Publisher Paul Cobb’s Birthday Tribute to his father

By Paul Cobb, Publisher, Post Newsgroup

Happy Birthday, Daddy. I am honored to be a son of your seven-children family circle.

Even though you only finished the 6th grade, you were known to spot talent and could predict future opportunities for success, especially when you met Mary Magdalene Bland while she was working at Grandpa Early Bland’s watermelon and food stand.

And you prophesied that the “Lord willing, I’m going to marry you.”

You crested when you married her after she had graduated from Langston University.

I now understand why publishing has been a major part of my life, because you worked for the Phoenix newspaper in Muskogee, Oklahoma, before you brought your family to Oakland, where I was born at 1776 7th Street at the Pack Train Hotel into a large, welded barrel that you kept in the closet.

Most of that money was “earned” from your after-work second job mastery of the billiard tables on Seventh Street while wearing overalls with a cargo hook in your back pocket.

You brought your entrepreneurial skills to your work as a longshoreman, where unbeknownst to your children, you managed to save by dropping the dimes, quarters, halves, and silver dollars.

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Those coins allowed you to buy properties and a car, in the same manner in which you earned them, face-to-face, over the counter, to be counted and acknowledged by the bankers and dealers, while you watched.

As a kid, with a portable shoe shine box, I worked in front of the pool halls by day, where I collected national Black newspapers from the Pullman Porters who brought them to me as a tip with payment.

You and Jimmy Herman helped me and my brother to get hired as ship clerks.

Dad, I did not know that you “graced” those same places at night. I remember when your wife told you to stop that lifestyle or she would leave, you stopped. You abruptly pursued a Bible-based lifestyle with zeal.

I still use some of your favorite aphorisms, such as, “don’t back down from any challenge, or anybody, at any time: You must outwork them.”

“Always come big or stay at home and if you do that, then all I can say is Hammercy.”

Following your advice, I married Gay Plair in 1970. I discovered that her father and you were both named after President Theodore Roosevelt and both of you share conjoined birth dates. Theodore Plair’s birthday is December 31 and yours is January 1. “Hammercy!”

You would have been proud to know that ILWU President Jimmy Herman came to my house with Port Director Wally Abernathy and American President Lines Shipping Co., CEO Bruce Seaton where we organized the Oakland Dredging Coalition to expand jobs and maritime opportunities.

I reminded your friend Herman how you would have said “Dig a little deeper or stay at home.” Hammercy!

This birthday message is being published in the Oakland Post because when Gay published her father’s birthday tribute on Facebook I finally realized that I, too, must honor you the same way. I hope the readers will show me how to use Facebook because I need to activate the “friends” names on my page.

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