A Picture of My Father

©2013 by John LaTorre

A few years ago, I built a wooden trailer that had a canvas top supported by a latticework of wooden and aluminum poles. The canvas has been replaced twice since then, killed by the fierce sun of several Sacramento valley summers. When I removed what was left of the most recent cover, I noticed some dry rot in some of the wooden members, and replaced those components with new wood and plywood. And then I waited for fair weather to paint the new members. That day came in mid-December, with a clear blue sky and light winds. I put on an old sweater and some ragged jeans, and set to work putting a coat of primer on the bare wood of the cover’s skeleton. 

 

As I painted, a picture came to mind of my father performing a similar job on his boat. He’d retired to Florida after a career as an intelligence analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency and bought a twenty-five-foot wooden boat in need of a bit of restoration. He had it pulled out of the water, and paid some young men with strong backs to scrape the barnacles off and prep it for painting. He saw no reason to pay somebody else to apply the paint, though. He could do that himself.

A local photographer named Jim Stem had gone out to the marina to take some pictures of local residents doing the sort of things that local residents do there, and he took a fine picture of my dad, in the sweater and golf cap he used to wear during the winter, applying paint to the hull of his boat. The camera caught him in profile, from about his waist to his head, framed against a robin’s-egg sky – the very picture of a man enjoying his golden years on Florida’s Sun Coast, exemplifying the retirees who comprised much of the paper’s readership. Jim Stem knew his audience. The picture ran in the Pasco Times that month.

I saw the picture when I visited him one Christmas. It was hard to miss, actually, because either he or my mother had had it framed and displayed in the family room. It continued to hang there for at least ten years, until my father decided to move back to his hometown of Syracuse, New York. I asked him why he was moving back there, and he told me that now that he was over eighty, he no longer felt the need to shovel snow; he could let younger men with stronger backs do that, too.

 

I found it odd that Dad displayed it so proudly, since he was quite camera-shy. This reticence was the result of twenty-some years of working for the CIA in the field or, in other words, twenty-some years of being a person whose job it was not to be noticed. Some documentation of his life was unavoidable, of course, since his name would be published in things like marriage announcements and the like. But the policy of the Agency was, quite reasonably, that the less of this information that was around, the better.

I remember a time he came home from one “TDY” – Army-speak for “Temporary Duty.” He would go on such things from time to time, staying a few days or even a few weeks. I didn't ask him where he’d been. I tried for a while, but he would only smile and shake his head. He knew that I was far too young and garrulous and guileless to keep a secret. (I am still garrulous and guileless, but now my beard is gray.) The only hints of his destination would be the things he brought back as presents: two small stuffed alligators from some place that had alligators, some “Mexican jumping beans” which didn't jump, a couple of transistor radios at a time when these things were just starting to hit the market. On this particular occasion, the only thing he brought home was a Polaroid snapshot of him sitting on a seat of an airliner, looking startled. He told us that free-lance photographers would take these pictures and offer to sell them to the subjects as souvenirs of their travel. Dad bought it, of course, since it was more than a simple souvenir to him. It was documentary evidence that he’d been someplace where he perhaps shouldn’t have been. It may not even have been the only photograph that the photographer shot of him, and there wasn’t anything he could do about that. But it was necessary to do what he could, and if that involved buying a picture that he didn’t want in order to take it out of circulation, then so be it.

Such discretion paid off in the long run. In 1968, the East Germans published a book called Who’s Who in the CIA, which blew the covers of hundreds of government agents. The idea was to embarrass the Agency by demonstrating how much the East Germans knew about our operations in Europe. At the dinner table that night, Dad did something he never did before or since, in his entire career with the CIA: he broke his habit of never discussing his job. He said, with visible relief, “They got a lot of us, but they didn’t get me.” I was twenty by then, and I guess he felt he could trust me to keep my mouth shut. I’d known by then that he worked for the CIA, but still didn’t know exactly what he did for them. It would be another fifteen years before he told me.

Dad lived in Florida for over twenty years, but made no deep friendships there. So when my mother passed away in 1993, he decided to move back to Syracuse, his hometown. He wanted to be around what remained of his own family, which at that point consisted of a brother, a sister, and a few in-laws, all of them living in in the Syracuse area. As these people died in their turn (only one of my father's six siblings survived him), their places in his life would be filled in some measure by those of their children and grandchildren who had decided to stay there. My brother and I tried to persuade him to come to California, but he would have none of that. He bought another boat, a smaller aluminum vessel, to sail on Otisco Lake, the scene of many of his most treasured boyhood memories. He would take it out regularly until a stroke robbed him of most of his sense of balance.

But back to the picture. Once my father started working for the CIA, I don’t remember him having his picture taken at all, except by family members on holidays and reunions. This is why the picture in the Pasco Times was so remarkable: ten years before, my father would have been very unhappy about having his picture taken, and would probably have asked the photographer not to publish it. But now things were different. Displaying that picture proudly in the family room was his declaration of independence. He didn’t have to hide now. It was all right to let the world know where Joe LaTorre could be found, and what he was up to these days. Nobody cared anymore.

At the time when the picture was taken as he painted his boat, he must have been at about the age I am now, in my oldest sweater, painting my trailer under a clear blue Sacramento winter sky. We become our fathers and our mothers, by and by, even when we aren’t watching.