My father, Walt Girdner, was born in an iron bathtub in central Iowa in 1922. The tub was in a wooden house with a big porch, set at a country crossroads surrounded by cornfields as far as the eye could see. On a cross-country trip, many years later, we stopped by that house outside Earlham, and the people living there let us go inside. My dad pointed to the bathtub and told me that was where he was born. There was still nothing but cornfields around the dusty, rundown, old place.

Walter Wayne Girdner was one of five children. His father, Walter Samuel Girdner, and his mother, Laurel Rote-Girdner, had met and married while both were divinity students at Drake University. Walter Samuel then took a job as pastor for a Christian church in Alameda, and the family moved to the Bay Area of California in 1925. My dad grew up in what was then a much more rural California.

He would fish out of an inner tube in Alameda Bay — he couldn't swim — and come home with a gunnysack full of fish, that he gave away to neighbors. He spent summers working on his Uncle Jim’s ranch outside Santa Rosa. He would pick plums and remembers holding his breath while running carts full into a shed filled with sulfur smoke in order to cure the fruit. On weekends, he would go hunting and fishing in the hills nearby.

At the same time, an interest in art and imagery was developing. Walt would address letters to his best friend, Art Weaver, by drawing a cartoon on the front of a homemade envelope that would somehow include Art’s street address, envelopes that Art saved, and many years later, gave them as gifts to me and my sisters. Throughout his life, he kept a faith in imagery as a powerful way to communicate and believed that young people are generally better at interpreting imagery than adults, because their imaginations are more agile and unencumbered.

Part of my dad’s childhood revolved around the church whose members would join with other church groups for an annual meeting at campgrounds in Santa Cruz. Uncle Bill, Walt’s older brother, tells the story about how he and Walt — the minister’s sons — and a group of other boys took pocketfuls of sand crabs into the religious services in the main chapel. When the sermon began, they all emptied the sand crabs out of their pockets. “People would be looking down,” said Uncle Bill, “and start yelling and jumping up.” Growing up during the depression, my father and everyone else struggled to make extra money. In one of those endeavors, he saw a trash-strewn, vacant lot in Alameda and got permission from the owner to grow corn. When the corn became ripe, he and a friend slept in the field to prevent others from picking it. They sold the corn as fresh as it could possibly be from a stand in front of the field, picking the ears only after they had been paid for. Later, as a college athlete in the early 1940s, he earned money during summers by bucking hay bales and working double shifts at a cannery.

Tall and lanky as a teenager, Walt would often run the three miles to school. He later became a high school champion in the quarter-mile and half-mile, and he would anchor the 440-relay. For his speed and endurance, he was offered a track scholarship to Stanford University.

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