My Dad was quite a guy. With a heck of a story.

His father, Wesley, was a church mouse poor religion professor at the tiny Nampa Nazarene College just west of Boise. Until, that is, he contracted tuberculosis and they moved him home to the frigid prairies north of Calgary, Canada where they made him sleep in a tent. Back in the early ’20’s, they believed cold was the cure for the lungs of those suffering from TB. And if cold was the ticket, Grandpa should have been as healthy as a horse. Instead, Wesley died. Dad was four or five. His sister, Alice, was about eight.

When what was left of the Swalm family got back to Nampa, the college offered my grandmother, Mable, a job cooking in the “Beanery”-the school’s cafeteria. I suppose they considered it a sort of pension for her. But by whatever name, it was extremely meager. Grandma couldn’t afford to keep Dad on what she was making. So she arranged a sort of “foster care” for him with a family who went to her church. By the time he was 13 or 14, Dad was effectively on his own.

He bounced around. He lumberjacked in the woods north of Boise until he got to making too much money and the Wobblies drove him off. He got a job with Fluor Construction to build an airbase on Christmas Island in the South Pacific. On his way there, his ship laid over for a few days in Hawaii. He was in a barracks overlooking Pearl Harbor on the night of December 6, 1941. The next morning, he was on the roof of the building watching ships of the US Pacific Fleet erupt in flames under a hail of Japanese bombs and torpedoes.

When he got back stateside, he volunteered for the military but was rejected; his right calf was shriveled from polio.

We’re In The Money

With the door to the military closed, Dad went back to working in the Idaho woods. Until, that is, someone showed him the Empire Crafts business. Empire Crafts was a multi-level marketing company whose products were china and silverware. During the ’50’s, he became one of their most successful producers. His distributor organization probably numbered in the hundreds-if not thousands. They stretched from Hawaii to Kansas and Oklahoma. He drove big Caddies. Flew tens of thousands of miles. Every year, he took his top producers to the white beaches of Waikiki. Near Christmas, he’d put our family on the Union Pacific Railroad for a ride to Ketchum, Idaho where we skied the fabled slopes of Sun Valley.

Until, that is, the Japs struck again. Empire Crafts simply couldn’t compete with the prices that the Japanese charged for very similar products. So, within the space of a year or two, Dad went from driving the Caddies with the big, outrageous tail fins. To driving a used VW bug with oxidizing orange paint.

But from there, at the very bottom, he started all over again. Except in real estate. Where he hit it even bigger. Hundreds of apartment units. Industrial warehouses all over Denver. An office building. He was a multi-millionaire.

From there? Politics. The Colorado House of Representatives. The last rock-ribbed conservative on the Denver City Council.

The Fly In The Ointment?

There might be some in my family who contend that Dad was an alcoholic. Did he have a dry martini or two, with an olive, to unwind at the end of the day?Yes. Almost always. And, on occasion, he no doubt drank more than that. Did that make him an alcoholic?I’m not sure. But I am sure that if he was a drunk, he was a very high functioning drunk. And, although he set high standards for us, he was never abusive to Mom or us kids. But, again, was self-medication with alcohol his way of dealing with what was gnawing at his mind?And which, in time, came to gnaw at mine. Don’t know for sure. Probably never will.

He was also a terrific reader. At night, he would often park himself under the lamp at the end of the couch in the living room, reading into the wee hours. But is “insomnia” the real name for his love of books?Again, I’m not sure. But I do know that during my manic phases, I could go for days with almost no sleep. Restless, mind racing, tossing and turning, yearning for the sleep that wouldn’t come. Was that Dad too?Who knows. But there is a pattern.

I’m also confident that he struggled with depression. “Your dad used to come home from one of those trips for Empire Crafts so depressed sometimes,” Mom told me once. “Another one of his sales people had told him he was going to quit. It just killed him. ”So was this just garden variety disappointment?Certainly possible. But maybe it went deeper. I do know, however, that I’m no stranger to depression. In fact, to serious bouts of depression. To bouts of depression which, with not much more than a nudge in the wrong direction, could have been life threatening.

So, what’s all this got to do with me and my experience with bipolar?

Now, I’m no psychiatrist. But I’ve snooped around enough on the internet to know that a significant risk factor for bipolar disorder is heredity. In fact, the National Institutes of Health has published a study that says that genetic factors account for 60 to 80 percent of the cause of the disorder. So, in the final analysis my bipolar had to come from somewhere. And it seems that Dad, for all his other amazing talents and strengths, is about as good a suspect as I can come up with.