Our Father's Wisdom : 19 Authors Share What Their Dad Taught Them They'll Never Forget

Noel Hynd (Hostage in Havana):
There are more things that I learned from my father than I can ever recount, but the ability to write was foremost, combined with a certain honest cynicism about the world around us. Allow me to digress into some personal recollections. After all, I followed him into the family trade: writing.

My father, Alan Hynd, never graduated from high school but found his way onto the staff as a reporter for The Boston Post around 1921. Born in 1903, the only son of Scottish immigrants, my father was frequently assigned to police desks and began a career writing true crime stories.

The career path later led him to other newspapers in New York and Philadelphia as well as Trenton, N.J. He worked on those papers through the 1920’s and 1930’s, which were fascinating times in American history. Most all of his newspapers are long gone now and, sadly, so is he. He died suddenly in January 1974.

But during his lifetime, my father saw close up the seamy underside of American life in the early and middle of the Twentieth Century. And he wrote about it, first for the newspapers, then later for the American true crime magazines that flourished in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, then finally for the “big” magazines of the time, like True, The Reader’s Digest and The Saturday Evening Post.

The subject matter was not without its drawbacks. Covering the Lindberg kidnapping in the 1930’s, my father had his first generation American idealism forever tarnished by the legal railroading of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, whom he was convinced was only a bit player --- if that --- in a much bigger kidnapping conspiracy. He wrote about what he saw at the trial, the inconsistency and questionable nature of the evidence, the incompetence of the defense attorney and the ulterior motivations of everyone to get the case “finished” as quickly as possible. As a reward for his straightforward reporting, my father was removed from the case by his paper.

At other times during that era, he reported authoritatively on the famous outlaws of the era, notably Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly. During World War Two, the times treated him well. He had two best sellers in 1943, Passport to Treason and Betrayal from the East. From time to time, he would receive unsolicited letters of praise from J. Edgar Hoover. He was always contemptuous of Hoover and privately referred to him as “a fraud who liked to come in and have his picture taken after the agents had done all the work.”

On many occasions, he gave some people things they didn’t want to read. After presenting all the facts about a prominent murder case in the Bahamas in the late 1940’s, he was poisoned by representatives of a powerful and uncharged suggested perpetrator. The would-be killers may or may not have broken into our family home in Fairfield, Connecticut to plant poison in 1951. The assignment was nearly successful. I can remember the trips to the hospital, shrouded in silence and mystery, when I was about 5 years old.

At another time, some mobsters just plain decided they didn’t like him, so they kidnapped him and held him --- at gunpoint and for ransom --- in a second floor room at the Hotel Dixie on Times Square. His magazine, Official Detective I think it was, delivered $300 cash. Unmarked bills in an envelope, just like in the movies. As I said, interesting times.

What conclusion did I draw from these events as I grew up? It was, I decided, much safer to write fiction than cover true crime. But I definitely wanted to write.

Over the course of fifty years, Alan Hynd covered more than a thousand police cases: domestic murderers, swindlers, bank robbers, serial killers, extortionists, embezzlers, con men. From time to time I personally met some of the people he wrote about. They were, to say the least, memorable. One goon gave me instructions on how to sneak up behind someone with a blackjack and bob someone over the head with maximum effectiveness. Another showed me how to deal cards from the bottom of the deck and what to listen for if someone was doing that. My mother was thrilled.

My father wrote with a smile, a wink in his eye and a sense of the macabre aspects of human motivation. I’ve tried to do the same. After all, as mentioned, I went into the family business.

Noel Hynd
Culver City, CA
June 2011

Noel Hynd is the author of many hugely successful spy and espionage thrillers, including Conspiracy in Kiev, Hostage in Havana and Flowers From Berlin. A collection of Alan Hynd’s true crime stories, Brutes, Beasts and Human Fiends, is also available on Amazon in print and on Kindle.

Carla Stewart (Broken Wings, Chasing Lilacs):
Never give up. That may be the hallmark of Winston Churchill, but my dad had his own version which I learned in my junior year of nursing school. I’d became very disheartened with my long hours of study and the difficult schedule I had that semester. I’d had a particularly rough day when I arrived at my apartment to find that my dad had done something he’d never done before—he wrote me a letter. Not the usual “take heart, you can do it” kind of prose, but a humorous, poignant tale of “You think you’ve got troubles, let me tell you what happened to me.” He chronicled the demise of his dog Rover (he named all his dogs Rover), a recent trade of two guineas for a pea fowl which he penned with the turkeys in hopes of obtaining a flock of peaurkeys, the neighbor’s dogs raiding his henhouse and killing seventeen chickens. On page six he got around to telling me to “keep your nose clean and to the grindstone,” but by then I had laughed and cried myself into a determination to stick it out.

No matter what life has thrown at me since that time, I’ve never forgotten that letter. Any time I get down trodden or too full of myself, I sigh and remember to keep my nose clean and to the grindstone. Thanks, Dad!

Jeanette Windle (Freedom's Stand, Veiled Freedom):
A piece of advice that stuck: "Whether frogs, snakes or iridescent plant life, the brighter and shinier the critter, the more poisonous." That advice first arose at age 6, when my father found my twin and I and younger sister playing with a bright-red 'baby snake' on the concrete floor of our living-room in the Colombian jungle zone where my parents served as missionaries. Turned out our plaything was a full-grown and deadly poisonous coral snake. In later years, I always associated Proverbs 14:12 "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" with that childhood lesson. (Among many others: "Always sit behind a taxi driver when traveling alone, because they can't pull a gun on you from that position"; "Shake out your shoes, clothes and bedding for scorpions and other creepy-crawlies before climbing in", "If lost in the jungle, find water and head downstream; a small stream will always lead to a larger, and sooner or later you will find human habitation".

Linda Windsor (Thief, Healer):
“You Can Do It!” That would be the message my dad left for me by his example. With no more than a ninth grade education, he started a business in a barn, sharing it with race horses. He picked up industrial electric motors and apparatus during the day and repaired them at night with mom's help. That was over fifty years ago and though he has passed on, their business still survives, employing about forty people in a building that eight barns would fit in. I recall one incident where he out-engineered the high tech engineers flown in to our little country town from Chicago to fix an electro-magnetic lift that still unloads the famous Perdue chickens from trucks to this day. What he lacked in education he more than made up with in common sense and, I think, a mechanical instinct.

Just because I was a girl didn't mean that I couldn't learn how to wire a receptacle or work in the shop insulating rebuilt motors and winding new coils for them. If something needed doing around the house, Dad could fix it. This do-it-yourself ethic was a matter of necessity, but it has served me well along with his business principles--honesty, hard work, charity and thanksgiving for God's blessings.

He saw that I got the education he did not. And never once did he ever say, you can't. Not even when I was up to my neck in writing rejections. He never got to see me published, but I believe he knows. I did it, Daddy.

Jim Stovall (The Ultimate Journey):
My father taught me in both word and deed that I was responsible for doing the best I could in whatever I choose to do. He showed me that winning is not always critical, but doing your best is an absolute priority. Then, in my teenage years, I was diagnosed with a disease that would result in my blindness. The doctor told my parents and me "You are never going to be normal." Without hesitation my father responded, "My son understands that being normal is nothing worth aspiring to." My dad just retired this month after working for the same ministry for over 56 years. His words spoke volumes, but his deeds are far more powerful.

Julie Lessman (A Hope Undaunted):
Obedience = Blessing. Something I learned from my father … but, uh, not in the usual way. You see, Daddy kicked me out of the house when I was 21 and I was bitter … until I became a Christian at 23. God’s first directive? Love your father. “But I can’t,” I argued, “he physically and emotionally abused me, and I hate him.” “Love him,” came God’s response. Groan. “But how?” I whined, “when I don’t feel any love for him?” “Just do it, Julie,” God persisted, “and I’ll put the feeling there.”

All righty then. So I did the only thing I knew to do—I repented of my bitterness and prayed for my widowed father diligently. And then I put feet to those prayers by taking homemade beef stew (his favorite) once a week and watching TV for an entire evening without talking except for commercials. When I left each night, I would hug him and tell him I loved him, but he would never say he loved me nor hug me back.

Repentance-Prayer-Action. I was relentless … until lo and behold, I found myself looking forward to our evenings even if it meant watching The Untouchables in total silence. A word here, a smile there, and pretty soon the “untouchable” became touchable. “Good night, Daddy, I love you,” I said months later with my usual hug. “Good night, Julie,” he whispered, his arms slow and awkward as they inched around to hug me back. “I love you too.”

Obedience = Blessing. One lesson. Two fathers. Infinite blessings.