My dad may have been soft-spoken, but when he talked
people listened.
The farm life, I think, molded him and it
gave him a soft-spoken manner and a gift for plain-speak wisdom. Being quiet,
he never spoke just to hear the sound of his own voice. But when he did speak,
many listened. Not everything he said was uniquely his own. Dad never tried to
represent any of it as his own original thinking, just things that were helpful
to remember.