Happy Hundredth

73rd Birthday.

Today is my father's hundredth birthday.

Paul kept a framed copy of this 1916
photo of him with his mother.

Paul Palotás (the family name was Paulik when he was born) was born a hundred years ago, on December 13 in 1915, in Nagyszombat, Upper Hungary (Felvidék). He passed away in 2007, about five weeks short of ninety-two.

The world has seen intense and unsettling changes in his century. He was a child of the First World War of cavalry sabres, massed attacks, water-cooled machine guns, trenches and poisonous gas. That war dismembered his parents' country. They became refugees, his parents lost their savings, then he and his brother became orphaned young teenagers.

Graduation photo, 1937.

In the next World War, a war of revenge, he was twenty-eight and a first lieutentant on the Don River front. The Soviet army counter-attacked and destroyed a Hungarian army, and then his world. He, his wife Irene, and three small children became refugees.

From Austria to Australia, Paul and his wife worked odd jobs until they salvaged a discarded, hand-powered knitting machine. That was the beginning of a successful knitwear manufacturing business in Sydney which they named Suzy Parker.

After eighteen years in Australia, they had raised five children complete with private schools, private music, ballet and acrobatics classes, and our own private Hungarian language world. They sold the business and we moved to America. We became not refugees but immigrants.

"1967 Édesapád" - "Your sweet father"

The business went bankrupt, promises to pay became worthless, and Dad became impoverished while his university-educated kids embarked upon their successful careers in the States. He got a job working graveyard shift in a Greek owned knitwear factory in the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard.

Paul never realized his get-rich-quick dreams literally, but in a much more real and meaningful sense. After his five kids were on their own and he was struggling with the career of a commercial real estate broker, he met Darany Mingmaninakin. Together they shared three decades of affection, traditions, travel, occasional business, and generosity.

He enjoyed a long semi-retirement: frugal but rich in experience. He taught himself to use a computer and wrote the initial draft of his autobiography in a self-taught foreign language, English. He wrote it very well. He taught himself to use computer and email to correspond with military academy colleagues around the world.

With Darany in Hárkány, Hungary, two weeks before his passing.

He and Darany traveled extensively: Thailand, China, Indonesia, Australia, Hungary, Romania, Egypt, Venezuela and Turkey, to name a few. Only two weeks before his death, at the age of almost 92, he happily endured the long flights from Seattle to Budapest without bother or complaint.

Everywhere he explored his Hungarian heritage and connections. His orderly during the war, the soldier who was his personal assistant, perished on the Don River along with a hundred thousand other Hungarians. Paul made it a point to financially support his orderly's widow and descendants. He established a trust for the benefit of Hungarian war orphans. It was Paul's agitation that got a plaque dedicated to the fallen of his Ludovika Military Academy class.

Alaska, 2003

He finished his autobiography in Hungarian, published in Budapest under an optimistic Hungarian title that translates, The Cock Crows, Sunrise Is Coming. He collaborated on another Hungarian publication that translates, We Are an Eastern People, arguing that Hungarians should ally with China and the Far East.

He was a self-made man, two, three times over. He remained outspoken and controversial, intellectually active like a precocious high school student, a proud Hungarian and a man of the world.

It's hard to believe his and my lives overlap and encompass a century. I often look in a mirror and see the features of my father's face looking back.

Boldog születésnapot, Édesapu.