June 2, 2026

Since Father’s Day is this month, I’ve been thinking about my dad quite a bit: Clarke Olson, 1917-2014. There were five of us with only a bit over eight years from top to bottom and a lot of sibling rivalry. The first three: girl, boy, girl, were super close in age. Then a space of three and a half years between my next oldest sister and me, the baby of the family, four days less than a year between us. So, our family was “the big kids” and “the little girls.”

The one phrase most associated with my dad is, “Keep it down to a dull uproar!” usually shouted at us from the main floor down to the basement “rec room” or from the upstairs into the attic of the rambling Victorian house in Lake Linden, Michigan (Upper Peninsula, Keweenaw) where we lived. If that yell failed, we were sent outside to play if it was above zero degrees or not raining. If the weather was extreme, we’d get a whack on the backside as further incentive to tone it down. Just before the whack, if we heard, “Don’t make me come down/up there,” we knew the s--t was about to hit the fan, and we knew we deserved it.

Other than that, Dad was not one to interfere. We had to work our sibling problems out for ourselves. And for the most part we did. Dad was never mean, but stern and loving, and we knew definitely meant business. He let us learn things the hard way but was there to catch us when we fell.

His way of relaxing after he came home from work was to sit at the piano, sip his daily martini, and play 30s-40s show tunes, often singing along with himself. One day when I was perhaps six, I asked him what a martini tasted like. “Here, take a sip,” he said. Does a child of six know what a “sip” is? I certainly didn’t; I took a glub and thought I would DIE! BLECK! I never asked again and to this day, I do not like hard liquor. I’m a wine sipper, and only one glass. Was that lesson his purpose in inviting me to take a sip? Probably. And it certainly worked.

Dad never told me what to do when I got older and sought his advice. He asked me all the right questions to lead me to my own good decision. He was short on compliments, so when he told me I’d done a good job on something or other, I knew he meant it. It’s been twelve years since he passed away, and I still think of him fondly and often. Sometime just before or right after Memorial Weekend each year, I make a point to walk out to the end of the breakwater at Portage Entry with a few rose petals to toss onto the water, since his ashes (and my mother’s) rest at the bottom of Lake Superior near that spot.