William James Dobson Jr., February 24, 1939-April 24, 2024

The sere landscapes around Reno, Nevada, reflect the sterility of the town itself. It’s a town that embodies endemic denial in American culture. The fragility of the ecosystems and geography in the surrounding mountains and hills parallels human vulnerability, the denial of which manifests itself in clownish masculinity on the city streets. In Blade Runner-ish jaggedness, muscle cars growl and loutish pickup trucks blat and motorcycles whine and tagless four-wheelers bark. Few behind the wheel of any of these use turn indicators to warn others of their next move. My father, who died April 24, was a man built for Reno. Born in Kansas City on February 24, 1939, he lived through some of the most rapid changes in the nation’s history. What was a country of wartime shortages and rationed goods became a nation of Cold Warriors, of which he considered himself the greatest. The Republic had shifted from a vague agrarian/industrial might into a supersonic behemoth competing in the Arms Race, the Peace Race, and the Space race. His life straddled those sticky times and extended into the era of the lawsuit, material obsession, selfish preoccupation with fame, and billionaire worship. Like his father and his father’s father, he bemoaned insatiable modernity and a nation’s youth he believed no longer wanted to work. Standing six feet and two inches, Bill Dobson’s lion-like personality made people cower in his presence, and many sought to avoid him. They never knew what they would get walking into a room with him in it. His platforms were living rooms and kitchens in his friends’ and relatives’ houses, not to mention his own with only his wife or kids in attendance. He was often charming, almost erudite. He smiled and regaled his audience with stories and anecdotes that he found interesting. Even when people did not find his stories engaging, he demanded their attention. He would often loft into political rants, despite the embarrassment or irritation of his audience. With the fervor of a circuit-riding preacher, he railed against social and moral change, short skirts, and gun control. In his self-staged presentations, he portrayed himself as the bulwark against declining morals, increasing personal weakness and lack of responsibility, and a diminishment of the individual—his tone and volume increasing with the number of “highballs” and/or beers he drank. The ill-defined ghost of communism was the American enemy, promoting rot within and feminine presence without. His believed his morality was balm for these social ills. His perspective was, in short, another in the run of generations that believed the past was better than the present. Myth functioned for him as memory, to paraphrase the words of Welsh social critic Raymond Williams. Dad dreamed of a nation that would return to a magically remembered past, when men were men, women obeyed patriarchal limits and wore proper clothes, and children were seen and not heard. For him, the adherent of any religion besides his strict, reactionary Catholicism had not gotten the story straight and was lost to Perdition. Even the papacy had strayed from its former glory. Dad was the Inquisitor, convinced that in his hands, order and piety would be preserved. He was also the peasant of his times. He believed human labor the highest form of divine expression. He resented shop owners and corporate managers–people that did not work. He possessed fiery hatred of trade and industrial unions. There wasn’t a company he could not run better than any capitalist titan or CEO. In his mechanic and technician roles at the National Cash Register Company, he believed his job kept the company running. He wasn’t far off. He believed with passion that without the Bill Dobsons of this nation, the human-built world would fall into corruption. Entropy would reign, and business empires would fall. Machines and hardware would break down and become useless pieces of the manufacturing that marked a once-great Republic. Trash would pile up. Bridges would fall. Roads would devolve to gravel and dirt. At the same time, he believed that without strict hierarchies and classes, society and commerce were doomed. Everybody had a place, and he was born into the wrong one. How many times did his children hear that “I could have been an architect (rocket scientist, engineer, banker, corporate giant) if it weren’t for you kids.” What he wanted to say was that he had sacrificed for us. He loved us enough to go above and beyond. He would forestall his rise in society for the love of his children. Of course, as kids, we heard literally what he said, which to us intimated that we were burdens. He encouraged us to achieve but often reminded us how we would never rise above him. Meanwhile, we were to stay the course, toe the line, and follow instructions. And if I use cliches when writing about my dad, they were things he fervently believed. We could do anything we wanted if we did not step out of line, violate the social order or government fiat or Church law. Where these boundaries were was never clear. Like many things in our lives, he defined and redefined the meanings of his language according to his convenience. When we were successful at something, he reminded us that we could always do better. Inevitably, we learned that whatever we did wasn’t enough. This is how I knew him. He had moments of tenderness and understanding between his outbursts and isolations. He demanded quiet and distance from his children. But coming home on an evening, he sometimes comforted and hugged us. He was the strongest person alive. I came to love his smell, part lingering liver-processed alcohol and machine oil. He seemed to know what we faced at school or work. He comforted us, sometimes with a great understanding and compassion. I remember moments when, beaten by bullies, he would give me rousing encouragement. “They are afraid,” he’d say. “They fear your ideas. They think the things that you accomplish are better than what they can do.” He taught me to be fearless in treading new ground, in walking into fear. He persuaded me to be myself. But then he’d tell me never to back down in a fight. “Put up your dukes and exact your due.” This I tried with miserable results. But he’d be right back at my side after he arrived home from work. “They will respect you even if you are beaten.” That this was never the case did not dent his belief that standing up for myself in physical confrontations could only ever do me good. It was a long while before I understood that there are many ways to defeat a bully, and the best was to deflate his ego. I learned to say, “All right, you can hit me. I give you permission. I won’t fight back. Let’s say you win and skip the work.” This worked every time. I never told my dad about this for fear of losing his esteem, which I prized more highly than anything. Home was his domain. What he said went. He demanded undying loyalty to him, the Church, and the Nation. A Coast Guard reservist for nearly 40 years, he admired all things martial. He took us to airshows and watched endless rounds of World War II documentaries and movies. He enacted on us discipline at home that was eerily reminiscent of the kind that sailors on a ship have to follow. Mutiny was the greatest transgression. My increasing rebelliousness and drunkenness drove him to distraction, even as he poured another highball. He treasured his pistols and rifles in a way that presaged the present American gun fetish. He was a Second Amendment purist before the rest of the gun-toting public caught on. While he admired the military, he hated government and was convinced that any gun-control law would lead to confiscation of his prized weapons. He took me shooting and taught me how to disassemble and clean rifle, shotgun, and pistol. Still, his was a childish obsession with guns, and he rarely followed any safety protocol he thought would interfere with his fun. I learned from him how to abuse guns and destroy property with them. It amazes me today that I never shot anyone or wound up in trouble with felony destruction of property. While he talked a great deal about personal integrity, his own fluctuated depending on his want. For instance, he taught that stealing was wrong and honesty the greatest human virtue. But he believed his company would never miss the paper, envelopes, staples, pens and pencils, and bits of machinery he brought home from work. The company owed him, he believed. He’d worked plenty, he reasoned, and “they” underpaid and exploited him. There was a vast difference, it seemed, between theft and getting his due. This great, flawed Leviathan commanded our admiration. Never would we meet a more powerful man. And for all his bluster and brimstone, he spent his evenings after dinner simmering in his easy chair, reading National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, and the evening newspaper. He read popular science journals and broadsheets. For a long time, he was the most learned man I knew. Indeed, I picked up my own studiousness later in life when I went from college to graduate school and, finally to Ph.D. studies from his example. Dad was also a skilled outdoorsman. On family vacations West—almost always West—he introduced me to a Nature whose order could be understood. We camped in mountains and deserts. In Nature, he showed me, everything had its place. It would respond to my presence, put me in my place, and never violate its own laws. As I grew up, I found a great deal of solace in the natural world. It made much more sense than the arbitrary and punishing home environment. For him and for me, the world of men stood in contrast to this Nature. Like him, people changed and they changed things according to their whim. They reacted and lashed out. It wasn’t like a scorpion stinging an errant hand. That was understandable and inevitable. Men had choices, even if they weren’t very good ones. Crime resulted from bad decisions in ever-shifting values and necessities. Nature represented constancy. As I grew older, I began to understand that he wanted to be like Nature but his actions and thoughts belonged to that mercurial world of man. And it was always man or men. Women, in his mind, should be along for the ride. Despite his impulsive behavior, his intentions were nearly always good or, at least, benign. His emphasis on morality, though he often fell, seeped into my soul, my core. He was distant from the family of his childhood, as I am from my own parents and brother and sisters. His faults and foibles can be blamed on his childhood home life, perhaps. But he always believed he could be better, more loyal to friends and family, and more honest. While he was not very good at patience, tolerance, kindliness, and love, these are traits I desire in piles and mountains and have found ways to gain some of them. Like him, I do not always follow these principles. But I know more when I violate my code than he did for his own. Maybe he was cognizant of his failings, but he rarely revealed that kind of self-awareness to me or anyone else. From his refusal to admit wrong, I have learned to apologize and make amends. My dad was a quintessential American. An American seeks to leave evidence of their existence. Reputation. Career. Children. Fame. A stone with a name and dates on it. These are often pursued without thought of consequences on people and institutions. If the American individual is the highest manifestation of human achievement, then the society that it creates knows little of the enduring significance of fortitude, charity, humanity, and devotion. It leaves only its selfishness to posterity. There is little room and only shame for those who seek to leave no mark. Reno was the perfect place for a man who endeared himself to few. He almost never used the turn signals inherent in human behavior or language. My dad didn’t know himself or others well nor understood that his decisions had lasting consequences. He acted and reacted. His moral concern was absent the understanding of human frailty, of the nation’s and its people’s faults, and of his family’s humanity. Despite all this, he was a great man if a complicated and frail one. He always meant well but often lacked the maturity to follow through with his good intentions. He never let on, if he understood it, that his leonine personality masked a vulnerability most of us can only hope to understand in ourselves. His passing is the end of an era that perhaps ceased to be a long time ago. I mourn his absence. If anything, though we talked very little and were not close, I feel like, wow, he’s no longer there. The gravitational force that formed me has disappeared. There is void and absence where once there was solidity. I made my peace about my dad a long time ago. About him, not with him. He was never in the mindset or place to have that discussion. It would have shown that vulnerability I’ve written of. I have a notion there was no greater embarrassment to him than a man showing he is, above all, human with human needs and impulses. To me, he was the most American human I’ve ever known. I loved him when I was a child. I fought with him when I became an adult. I tried to reconcile with him when I quit drinking and began to mature. I suppose my lot is always to live without that reconciliation, not knowing what the world would be like with my father in it. He is gone now. I am less for it. But I remain endowed with all the good things he tried to achieve, moral and physical. While he gave me many positive lessons, I’ve also learned that some of the greatest lessons in life are the negative ones—what not to do, how not to act or to be. These are foundational and essential. For that, I’m eternally grateful. His obituary, which appeared in the Kansas City Star on May 1, 2024: William James Dobson Jr., February 24, 1939-April 24, 2024 A graduate of De La Salle High School, Bill married Dorothy (Bauer) in 1962. They lived in Reno since 1983. He says goodbye to Dorothy, his sister Mary Beth Reiff, children Patrick, Christina, Marty, and Angela, and four grandchildren.