The dirt on Father’s Day, after all these years

Father's Day has me thinking about dirt. And no, this isn't another topsoil column. Promise.

It's that my dad, Howard Dorman, who is 83, spent so much time working in it. His yard is filled with towering trees he planted as saplings, some sent through the mail from a seed catalog.

We always had big garden. One year, it produced tomatoes as big as your head, which I tried to sell at a table next to our gravel road. Turns out I can't even sell tomatoes as big as your head.

His large rose garden still thrives. After a bitter winter killed many of his roses a couple of years ago, he simply went out, bought replacements and planted them.

He still fills pots with flowers because that's what my mother would have wanted.

Then there's ball field dirt, his second home for the roughly 50 years he coached softball for Woden-Crystal Lake, Belmond and Belmond-Klemme. He won more than 1,000 games, was named national coach of the year and is in the Iowa softball coaches' Hall of Fame. His teams won a couple of state titles and appeared in several state tournaments.

But beneath all those shiny stats is dirt. All the mornings and afternoons and evenings spent raking and filling, spraying and dragging that softball diamond. All the times I watched him drive in circles smoothing its sandy contours on an old tight-turning tug that used to work for the Iowa Air National Guard.

Alone, under the lights, long after the game was over.

He fussed over its details. He checked and rechecked. He fought against rainouts with shovels, rakes and sand.

The old Impala he drove for years to and from the diamond was covered in ball field dust, inside and out. Its windshield was cracked by foul balls.

That's what it takes to build something, a program, a legacy, something that you can be proud of long after the cheers die down. Something so special that kids still reach out to you after all these years because the lessons you taught them are still so meaningful to them. Sometimes, what you plant in all that dirt blossoms. The scraping and dragging and fussing pays off.

That old diamond is gone now. They built a great new school on top of it, and moved the baseball and softball complex to some land nearby.

He coached at the new diamonds for a season or two before retiring in 2008 and re-retiring in 2010, although he still does some coaching. As long as there are kids who want to learn, he's not going to stop.

The school district named the new diamonds for the people who donated the land, which isn't surprising.

After all of that work and coaching and nurturing, I wish they had put his name on that field. Of course, that's the biased verdict of an opinionated son who makes a living complaining about the decisions of officialdom.

My dad, of course, doesn't need a nameplate to know he built something.

And I remember it every time I'm in my garden, hands caked in mud. And every time one of my kids walks off the field after a softball game, grinning, in a uniform covered in dirt.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com