Chapter One
Father and Son
I've waited until the end to write about my friendship with my father. The joy
of discovering male friendship is clearest in that friendship because it took a
lifetime to appreciate it. A father is not a pal — he is the figure of
authority and stability. For my part I was lucky that mine lived to see me into
adulthood, and that together we found we shared interests and forged a genuine
friendship.
Dr. Stephen Hedges Ambrose was above all else a public servant. My brothers and
I never knew that — we found out only later. In the late 1980s, when I was
fifty years old and living in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast and
close to Interstate 10, near various places where many mid-westerners came for a
winter vacation, those from Lovington, Illinois, or Whitewater, Wisconsin, where
my father had been a general practitioner of medicine from the early thirties to
1963, would see my name in a local phone book and drop in for a quick visit.
Always, they wanted to tell me what a great man my father was. No one else in
the world except his patients knew that — he never made a lot of money, or
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