My father, William Steven Van Natta, died at the age of 64 in 1967, when I was just seven years old. When we left the funeral, I said to my mother “are you going to get married again?” Little did I now know it would be difficult for her to do with six young children?
I have a couple of memories of my father: Dad coming home from his bar tending job and pouring coins on the table from the day’s tips, and another of him picking me up from my first day of kindergarten. He would become a mythical figure in the next few years. I was proud to be named after my father, yet puzzled as to why my older brother Walton wasn’t.
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There would be tough times ahead for the family, yet we managed to get through them with the help of my father’s social security benefits and veterans benefits. The Veterans benefits were for his service in World War I and in the Merchant Marines in WWII. As time went by he became a faint memory, yet as I grew older I always missed not having a father. Not going to a baseball game with him or hearing family stories about his brothers, sisters, father or mother. Instead our life was living together in the Jersey City projects, six kids and a single mother.
