April 4, 2008, would have been our father’s 91st birthday.

Griffith Williams had many jobs in his life, from milk tester to insurance salesman, but it’s probably safe to say that he never made a day’s salary doing anything he truly enjoyed. A job is simply what you did to pay the rent and feed the kids. And, yes, despite childhood photos in which we looked so skeletal that Biafran orphans were tempted to send us money, Dad did feed his kids. We always assumed that we ate so much Royal gelatin and drank so much pineapple-grapefruit juice because Dad was cheap, not realizing at the time that, for much of our young lives, our family was barely scraping by. Only later, once Mom and Dad were making comfortable livings, did it become obvious that Dad was also, indeed, cheap. Luckily, we were never reduced to eating the notorious “canned whole chicken” which was stored in our kitchen cupboard for years, presumably kept on hand for a rainy — or falloutty — day.

Dad’s truest calling and passion was probably his role as the unofficial historian of our hometown, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and its surrounding region. Although he did not even grow up in Prairie, he became fascinated by its rich history and, over time, became the “go-to” source for information about the past people and events of our little burg. Nearly eight years after Dad’s death, our mother will still receive the occasional letter or phone call from an out-of-towner, curious about some nugget of information about Prairie du Chien, who had been told the best source on the subject would be Griff Williams. When he died, he took an entire irreplaceable searchable database with him.

Between 1970 and 1990, our dad conducted a series of oral-history interviews with over thirty elderly residents of the area, using a cassette-tape recorder purchased with what he termed a “magnificent grant of fifty dollars” from the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Following his natural curiosity, Dad sought out a cross-section of the community: farmers and businessmen, clammers and railroadmen, one-room schoolteachers and bootleggers. Their stories vividly evoked the details of a bygone world, as life was lived in the early 20th century. Tales were told of the arrival of newfangled contraptions like the automobile, the airplane and the telephone; of visits to town by presidents, circuses and wild-west shows; of sermons, square dances and Prohibition. Dad would be pleased to know that his interviews are now archived at the Wisconsin Historical Society and can be heard on CD at the local museum in Prairie du Chien.

Dad was a compulsive archivist who taped innumerable hours of audio from the TV or radio, well before the era of the VCR. Dad would position the microphone of his tape recorder near the speaker of the TV or radio, often propping the mic in place by rubber-banding it to a Scotch-Brite sponge from his job at the town’s 3M plant. He’d capture the big events, like moon landings or presidential inaugurations, but also the personal moments, like when my five-year-old wishlist was read on our local radio station’s “Letters To Santa Claus” by the legendary Norb Aschom. (Santa never did bring me that Incredible Edibles set, which has scarred me for life — although probably not as badly as those kids who DID get Incredible Edibles were scarred when they tried to pick up those scalding metal trays by hand.) Whenever any of us would accomplish something that merited a mention on the the local news, Dad would always be standing by, ready to press “record”.

Dad was a filmmaker, having won a Bell and Howell regular-8 camera from the Piggly Wiggly around the time I was born. In stark contrast to modern video cameras, where one can let miles of tape whiz past while nothing very interesting happens, the technical limitations of Dad’s camera, which had to be wound by hand before nearly every shot, necessarily condensed any event into brief snippets, preserving the Sixties for us in a series of silent three-minute celluloid haikus. An alien studying these films would come to the conclusion that life on earth consists primarily of parades, floods and the unwrapping of Christmas gifts. Lord knows what they’d make of those times when Dad accidentally double-exposed the film.

Dad was a writer. For many years, he contributed articles to our local newspaper which would feature a photo or postcard from the past, accompanied by his lengthy historical caption. In his retirement, he over-filled two volumes with his neatly hand-printed reminiscences, reflections and the occasional diatribe (let’s just say he was not a Clinton fan), all supplemented with photos, newspaper clippings, postage stamps, ticket stubs and, I swear to you, at least one label from a cantaloupe. A separate notebook was devoted solely to his Air Force experiences in Europe during World War II.

Dad was a cartoonist. Or maybe “doodler” is the more accurate description. Put a scrap of paper in front of him and he would draw characters — ALWAYS in profile, in a style comparable to “Dick Tracy” villains or the oncoming thugs from the opening credits of TV’s “Batman”. He sketched these characters so compulsively that, upon his retirement, his 3M co-workers could fill a large piece of poster-board with a gallery of these cartoon heads they’d saved over the years; like snowflakes, no two were exactly alike.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad as I’ve been working on this documentary, figuring out ways that he can be a presence in the film despite his physical absence from our lives. Fortunately, there’s enough videotape from the last decade or so of his life that I feel he’ll be fairly represented. But it has also become more and more apparent just how many of his interests have turned out to be his sons’ interests — sons who were foolish enough to attempt to make their livings in the sorts of creative endeavors which Dad limited to his off hours. We’re all writers of one sort or another. Brad’s radio feature, “Yesterday In LaCrosse”, mining the past of his own adopted hometown, echoes Dad’s historical work. Greg’s an amazing cartoonist, as one can see from his WikiWorld series of illustrations for Wikipedia. And all those home movies and audio tapes? Dad was doing a documentary on this family for nearly forty years! I’m just carrying on the tradition with slightly more sophisticated gear.

Many times during Brad’s recent notoriety, Mom has commented, “Your dad would have loved this.” Given how thoroughly he captured our lives in a far less technological age, I’m sure Dad would be faithfully manning the VCR remote each time another news organization saw fit to interview Brad about his amazing memory. And although I don’t believe in such things, just for today I’ll let myself imagine that there’s a place called Heaven and that, whenever Brad comes on the tee-vee, the powers that be allow Dad to dangle a microphone down from the clouds, just so he can tape it.

Happy birthday, Dad.