The distance between men, reluctance to show emotion, or affection, so noteworthy in the post World War II era, was not because that was the way it had always been.
My father was born in rural Kentucky in the early twentieth century. He had a lot of the notions of that time and environment, one of which was that bringing up children was women's work. So I didn't talk with him very often as I grew up, though I listened at the dinner table. To his own father's way of thinking, boys were of no interest or use till they could do a full day's work in the fields. My father qualified that attitude to an extent--he was proud of being the first person in his family who went to college, and higher education was his chief ambition for my sister, my brother and me. However, he didn't think there would be much point in talking to me till I got it. So our relationship mostly began when I was an adult. A memory of him taking me for a ride on his shoulders once, lasted for my entire childhood.
As my father got older, his feelings for his children developed. He and my mother retired in the town my older sister had settled in, and he kept expressing the wish that my brother and I would both settle nearby, or at least in the same state. Neither of us did. I visited a few times a year. My father had begun intervening for the good in the lives of some of his neighbors. There was a boy he befriended and sponsored from the time he seemed to be in danger of drifting into crime until he grew up to became a school principal. There was a neighbor, a skilled mechanic who was gentlemanly until he drank, for whom my father gave character references in court. Both were grateful, constantly visiting him and doing kind things in return. The mechanic, T., often expressed regret that he saw me so seldom on visits to my father .
On my last visit before my father's death at an advanced age, we were sitting together on the back patio. He reached out and took my hand, and we sat together holding hands for several minutes. T. came up to us from across the lawn and his face immediately lit up when he saw us together. The three of us talked for some minutes while my father and I continued to hold hands. At last the moment passed.
A few months later my sister called to say that my father had died peacefully in his sleep.