By Patrick Timothy Mullikin

Everybody works but father. He sits around all day. Feet in front of the fireplace, smokes his pipe of clay.Mother takes in washing. So does sister Ann. Everybody works at our house, but my old man.

Whenever I hear this silly old song sung by Groucho Marx I think of my father, Willard Everett Mullikin Jr., who was a ripe-and-retired 45-year-old when I was born.

His was the classic rags-to-riches story: As a Roosevelt (that's rough-riding Teddy, not FDR) high school student in the mid-1920s, he worked the loading docks of a Los Angeles-to-LasVegas trucking company, then became its general manager and ultimately its president. Having worked during the Depression years in Los Angeles, he had no faith in the stock market. Instead he invested, wisely, in real estate.

I think what drove him to work so hard early in his life was not so much amassing money but knowing that the reward for working hard was not having to work — ever again. And he didn't. He sold his company, Fleetlines: Pioneer Truckers of the Southwest, in 1959. At age 50 and gray, he retired to a comfortable, sedentary, air-conditioned life, married to wife number three: his former secretary, my mother.

My father was an avid stamp collector, a philatelist if you want to get fancy. Living in air-conditioned exile, chain-smoking Salem menthol cigarettes, and futzing around with stamps was no recipe for longevity. He did, however, manage to live comfortably and enjoyed a carefree, retired life for the next 17 years. He died amid the hoopla of our nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976. His ashes were scattered off the coast of Ensenada, Mexico, which he would have found to be an amusing, if not ironic, final resting spot: Once, hopelessly lost driving the cactus-strewn back roads of Baja California (and ignoring the most obvious resource, my mother who was born in Mexico and fluent in Spanish), he pulled over to the side of the road to ask directions from a local who was selling watermelons from an ancient pickup truck. Normally conservative and reserved, my father bellowed: "Wheeech way to EEEEEN-sah-nah-dah?" He chuckled over this witticism for days. My mother sat in stony silence.

Having both a stay-at-home mother and a stay-at-home father was unheard of at a time when most fathers went to work in the morning, returned in time for dinner, and repeated the process for five or more consecutive days. There were three recurring questions I was asked during my childhood. Q: Is that your grandfather? A: No. Q: What did your father do in World War II? A: Nothing. He owned a trucking company. Q: What does your father do for a living? A: Nothing.

My father loved Las Vegas, that is the bare-bones Las Vegas of '40s and '50s, before Bugsy Seigel and Howard Hughes fooled with it. Looking back, I see similarities, minor similarities thank God, between my father and Howard Hughes. In the late 1960s Hughes, with his flowing mane of white hair and long beard, shuffled around his penthouse suite at the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas with tissue boxes on his feet, urinating in Mason jars. My father, who resorted to shaving once a week because he was retired and could get away with it, was a devout slipper man — both inside the house and, to my mother's horror, also in public places. And before you ask, he used the restroom.

He loved to go out to dinner; so did my mother, naturally. So my three sisters and I would get into the family car, and off we'd go – our slipper-clad chauffer behind the wheel, all of us in a haze of mentholated cigarette smoke. (Both my parents chained-smoked.) I'm sure the waitresses and kitchen crews got as hoot out of the slightly demented, old coot who left the house in his bedroom slippers. Little did they know this was his "normal" attire.

My father was born in Tulsa, Okla., in 1909, and spent his childhood years in Great Falls, Mont. "A great place to be from," he used to say about Great Falls. In an attempt to introduce culture into the lives of his Southern California-bred brood, he purchased (or was given or was owed for some past favor or murky transaction) season passes to the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera series. The Civic Light Opera is where touring Broadway shows were presented to savage west-coasters. A night at the civic light opera was a dress-up affair, which my father did from head to trouser cuffs. Once seated, and in slippered bliss, he was out like a light as the first note of the overture was struck. He would awaken to the houselights and applause, smoke a few cigarettes during the intermission, fall asleep during second half of the show, and awaken again to the sound of applause and clap along.

A few years ago I went out to pick up one of my kids or drop off an overdue video and discovered that I was wearing my slippers, a particularly ratty pair at that. Self-conscious at first — like the recurring dream where you are at a busy mall, clad only in your underwear, or worse, nothing — I found wearing slippers in public to be a refreshing experience. And on occasion I'll leave the house slipper-shod, despite protestations from family members.

This Father's Day I plan to wear my slippers all day, in honor of my old man, and dream about the day when I'm asked: "What do you do for a living?" And I can answer, proudly: "Nothing."



Patrick Timothy Mullikin is a correspondent for Vermont Sunday Magazine.