My late father, Harley Upton Biggs, Sr., was born in Greenbriar, Arkansas, on July 3, 1920.

He passed away in 1997 but on June 3, this year, he would have turned 100 years old.

What kind of person was my Dad?

He was one of the most pleasant people you could ever encounter. He was a barber by profession. From 1960 to the 1980s, he cut hair in Getty Building at 15th Street and Boulder Avenue. The Getty Building, built by billionaire J. Paul Getty, became the Skelly Building and later housed Texaco Oil Company headquarters. It is now the Boulder Towers.

Dad worked for himself but in that era, people who worked in the building could get their hair cut on company time.

A few years after he passed, some people from Texaco called me and invited us to an annual alumni dinner. Even though Dad was not a Texaco employee, they liked him so much that they wanted to acknowledge him at the dinner.

Life wasn’t easy in Central Arkansas in the 1920s. Dad’s family – he had two brothers and one sister – had to go through the Great Depression.

Dad told me that they didn’t suffer too much because they lived on a farm and grew most of their own food. Sometimes, he would get a spare nickel and walk into town to buy a “soda pop.”

Dad and his brother Alton loved baseball. They played in school and they were both very, very good. Uncle Alton played minor league baseball professionally and he was a manger for awhile. He was the manager for a minor league club in Phoenix and Billy Martin, the late Yankee manager, was one of his players – and close friends. Uncle Alton was very likable, too.

My Dad played minor league professional baseball around the country for awhile. He was a three-sport star at Cherokee High School in Cherokee, Oklahoma. He was offered a college scholarship to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University) but he got drafted by the U.S. Army and shipped to Europe to fight the Nazis.

Dad fought under Gen. George Patton. Dad was wounded and got a Purple Heart. He was captured for a few days and rescued.

Dad didn’t like to talk about the war. It was a bad memory even though America won.

He married my mother on July 10, 1942 (exactly 40 years before I married Susan). They had five sons – Bill, Tom, Jon, Harley Jr. and me. I am the youngest. We were five “baby boomers” – all born about two years apart. Tom and Harley Jr. have passed.

In the late 1950s, my Mom contracted cancer and she died in the spring of 1959, leaving Dad with five boys – ages 5-13 – to raise alone.

Mom’s family, who lived in West Virginia, wanted to farm us boys out to members of their side of the family because they doubted Dad’s ability or resources to raised five boys alone.

But before she died, my sainted Mother asked Dad to pledge that he would keep us brothers together. He made that pledge to the love of his life and he kept that pledge even though it meant struggles and hardship.

Dad wasn’t perfect (none of us are) but he was a man of faith and he kept his word.

We moved in with Dad’s elderly parents in a little three-bedroom house near McClure Park in East Tulsa. We were poor – Dad made about $100 a week cutting hair in the 1960s – but we were together.

Dad repeatedly told us to go to college and get a degree. In fact, four of us got degrees and three got advanced degrees. We became a newspaper editor, two teachers and a research librarian.

Uncle Alton died in a VA hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas in the 1980s. When we were growing up, Dad told us to never put him in a nursing home or a VA hospital.

When he turned 70, his knees gave out and he fell a few times. He needed round-the-clock care. He went to the Veterans Center in Claremore – which is a nursing home and a VA hospital. But it was unlike the institutions he feared. They took great care of him until he passed away in 1977.

Dad and were driving to West Virginia in the 1970s to visit some relatives and old friends. Out of the blue, he started talking about how he had trusted Jesus Christ as his personal Savior and how he had been baptized. He knew this was important to me and it was important to him say those words.

I have drawn comfort from that for years.

I miss him. I wish I could talk with him about the challenges of life. I wish he could see his grandchildren and now great grandchildren. I wish they could spend time with him.

The great hope and expectation is a family reunion in Heaven. After saying hello to Jesus, I want to go give my Mom and Dad a big hug and tell them I love them and I really missed them.