Brrrinnnggg. It was the first call to Dad’s new business number, and he barrelled across the kitchen like a fullback, determined to get to the phone before Larry or I did.
“Daggum, my new line just got put in yesterday and already it’s ringing off the hook!” Dad said.
“It’s the sound of family history in the making,” I cracked.
“Shhh, look at how excited he is,” Larry whispered. “Daniel G. Hill and Associates,”
Dad’s voice thundered into the phone’s mouthpiece.
“The caller’s going to think he dialled the wrong number and got God on the line.” Turned out I was half right. The caller had been hoping to order some takeout Chinese food.
“Larry, time to get to work. Take a look at the blurb I’ve put together to go on my new business brochures. See if there’s anything I should add.”
Feeling like I was getting in the way of a bustling work day—I was the only Hill family member not working part-time for Dad’s new firm—I left the kitchen and started putting on my shoes in the front hallway. Catching Mom walking down the stairs with a stack of Dad’s latest press clippings, I asked, “Don’t you think it’s a little weird how Dad can get so crazy excited over a phone call and then fold up with disappointment if it’s a wrong number?”
“It’s clear you haven’t been around much lately, Danny.”
“Huh?”
“Your father’s always been labile. And anyone easily wound up can just as easily feel let down.”
“That means changeable,” yelled Larry from upstairs.
“You mean Dad’s like a little kid?” I asked Mom, ignoring my smarty-pants brother.
Mom smiled as if to say, Is that so bad?
I knew I was nitpicking. Surely I wasn’t miffed because I was the only Hill not asked to work for Dad. I barely had enough time to manage my nine-to-five job and all my musical commitments. But still, Dad could have at least approached me with some kind of minor work offer—if only so I could proudly remind him of how busy I was.
Once more, I felt like the odd one out, drifting further away from my family, seeing Larry from time to time, invariably to engage in yet another silly running competition—not as much fun lately as he’d become faster than me—and staying in touch with Karen and Mom with a twice-weekly phone call.
Mom kept me up to date on Dad’s array of new jobs: teaching courses at the University of Toronto while acting as special advisor to the university’s president, providing consultation services to the likes of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, the Toronto Star and the City of Toronto. His was the first human rights consulting firm of its kind in Canada, and to some the very idea that he was being paid as a private businessman to break down racial barriers—rather than receiving an annual government salary—appeared if not mercenary then certainly opportunistic. This couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
Because Dad’s true passion was Canadian Black history, the majority of his time was spent writing the groundbreaking book The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada (published by Stoddart Publishing in 1981) and forming, along with my mother and some close friends, the Ontario Black History Society. These twin endeavours, realistically speaking, earned very little. Running a consulting firm reminded me of the upside-down world of being a working musician. The important stuff, projects that in the future might be of significant value, be it songwriting or book writing, didn’t pay that well, or if they did, the resulting money could be several years away. On the other hand, the fluff jobs, making a quick five hundred dollars for sleep-singing through Chicago’s “Color My World” during a wedding, or producing a series of general recommendations for fairer hiring practices in, say, the Ontario Department of Agriculture (recommendations that would look good on paper but likely go unimplemented), promised little lasting value but paid a lot of bills.
“My parents were very concerned about me leaving the security, the pension of a government job,” Dad told me a few years after setting up his business. To be sure, for a man raised in the Depression, this abrupt change of profession represented a major gamble. But thrifty though Dad was, a big salary had never been important to him. Furthermore, his twelve years at the OHRC had earned him a comfortable pension.
Dad would be forced to draw on some of those savings in his early days as a consultant. He’d expected, somewhat naively, that significant work would pour in from the Ontario government, but he’d underestimated the egos he may have bruised when he vacated his job. When the government work didn’t immediately materialize, he took it personally. And there was another blow to his ego. Self-promotion, marketing, advertising, billing and following up on clients slow to pay were all part of running one’s own consulting firm. For a man such as my father, who’d spent the last twelve years dealing with people approaching him, hustling up work represented the ultimate act of self-abasement.
Dad was fifty years old, an age at which most people take stock of their accomplishments or lack thereof. Perfectionists tend to ignore their triumphs, downplaying any past successes while dwelling on their failures, real or imagined. In a sense Dad was, once more, ahead of the curve. Nowadays there are legions of fifty-year-olds launching their own businesses. This was not the case in 1973, when fifty was considered too young to retire and too old to be sustained by dreams that could take years, if not decades, to achieve.
That Dad’s children were closing in on adulthood, with Larry and Karen but a few years away from university, marked another milestone in Dad’s life. While he and I were on civil terms (meaning we weren’t fighting because we rarely saw each other), I knew that the thought of Larry and Karen leaving home saddened him. All these life transitions left him dislocated and out of sorts, which in turn dimmed his usual spark, the very thing that had always made him such a whirlwind force. His work suffered.
One day, Mom, in her double role as wife and bookkeeper, came into his office and told him that he wasn’t bringing in enough money. Mom had never minced words with any of us, and although Dad consistently absorbed Mom’s barbs with an equanimity that bordered on the heroic, her warning that he had to work harder left him, in his own words, “shocked and deeply ashamed.”
Dad removed his ovoid, black spectacles and stood up from behind his sprawling mahogany desk. He closed the office door, looked Mom in the eyes and said, “Donna, I won’t let you or the family down. Wait and see, I’m going to land more contracts. I’m going to make you proud of me.”
Dad told me this story more than twenty years later with tears in his eyes. If his candour left me unhinged, his response to Mom’s “buck-up” talk confirmed what I’d always known. Dad’s internal emotional wiring had undergone little or no change since he was a boy. There could be no greater disgrace than to be regarded as an underachiever.
Within a year, Dad landed the biggest contract of his consulting career: an exhaustive report commissioned by the attorney general of Ontario on the practices of religious cults, sects and mind-development groups. It would take him more than eighteen months to complete and span close to a thousand pages. (In keeping with Dad’s philosophy on free speech and freedom to embrace any belief, religious or otherwise, so long as it was legal, Dad’s position was that cults and sects should enjoy the same rights as mainstream Christian, Muslim or Jewish groups.)
As had been the pattern throughout my adolescence, Dad’s work made only a glancing impression on me. Except that now every press clipping or review that mentioned me also mentioned that I was “son of Dr. Daniel G. Hill, former chairman of the OHRC.” Would I never be able to separate myself from my father, or at least be viewed by the world as my own person?
However indifferent I pretended to be about Dad’s ever-growing body of work, I never stopped studying and analyzing him as a man. And as a husband. Now that I was living on my own, what I missed most about Dad, or rather Mom and Dad, was their continued devotion to one another.
When Karen and Larry left home for school, my parents had a home largely to themselves for the first time in twenty years. I’d seen more than a few married couples drift apart once their children left. The opposite happened with my parents. Dad missed Larry’s frenetic darting in and about the house (he was always rushing, late for something) the same way he missed Karen’s calm, dependable presence. But that didn’t prevent him from soaking up the extra mothering that started flowing his way once his children weren’t around to lay first claim to it.
“Dan, honestly, what have I told you about walking around the house without shoes on,” Mom would tut. The two of them would be sitting on the corner of their bed, Dad’s humongous feet dangling across Mom’s tiny lap. All too aware that a diabetic’s first weak spots show up where the circulation is most easily compromised, such as the extremities, Mom would carefully clip the calluses off Dad’s big toes, wielding the nail clippers with the dexterity of a surgeon, hollering at him to stay still.
“Danny, don’t distract your dad,” Mom would command without looking up, when I’d make one of my surprise visits. “He refuses to believe how easily he could lose his toes to infection—and his doctor’s too busy singing his praises to bother with keeping him healthy.”
“He’s a human rights doctor!” Dad said, the boom in his voice making it clear that he was responsible for converting his doctor to the righteous cause. I’d mumble an apology for dropping by without warning, feeling as though I’d interrupted some primate grooming session.
“Not at all, son,” Dad said. “Your mother’s trimming back all the dead skin on my toes. It’s from years of marching in the U.S. Army in the steaming hot south, with boots two sizes too small for my big Black feet.”
I stood watching the two of them, trying to hold on to this all too rare relaxed moment we were sharing. Lately Dad had become slightly more approachable. But even our more pleasant visits were invariably torpedoed by one of his “innocent questions.”
“So tell me, son. What’s all this foolishness I hear about you thinking about leaving RCA Records and signing your life away to the McCauleys? Is this your idea of a step up in what you call the music business?”
Should I tell Dad the truth? That I was learning from the best? He’d gambled with his career, leaving the status and security of a big government job to strike out on his own. Was that any different from me leaving RCA Records to join forces with the McCauleys? One day Dad would connect the dots between him and me. Or so I hoped.