My Dad, John Howard McWhirter

My dad was born on Sept 21, 1920 in Wilkinsburg, PA at home. My mother used to say that "Mom Mom" named him after the doctor that delivered him, but knowing her I find that idea pretty silly.

He was to be an only child. My grandmother somehow got a pinched nerve during birth which caused her not to be able to walk for months after Dad's birth. Her doctor told her not to have any more children as next time it might be permanent. I don't know about that, but this was 1920.
He grew up in Wilkinsburg but he wasn't really lonely. He had lots of cousins on his mother's side of the family, and more on his father's side up in Mercer, PA.

He was very close to his father, was an excellent student and wanted to be an electrical engineer, which at that time mainly meant you were an electrician and didn't require college.
Dad was always into photography. He started out with a Brownie camera and learned everything he could about developing photographs. In our family there were always cameras going off.

He met my mother, Florence Esther Thompson through his cousin Jean. They were best friends from their school days. One day when mom went to visit Jean, her cousin Howard came out the front door and Jean introduced them. My mother said that she told Jean that THAT was the guy she was going to marry.

They started dating and fell in love. He was working at Westinghouse in East Pittsburgh when they met. His job was shoveling coal into a blast furnace. Not a good job. Once a blast furnace door had opened and he'd been burned all over his back.

Mom said he was the sweetest man she had ever met. Kind, thoughtful, loving, fun. And when he was drafted, they decided to get married, before he got shipped off to Europe.

The wedding was at Calvary Presbyterian Church in Wilkinsburg on January 1, 1941. More details on the wedding when I get to my mother's page. They took off on a plane for a honeymoon at Niagara Falls.

My father went to boot camp and then was stationed in Alexandria VA before being sent off to war. Later he was stationed at Savannah GA. And Then he was sent to Europe.

We was an engineer for a train that carried prisoners from place to place in Germany and I think France. He got to see a lot of Europe, but he loved the Alps the best. He bought a black forest cuckoo clock there and sent it home.

Toward the end of the war, he took part in the Battle of the Bulge. And when he came home, he was never the same. He became short tempered and could get angry at the drop of a hat. Today we'd call it post traumatic stress, but back then, he just was angry and mad all the time.

To his dying day he never would talk about his experiences in the war. He came home and nine months later I was born in 1947. Four more kids followed, while he worked at Westinghouse as a lighting supervisor.

Ham radio was always a big part of his life as well. Here he is in his studio in the basement (with asbestos sound-proofing tiles on the walls...)

He was a good an honorable man. I think above all he valued intelligence in people. He lived a full life and a late in life he became interested in computers. I wonder what he could have been or done had personal computers been around back when he was a young man.

My mother, Florence, died in 1981 of cancer. He was distraught. He started going to square dancing with friends and met his second wife, Mildred (Millie) Wallace there. They were married 13 years before his death from a heart attack in 1997.

He and my mother are buried a the Mt. Hope Cemetery on Frankstown Road in Penn Hills, PA.

I could go on and on and on...and I'm sure I'll add more stories as time goes by. My dad and I had our difficulties, and we didn't speak to each other for the last decade of his life. I like to think he's forgiven me as much as I have forgiven him.