MY HERO

Stanton Paine C.

by Lexi C.

My hero is my dad, Stanton Paine Coerr. He was born on December 26, 1942 in La Ceiba, Honduras. In his childhood, he lived in a lot of different places because his dad was a diplomat and had to travel.

In one place, Dad said he went to a school where no one spoke English and he never understood anything they were saying. But he got a laugh every day when he said the boys would dunk the girls’ pigtails in the ink pots behind them. Although Dad said he never did this, I don’t believe him.

My Dad also had a lot of trouble with his mom and dad when he was a kid, since they were divorced. He went to boarding school for this reason, and at boarding school, they had Honey-Bunn ® Fridays. He said that every Friday, the students would get a Honey-Bunn ® from the cafeteria, and they were very valuable. For example, someone would say, “Hey, if you do my homework for a week, I’ll give you my Honey-Bunn ®.”

My dad also had some awesome pets. There were two main pets that always seemed to show up in his stories. I loved hearing them over and over again. The pets were Lola the Parrot and Monte the Dog. Here are some stories about them:  Monte was a very nice, sandy brown German Shepherd. He was by far my Dad’s favorite dog ever, and there is a nice picture in our house of a young Dad hugging Monte. My dad and Monte would like to go out into the yard, throw things around and wrestle. He said that Monte liked to run off during the day and then come back when Dad or Dad’s mom called him. However, this really confused Monte when Lola the Parrot came to the house, but we’ll get back to that later. The funniest thing Dad said Monte EVER did was the Great Oil Paint Massacre. My Dad’s mom loved to paint very simple and beautiful oil paintings. She had a whole room of paint supplies, and one day, she put up a blank canvas to start painting on and was about to get going on it, but then she remembered that she needed to get something from the store. When leaving, Grandma left the door to the paint room open and didn’t really pay it any mind. My dad speculated that Monte walked into the paint room and sniffed at the paint. Then he chewed on the rubber tube and decided it felt good, so he bit into it, causing the paint to get all over his mouth. Then he spit it out and tried to do the same with EVERY other paint tube. Finally, when he was satisfied, he must have gotten some paint on his head and the rest of him. I’m sure that didn’t feel good, so he rubbed on the carpet and the wall and the furniture and such. You can imagine the shock of the family when they got home and found their home green and blue and yellow and green, with furniture and carpet ruined. But the funniest part of it all was that Monte didn’t get a bit of paint where it was supposed to go: the canvas.

Now here’s a story on Lola. “Lola was very good at impressions,” Dad said. “She was a parrot from the jungle and liked to mess with our minds. She could do a telephone impression better than the telephone could. She would sit on a rock out in the backyard and go, ‘Bring! Bring! Bring!’ until someone tried to  pick up the real phone and found no one on it. Then it would just go crazy in the house, every one of us, my mom, my dad and my sister, Suzan, all running and trying to get to the phones we hadn’t checked.

“Also Lola would like to sit out on that same rock and call, ‘Monte! Monte! Dinner!’ while I called the same from the other side of the house. Monte would run into view and kind of look back and forth from where he heard Lola calling and where he heard me. It was very funny to watch Monte try and figure out which voice had the food.”

The worst thing that happened to my dad when he was a kid was falling out of his aunt and uncle’s car. These were in ‘Ye Olden Days’, when cars didn’t have seat belts, and Dad was messing around with the door handle as they drove along. After awhile,he started pushing the door open, and Dad fell out and onto the side of the road. His mom and dad had been following his aunt and uncle to go somewhere, and they saw him tumble into the grassy side of the road. They all rushed to him to see if he was okay, but he said, “That was awesome! Let’s do it again!”

Once my Dad grew up, he had some very weird and cool jobs, much like the very weird and cool boarding schools he attended. One time, he worked at NASA in the international relations department and got to travel to Russia and also accompany Russian scientists on their trips to the USA, which always included a trip to Disneyland ®.

There’s a funny story in that NASA job: the story of the Forever Forgotten And Lost Satellite. This began when the company wanted to shoot a satellite into space. It was an older one, the kind that looked like a silver basketball with little spikes piercing it. The way they launched satellites was with a big rocket that fell off when the basketball made its way into orbit. NASA launched the rocket and the first part fell off. Then the other parts fell off until they couldn’t even see it. Well, if they couldn’t see it, they assumed it must have gone up into orbit! The launch team cheered and the guy who tested it for the radio station said, “Hey, it’s really working well!” Then he saw the little basketball roll into the room. He sighed and said, “And it’s getting louder!”

After working at NASA, my dad went into banking and worked at Wachovia.  He was able to travel to Japan because of this job and learned how to use chopsticks there, which is much cooler than learning at a Chinese restaurant. After that, Dad worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, and was leader of the team that set the air quality standard for the metal, lead.

Finally, Dad started his own business, Coerr Environmental, to work on environmental issues facing the natural gas industry. He worked for individual companies, including the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, and the Gas Research Institute.

That was how Dad met my mom. Mom applied for a job at Coerr Environmental in 1994. Dad and she were the only single people in the office at that time, so they ended up doing all the work on nights and weekends. They go to know each other well and fell in love. Then, one week after their official first date, Dad set a card at Mom’s desk that read:  Happy One Week Anniversary! Then, every week, there was a card at Mom’s desk saying Happy whatever week anniversary for a whole year. In the end, Mom had 52 cards in a book to be saved forever. And on the last card, the 52nd… Dad asked Mom to marry him on it. He was very romantic.

Mom and Dad had their wedding in Bermuda, and they sailed down in our boat, the ‘Byron Hill’, named for Dad’s grandfather.

After a long time, once I came along, Dad thought we should all take a trip together on the boat. We went to the Bahamas and lived on the boat while we were there. Dad taught me how to play harmonica and told me some stories. One of the simplest stories was my favorite:

“Do you know why this boat is called the Byron Hill, Lexi?” Dad would ask.

“No,” I would say.

“That was my grandfather’s name. He loved to think about sailing, but he never got around to doing it. We would sit together and look at boating magazines and he would say,

‘Isn’t that a pretty boat, Stan?’

And when I got old enough to get my own boat, I named it after him.”

On one of our boat trips, when we were going to St. Martin which is a half french half dutch island, Dad actually saved a guy from drowning, which was a pretty heroic thing. That is one of Dad’s awesome personality traits. The guy’s dinghy was floating out to sea and he was swimming after it. Dad jumped out of our boat with our little lifesaver floaty ring. He brought the guy onto our boat where the saved man said, “Merci, merci, merci.”

My dad in general was very kind and caring. He went to college at Williams which has the mascot of the purple cow. Then, once he finished there, he went for another few years at Princeton. When I was one or two, Dad got me this little stuffed purple cow from Williams and sang a cute little song about him, that was very funny and nice of Dad. I loved him for always finding ways to make me feel special and loved.

So that is my long story about Dad. What can I say? He’s my Dad, and I love him. He has meant so much to me, and he really started me on my writing. The reason that I want to write now is because he would tell me little stories about himself and stories he made up about one of my stuffed animals, Belle the parrot.

“I was in the jungle in the nest,” my dad would say in a funny voice. “And there were seven of us, all little baby parrots, and the nest was a mess, so I just got on the branch of the tree, and would sleep there. But sometimes at night, I would hear this little noise…” and then it would be my turn to help with the story. I would scratch my fingers on the side of the bed to make a noise, and dad would yell in Belle’s voice: “PYTHON!!!!!!!!!!” And we would laugh.

So that’s really everything, and I hope that now you know a little more about my dad, Stanton Paine C. My Hero.