A Chip off the old block?

I'd like to share some reflections about my dad -- Karl P. Wentersdorf -- and our relationship throughout the years our lives intersected. Karl was not my birth father. He and his wife Anna adopted me in 1947 after I had spent the first eighteen months of my life in an orphanage in Marburg, Germany. After my mom died in 1951, he raised me as a single dad. In 1954, he emigrated with me to the U.S. where we settled down in Cincinnati, Ohio and where I attended several parochial schools, junior high, high school, and college.

My dad was a complex individual. Our relationship, though sometimes strained, grew closer as we both grew older. For one thing, even though he got married during the war, he was gay, which he knew about from the time he was a teenager. This made life very difficult since he came of age during the 1930s when being openly gay could easily have landed him in a concentration camp. Things didn't get much better when he started teaching at Xavier University, a Jesuit college, since Catholic attitudes towards being gay weren't very accepting. For the rest of his life, he remained closeted, even though social attitudes towards being gay had relaxed considerably by the time of his death in 2012. Because of his gender preference, Karl moved to San Francisco in 1989 after retiring from 31 years of teaching English.

Highly guarded about being gay, my dad got very angry with me once after I revealed to him that I told a therapist about his gender preference. He kept a lot of secrets from me while I was growing up. For example, he didn't tell me that I was adopted and that he was gay until I was in college. I remember once when I asked him about his family background, he was reluctant to talk about it. I later found out that his father was killed in World War I when he was two, and that his widowed mother sent him to London to live with some aunts when he was about eight. It was in England that he became bilingual and fell in love with Shakespeare's plays. But he was not happy living with his aunts. When he was fifteen in 1930, he moved back to Berlin to live with his mother with whom he didn't get along with either. He also told me that he decoded and translated BBC broadcasts for the German government during the war because he was too physically unfit to serve in combat on the front. After the war, he and my mother, who had run a translation business before the war, worked for the American Occupation Forces in counter intelligence, interviewing ex-Nazi officials, military personnel, and refugees. Between the two of them, they were fluent in five languages, including German, English, Russian, French, and Polish.

My dad was able to fulfill his life-long dream of becoming a college professor and scholar. Admired by and devoted to his students, he was the recipient of two Xavier teacher-of-the-year awards. He was a renowned, though not always recognized, scholar in the fields of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Old English, Modern Drama, and other areas of English and American literature. Besides teaching, he spent much of his spare time advising and befriending his students. He also moderated a campus literary society called The Mermaid Tavern, as well as a literary quarterly called The Athenaeum. After retiring professor emeritus from full-time teaching, he spent the rest of his life tutoring Asian students in English conversation.

However, my dad's life was not limited to teaching and scholarship. He had a wide variety of other interests that included travel, foreign languages, music, art, and movies. He loved listening to classical music, grand opera, and 60s rock-n-roll. Thanks to his students, he became an ardent Beatles' fan. He liked to entertain his friends. He was also an excellent chef who could whip up a tasty boeuf-a-la-bourgignon recipe in a pinch.

My relationship with my dad was a complicated one that changed considerably over time. In many ways, we had a lot in common since we shared many of the same interests. While an undergraduate at Xavier, I even took some of his classes including Shakespeare, Chaucer, and History of the English Language. I must admit that I never worked so hard to obtain those As!

But we had our differences. While my dad was an accomplished teacher and scholar, I was much too shy to face a classroom. Nor did I enjoy writing term papers, even as an undergraduate. And by the time I was a grad student at Ohio State, doing research became an agonizing process that I did my best to avoid. Eventually, I dropped out of school altogether to work in a factory. For a while, my dad pressed me to pursue his field of scholarship by trying to convince me that I had the perfect background to become a specialist in Medieval English literature. But I wanted to write poetry, songs, and stories instead. However, my creative gifts didn't flourish until long after college.

My dad and I also had some major emotional issues. For one thing, I often found myself intimidated by his dominant presence, especially when he regaled me with his hour-long monologs. In fact, it took me years to stand up to him in order to carve out my own separate identity. At first, he was not receptive to all the time I spent in therapy, but as he got older and wiser, he accepted the fact that our careers would never merge. Eventually, he began to support my creative pursuits in songwriting and music. And our together times became more enjoyable. I still have fond memories of my annual vsits with him in San Francisco when we'd watch his favorite movies, followed by heated discussions far into the night about everything under the sun. The bottom line is that he loved me, and never missed an opportunity to send me gifts and cards on my birthdays and each Christmas.