My father was born in 1886 to a German-American father and an immigrant German mother who had come to this country when she was 10. He grew up in a community that was mostly German in New Jersey, went to college in New York and then worked all over the United States building bridges, on the Panama Canal and in Hawaii as a civil engineer.

He was three inches shorter than I am, maybe 40 pounds lighter and balder, but we both had the same myopic eyes. He broke his nose twice playing football in the days when there was a lot less protection for players than there is now. I've never broken my nose, but then I've never played football. I've always avoided contact sports, which probably says as much about how different we were are as anything.

He loved stories by O. Henry and poems by Rudyard Kipling. I was raised on Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He smoked a lot and drank some. I quit smoking a quarter of a century ago and I'm almost a teetotaler. We each had three children. His first died. Mine are all still alive and well.

Clearly, then, we were different people.

But I'm not talking so much about what we were like as individuals. Rather, I'm thinking of the difference in the times we lived.

He went to an all-male engineering school. Mine was coeducational. When he traveled, it was by train and boat, not by jet. The farthermost he ever got from the United States was the Panama Canal Zone, where he promptly got malaria. I never got malaria, but in my time I've visited at least 25 countries.

He served in World War I as a captain of engineers, but he never got overseas. I was a sergeant in the infantry and I spent more time overseas than I did in the States. I'm not sure what difference that makes, but it must make some.

My world encompassed more than his did. He did have a radio—not a very powerful one, it's true. The first and only house he owned included only two bedrooms and one bath. My first house had three bedrooms, but only a single bath.

Can we measure differences in lives by the number of bathrooms? Probably not, but plumbing has come a considerable distance since we both were beginning homeowners.

In his lifetime he acquired property, including an 18-acre ranch. In mine I garnered some real estate, too, but I never wanted to be a rancher. I suspect he might have wished he were one. In his time, farming or ranching was more widespread. The move away from the land into the cities and suburbs hadn't really begun.

He drove a Model T Ford. I learned to drive one when I was 16, but my first real car was a Ford V-8, and there have been a succession of vehicles since then. His last car was a Hudson touring car with a top that folded down. It boiled over on every modest hill. He took that in stride. He expected it and dealt with it accordingly.

If he went to movies, I never heard much about it. To be truthful, I don't really know what he did for entertainment. Certainly he didn't watch movies.

He did take a lot of black-and-white pictures—color was yet to be invented. I suppose he read a lot. He wasn't much of a churchgoer nor did I think of him as zealously religious. He was raised a Christian Scientist, a denomination that was more popular then than it is now. However that came about, none of it wore off on me.

For obscure reasons, most of my life has been spent as a Congregationalist.

I don't know much about his life with his father, although I probably knew more about him than did my dad. His father, my grandfather, when I knew him was deaf, obstinate, opinionated and not very happy. But then he had reason. By the time I knew him, his son (my father), his daughter and a couple of other children all had died.

And that, I suppose, is the chief difference between my father and me and between our times. My father only lived to be 40. He died of pneumonia in a time when antibiotics had yet to be discovered. Had he been me, he probably would have survived like me into old age, and both our lives would have been far different than they were.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.