June 15, 2024

I spent so much time in my friend Mike’s house growing up that I knew his parents as Mama and Papa. His father, Kenneth Edward Nyboe, was born in 1924 in New York City but spent his summers in Maine, where he knew my mother and my aunt and where he met, and secretly married, my aunt’s friend Helen Bryant just before he shipped overseas to be in the tank corps with Patton’s Third Army in World War II.

Papa’s war was not an easy one, although he came home without visible wounds. After the war, he went to the University of Maine on the GI Bill, spurred by Helen, who had never been to college herself but made it clear she expected him to live up to her faith in him by making it through school. 

After college, he went to work for the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., insisting on the simplest solutions—the ones that worked—even when the rest of the team scoffed that they were too easy. For years, while Helen and their two sons were in Maine for the summer, he commuted between there and Washington, driving back and forth on the weekends because even though it was a 12-hour drive, nothing mattered more than driving down Carter’s Lane at the end of it.

Papa was away a lot, but when he was home, he always had time for us kids. He taught me how to shingle a roof and to sand a deck and to wire lights and to spell out the NATO phonetic alphabet and to count hours in military time and what to do when you cut an artery (which came in surprisingly handy after a kitchen accident many years later). 

He took all of us out to the islands in his boat for hiking and picnics. On one incredibly special, brutally hot August day, when everyone else had gone somewhere and the tide was way too low to swim, he took me out into the sound to find deep, cold water so I could jump in. The heat made things waver; we saw mirages among the islands that day.

Papa Ken had a huge heart. He could whistle “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof loud enough to hear all the way across the harbor. And he always said there was nothing anyone couldn’t work out, so long as they talked to each other honestly.

Papa had a wonderful voice, a resonant baritone. When Helen was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their sons—these were the days when you stayed in the hospital for a week—she got lonely and scared. She called Papa in tears. “Say something,” she begged. “Just say something to me. I need to hear your voice.” 

And in the middle of the night, Papa didn’t even say hello. He took a deep breath. “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….” 

And he recited the Gettysburg Address until she could sleep.

Happy Father’s Day to dads and to those who fill the role.