I am writing this column on Father’s Day. My father passed away in March of this year, after a long battle with heart problems, so I am especially thinking of him today. He was born in Robertson County, Tennessee, north of Nashville, but lived 47 years in El Paso, Texas. Our family had memorial services for him in both places and buried him back home in Tennessee.

My father was part of the drama of the 20th-century South. Growing up in the rural South of the Great Depression, on a tobacco farm, he went off to war, stationed in Britain as part of the 8th Air Force. Afterwards, he and my mother married (in June 1945) and moved to the city, to Nashville. They became part of the great migration out of the South, seeking opportunities in the West, moving to El Paso in 1957.

My brother and I grew up in a bicultural border town, with a strong military-defense presence and friends coming and going, not at all the kind of place we often associate with the rootedness and tradition of the earlier South. Our parents brought us up to be Southern, though, through the religious values they taught us, the foods they fed us, the stories they told us, the accents we heard about us, and the intense family relationships they nurtured in us. I never remember hearing them talk about the Confederacy and the Civil War, but we were Southern by birth, raising, and culture nonetheless.

Even before Father’s Day, I had been thinking about all of this after a visit to Washington, D.C., several weeks ago. I went to see the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, which I had not seen since its dedication in 1997. It is not on the usual Washington heroic, giant scale, but it is a memorial one truly experiences, moving through four outdoor spaces. At its heart is the bronze statue of Roosevelt, seated in a wheelchair, with his beloved dog Fala at his feet. The references to the Great Depression, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Social Security, and World War II all evoked memories for me of my father’s experiences. The news that day, the anniversary of D-Day, told of the new World War II Museum in New Orleans, a Deep South honoring of a generation.

That generation has aged gracefully, seeing America through many challenges, and none more so than in the South, which has lived through extraordinary social changes. That generation brought the South onto the global stage. One of our challenges at the Center is to document and understand those experiences, especially through recording the words and events of my father's generation, to help us understand all of our fathers. A regional humanities center needs to accumulate documentary evidence and put it in context. We need oral histories of those who were tobacco farmers and cotton farmers, wartime heroes, and builders of a new South, indeed.

My father rests in peace now, in a cemetery surrounded by family, leaving us with memories of a good and decent man. Amen.