  I learned later that my father was far away on isolated duty probably on a ship in the arctic somewhere during my birth.

During my childhood, through the bits and pieces that I remembered from nearly 40 years ago, I know that I grew up in a loving family.  I also assumed that it was perfectly normal to pack up and move every 2 years or so regardless of how accustomed I had become or all the friends I had made.  Florida, Hawaii, California, Ohio, Arizona and Alaska all during the first 12 years of my life was enough to develop a pattern of moving every few years that I continued throughout most of my adult life as well.  

In my memories, my father seemed pretty strict with us children in a military sort of fashion “turning two” in weekend house cleaning sessions and going through “inspections.”  But at the same time he was caring, protective and loving and I remember countless great times we had as a family playing in the snow in Ohio and Alaska, tubing in Arizona rivers and navigating our remote control yacht in various lakes.  I also remember being extraordinarily proud of my dad watching him perform an exhibition and play something like 25 simultaneous chess matches in a circle in some hotel lobby I think in Los Angeles while onlookers watched in anticipation wondering if even one player in the large group could manage to win a single game.  

My mother and father amaze me in the midst of swarms of separations and divorces in the U.S., here almost 50 years since they met, they still are as much in love with each other as in the beginning.  Their relationship is a shining example of excellence for us children, who have all suffered challenges through our respective relationships.  For me, after two previous divorces already, I’m finally settled down, living in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and am the happiest I’ve ever been in my life with my Brazilian wife, Suzy.  We just celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary as my parents approach their 50th.  And here in Sao Paulo has now officially been the longest period in my entire life that I’ve lived in the same city.  Luckily, through my work at Intel Corporation, I’m usually able to travel to California at least once a year and take advantage of the trip to visit the entire family there, bringing Suzy when possible.  The family also enjoys less frequent Brazil vacations to visit us and sometimes we even meet in other places for family reunions like in Cancun in 2008.

To close here, I’ve been proud of my father and mother my entire life and still remain so.  Just recently, after reading some early excerpts written by Dad about his life for this book, I learned even more reasons to be proud.  And I hope that others who are able to read about his life can use what he’s been through as a model for their own successes in their lives.