Understanding Your Father: A Memoir for My Sons

Memoir of Joseph M. Flora. In Joe's own words:

This memoir takes the reader to the Great Depression years in Toledo, Ohio, where I was born; to my elementary, junior high, and high school days in Saginaw, Michigan. School I loved from the start, and early I declared that I would go to college. A teenager, I knew that summers were when I earned money for college. I graduated from the University of Michigan, Phi Beta Kappa. Graduate School was a very different experience-the Master's degree a big step for those planning for the doctorate. The professoriate would decide who would proceed toward the PhD. Summers ceased to be about earning money. Happily, my graduate student years led to a career as professor of English at the University of North Carolina.

The education of our sons also figures in the memoir. Even before they could walk, talk, make decisions, we would be learning from them as we tried to guide them. They with their parents would frequently visit Michigan and Florida, spend time with their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and they would ponder. Sometimes we took trips with our sons in North Carolina-the mountains, the coast. Especially memorable was the summer of 1976, the nation's bicentennial, when I was a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico, an education for the Flora family.

Many of my UNC colleagues appear throughout this memoir, often several times, all the way to the Postscript-friends who shared similar values, friends who sang and laughed with us. Some of our colleagues have fallen into the deep sleep, but they still matter, still inspire, can still amuse us, as do many of our relatives in Saginaw, Ann Arbor, Battle Creek. The memoir touches faith, hope, joy.