Remembering my dad

I actually don’t know that much about my dad. All the more reason to memorialize it here.

---

Here is info from his Death Certificte:

• Hal E. Freeman
• death: July 13, 1963 no autopsy
  • died in Professional Building Parking Log, 633 E Elm St
  • On a hot summer day in the parking lot outside the Professional Building where his doctor’s office was.
  • died of arteriosclerotic heart disease (had for 11 years)
  • buried 7/17/63 at Robberson Prairie Cemetery (north of Springfield)
• born: 8/22/07
• age: 55
• occupation: physician
• in Army in W W 2 (from Flavius B Freeman)
• Greene County Missouri.
• Lived in Springfield for 15 years

Mother: Marguerite Day Shelledy
Father: John Guy Freeman

Children:
Hal Elson Freeman (aka Butchie) – 1937 – 1946 – born Cleveland OH
Milly Margaret Freeman – 1940 – 2017
John Philip Freeman (ME!) – 1948 – present

---

I know shamefully little about his life.
I was never with him for longer than about two weeks at a time in my whole life!

His people came from the Ozark hills, north and west of Springfield Missouri.
The town names are Williard (county seat of Greene County), and Ebenezer, a very small town where my older brother Butchie is buried.

I think the Freemans were kind of a big deal in their little part of the world — landed gentry on a local scale.

His horizons were wide enough that he applied to medical school and went all the way to Kentucky for the University of Louisville which not too many folks did in the 1930’s did I’m guessing!

His cousin Flavius became a big deal Springfield lawyer.
The internet tells me he was Democratic Party Chairman of Greene Co 1958-1960, and that he interviewed Harry Truman in 1960!

His page on: Ancestry.com

---

I’ve tried to piece together my parents’ lives in the 1930’s and 40’s.

other children:
Butchie (Hal Elson Jr) in Cleveland in 1937.
Milly was born in Cleveland in 1940

So between 1940, and by somewhere in 1941-42 the family left Cleveland and settled in Long Beach CA, at the behest of the US Army.

Dad was a doctor at the military hospital in Long Beach. My mom sat on her nursing credentials while she raised two young children, one of whom was already having serious symptoms.

Butchie (Hal Jr) died 1949(*) of complications of rheumatic fever. That sad event essentially blew up the family.

(*)Ancestors.com says he died in 1946, but I remember my mom telling me I was a little baby when he was dying, so I’m sticking with my memories of hearing 1949.

I was a normal, cute little healthy, happy baby.
My mom and my sister put a lot of energy into making sure I was that way!

It couldn’t have been easy:

• going to my room and make me feel secure and loved and that the world was a good place, then
• going to the next room where my older brother was slowly succumbing to rheumatic fever.

They took the brunt of it. My sister especially who was 8 or 9 at the time. Thanks to them I grew up relatively unscathed. Although my therapist told me that’s why I am sort of a “pleaser” … my place in any given group is to make sure everyone gets along and not make unnecessary waves about my needs.

---

Growing up in Louisville my Mom made it happen that my dad and I spend time together every summer.
We never did holidays together, none of that stuff, just once a year in the summer.
Sounds court-mandated to me.

Some summers my mom drove us to Springfield where she still had friends. My mom is where I got the travel bug 🙂 (travel posts coming later 🙂

A few times my dad drove or flew to Louisville.

At least once my mom put little grade-school me on an old propeller plane to fly to Springfield … all by myself! That was VERY exciting.

I don’t remember a lot about when he visited us. I imagine it was pretty stressful for my mother.

One time I must have been annoying because he swatted me (just a little swat!), and boy did that cause a scene!! I don’t even remember the swat, but I remember how mad my mom was about it and how thoroughly she reamed him out abut it.

The times I visited him were quite fun (for me anyway!).

It was a big deal to him that the Air Force rejected him to be a pilot because of his bad heart. He was bummed about that for the rest of his life … which wasn’t that long because of his bad heart … so there you go!

FROM MOM post:

She met my dad who was in Universite of Louisville Medical School – Hal Elson Freeman

• He also grew up in the country – a little town outside Springfield MO
  • However, unlike my mom’s family who were farmers, his family were local gentry. My cousins (who I barely knew) were lawyers and doctors, certainly not farmers!
  • Milly was more familiar with them, she must have been in junior high when we moved to Louisville. She did NOT like them!
    • Uncle Flavius Freeman (what a name!) handled the legal business of my tidying up my dad’s affairs.
    • It was probably kind of a mess
      • debentures (whatever those are) for drilling oil leases (good!)
      • partial interest in a couple of uranium mines in the Ozarks (bad!)
    • Milly was quite sure he was robbing her.
      I don’t think so, but it wouldn’t shock me.
• Dad got his MD at the University of Louisville Medical School somewhere in the 30’s … where he met my mom of course!

New thoughts

Not really new new, but thoughts that I have appended after I committed this post to the internet. (Feb 2026)

Here’s an undiscovered old thought:

4/19/93 – I called Milly on her birthday. Got some history:
My dad left at about age 42, and moped about it for the rest of his life.

That would put it in 48-49, earlier than I thought. That would in fact put it before I was born!

Hanging with my dad in the Missouri summer

I am starting a new Jack Reacher book, and the action so far is all taking place in a remote and kinda sleepy Ozarks backwater town.

I thought “hey my Dad took me to just places just like this!”

The criminals are meeting in a “cave” that’s really a man-made tunnel that was built as a gold scam in the early nineteen hundreds. Then it had a new life as a uranium scam in the 50’s and 60, and is a place for this criminal enterprise to store their heavy equipment.

The trigger is that I was in a place exactly like that cave somewhere in the 1958-1962 range! My dad died in the summer of 1963. I musta been at least 10 years old to even remember it, which means the counter starts in 1958.

We called it a “cave”, but it was obvious to even me that it was a man-made hole in the ground. I actually remember my dad being shown a very at hard, heavy chunk of rock that really was uranium ore! Whether it actually came from that cave is another matter. 🙂

Why a Dermatologist and where did that money come from?

The bit above about getting woo’ed to invest in a sketchy uranium mine made me think a bit about my dad’s family. The fact that he was worth being wooed by investment people (in the 50’s!) implies that there were some discretionary savings to go after. He was a practicing MD after all, so there probably was.

He had a one-person medical practice in the Professional Building in Springfield MO. The anchor of the place was a drug store (handy to the medical offices), part of a local chain called Crank’s Drugs.

[That’s what it was really called, no joke! 🙂 … If you search it google thinks you’re asking about drug addicts.]

The building was at the corner of Kimbrough and Cherry. His apartment was a short half-block away on Elm St.

• He would pick me up at the airport after I’d been put on the plane by mom in Louisville.
• Stay at my Dad’s third story walk-up on Elm St.
  • Whatever money he was making he didn’t spend it on lifestyle! 🙂
• While he was seeing patients I would hang out at the lunch counter at the drug store. They would treat me like minor royalty, which was fun!