#3 - Dad (Updated April 2020)

My dad was born Myron Gerald Nuffer on March 4, 1922 near Preston, Idaho, the oldest child of Myron David Nuffer and Camille Cole.  Gerald's father was a farmer, a school teacher, a salesman, and a carpenter.

Gerald as an infant (about 1922)

Gerald and Sport, his dog. (1934)

My dad loved to tell stories of his idyllic childhood living and working on the family farm, roaming the fields and hills with his dog or his horse, hunting, fishing, and generally being free to explore his world.

Camille Cole and Myron D. Nuffer, about 1920

Dad loved his parents.  Every night he would go for a walk with them down the lane near their home. At a certain point, Gerald was not allowed to walk farther with them.  They would walk further down the lane alone together, talking with each other, and eventually would return.  He knew better than to join them before they got back to the assigned spot, and he would wait for them there.  He believed his father could do anything he put his mind to.  Gerald wanted nothing more than to please his parents and so if they asked him to do something, he did it willingly.  He told me that his father had a way of asking things that just made him want to do them.

Beth, Gerald and Frank (1932)

He said his mother lit up every room she entered.  She had a way of influencing people to do what she wanted them to do. She loved beauty, and loved to make the world around her beautiful.  She wrote poetry and always looked at the world as a lovely place, even when times were hard. Camille wrote a poem when she was young that describes how she saw all the beautiful things in the world and believed that God must have created all that beauty just for her.

Dad was the oldest of five children: Beth, John Franklin, Paul, and Marilyn were his younger siblings.

When Gerald started school, he picked up an unintended nickname. His teacher called him "Gerald," using the soft G of the British pronunciation.  He corrected her, saying that his family was German, and they  pronounced it with a hard German G.  She insisted that the correct pronunciation was "Jerald," and when he continued to protest, she whacked him over the head with a book and declared his name "Jerald."  From that time on, that is how he was known at school.  When I was a girl, I thought it was strange that his colleagues at the university called him "Gerry."  At his funeral, we knew precisely who his colleagues and students were, because they called him Gerry.

In the years before my dad passed, I recorded a number of stories he told about his life. One day we were talking about his nickname of Gerry, and he told me another story. When he was in the army, he went by his first name, Myron. The other recruits in boot camp thought that Myron was an odd name, so they announced they were going to call him Mike. And they did. So he was Jerald in school, Mike in the army, Gerry to his university colleagues, and Gerald to everyone else.

(The change of the spelling of the family name to "Neuffer" did not happen until about 1960, thus Beth and Marilyn both retain "Nuffer" as their maiden names.  Frank and Paul both changed their family names at some point after Myron David made the change in 1960.  Gerald's family changed their name in 1963, except for his oldest son, Myron David Nuffer, who was in the Navy at the time, and never changed the spelling.)