Happy Birthday Dad

Happy Birthday Dad!  Darwin S Warriner was born on July 23, 1913, in Detroit Michigan.  He was a photographer, and a tooling inspector.  This is one of his selfies from the early 50s.

Here he is as a happy little boy with his big sister June.  This Photo looks to be from around 1916.

Here are his other siblings:  Sister Mavis, and little Brother Billy.  There were two other Warriner children that didn't make it long enough to get a picture taken.  And Billy died of a ruptured appendix when he was 17.

In this great street photo, you can see the birth order of the Warriner kids: June, Darwin, Mavis, and Billy.  Detroit, 1923.

By the time this photo was taken, Darwin had been through the wringer.  There had been some sort of accident when he was very young, whereby he fell against the pot belly stove.  Catching himself with his hands, he suffered horrible burns which disfigured his hands for life.  He suffered through rudimentary treatments, and spent much time in the hospital. At one point they sewed his hands up on his abdomen somehow, hoping that would stimulate healing.  And  he went through the torment of experimental skin grafting, where they took skin from his sides and grafted it onto his hands.

When the healing was complete, his hands were deformed and his fingers were not very flexible, and his hair had turned white from all the pain and anguish.

He came out of the long ordeal with hands that were imperfect but worked well enough.  His penmanship was impeccable.  But he didn't have fingerprints anymore.

I remember sometimes he would come home from work and his hands would be bleeding.  The skin just wouldn't toughen up and would easily tear open. I never heard him complain about it. And he attempted to hide his injuries from nosy little children like me. He would just wrap them up in clean rags, sit down in his La-Z-Boy, and pour himself a nice big drink to help him deal with the pain.

His hands never kept him from doing what he loved to do on his days off-puttering around in his garage, making things with wood, and jigsaws, and drill presses and the like.  He was very good with those hands.  He could fix anything around the house that needed fixing.  He could lay tile, put up wood paneling,  and make new wooden frames to screen every window in his house.

Here is Dad in 1968.  It is his birthday, and we surprised him with a homemade birthday cake with lit candles.  He always got the same things on his birthday--some new bottles of Old Crow, some cans of cherry scented pipe tobacco, and a big can of Planters Fancy nuts.  He turned 55 years old in this photo, and there he was still taking care of babies in diapers. And he only had three more birthdays left in his short life.  He was a man of very few words.  And you surely did not want to get him angry at you.  But he was always dependable.  He supported all 9 of us kids. And it didn't matter to him whether we shared bloodlines or not. He was our Dad.