THE BELL CURVE:

A few days after an emotional conversation on my patio was virtually wiped out by the roar of commercial aircraft taking off at what seemed like 30-second intervals, I read a news report in the Pilot offering legitimate hope that new avenues of relief from this level of noise invasion were, at least, beginning to be explored.

They have a long way to travel, but the good news is this effort is being kept front and center at this early stage by the people who can do something about it.

That would start with Orange County Board Chairman John Moorlach, who told Pilot reporter Brianna Bailey that current relief efforts are concentrating on exporting John Wayne passengers to other regional airports by public transportation, a plan that might hopefully save passengers both time and money — and Newport Beach residents a lot of pain.

Similar efforts — fueled by open minds — are also underway to look for answers many years before the current situation becomes a crisis, that merits a cheering section from the sides.

For many years, my connection with Father’s Day has been ambivalent. I regard it as a bald commercial effort to sell bad poetry on greeting cards. But at the same time, if I don’t hear from my own progeny, I despair that this attitude has rubbed off on them.

So in this mindset and for reasons fuzzy to me — perhaps because I heard warmly from two-thirds of my offspring on this Father’s Day — I journeyed back in time and visited my own father last weekend, a trip I don’t take very often.

In a way, this is appropriate to his lifelong reluctance to expose his own deep feelings. My father was a very interior man. For starters, he was a Democrat in a large extended midwestern family of rabid Republicans. Although he was firm in this place, he mostly avoided political discussions. One of his few controversial gestures I can remember was framing a front page of the Chicago Tribune that announced — wonderfully prematurely — “Dewey Beats Truman.”

It hung in his bathroom until he died, and I was the only one visibly to be infected by it.

My father virtually gave up his own parental family — I scarcely knew them although they lived close by — to socialize almost exclusively with my mother’s relatives. Not by choice, although he never made this evident, but rather to build points to soften any mysterious reprisals that might take place at home.

One such modest defiance was drinking his cache of beer down in the basement when my mother banned spirits from the house. Although religion was important to my mother, I never saw my father in a church. Yet, just before he died, he gave me a worn and tattered Bible full of annotations that clearly indicated heavy use.

Two visions come most clearly to mind when he comes into my thoughts. The first was my father sitting in the lobby of a commercial auction hall, unable to face what was taking place inside.

After my mother died, he sold their house in Decatur, Ind., and moved to Miami where my brother lived. He offered us any of the possessions we wanted, then sat by stoically as the remainder of his life was auctioned off, out of his sight, in bits and pieces, sometimes for nickels and dimes.

The other vision took place a few weeks later when I drove him to Florida. We had two days alone in the car together, and there were many things I wanted to know about a life in which I had always felt his love but observed him at the emotional distance he created. So, given the opportunity, I interviewed him. I was pretty good at it, since I had by then years of practice in my journalistic work.

But I couldn’t lay a glove on my father. He was fully engaged until the questions got too close to the line he had always drawn. Finally, near the end of the first day, I gave it up, and we talked baseball and politics the rest of the trip. Yet, I never felt excluded. Only lovingly — and finally a little impatiently — rebuked for the modest pressure.

He was kind, gentle and very much his own man. When I was living in a trailer camp with my family while I finished college in Columbia, Mo., after World War II, my father drove there from northern Indiana to visit — a distance of some 500 miles. He arrived in late morning, had lunch with us, absorbed our lifestyle for several hours, found we were healthy and reasonably happy, then announced in mid-afternoon that he was ready to start back.

We couldn’t persuade him to extend his stay even overnight. What he saw was good, his mission was complete, and he could leave us comfortably. That was a microcosm of his life, right to the end.

I was hoping someone else would do it, but since they didn’t, I feel a need to correct a small piece of history in a Forum letter related to my column on the GI Bill of Rights. In reviewing the history of veterans’ benefits, reference was made in the letter to the march on Washington in the early years of the Great Depression by many thousands of World War I veterans seeking the bonus they had been promised.

The protesters were finally driven out by soldiers under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who rousted — at the point of bayonets — many veterans with whom MacArthur’s troops had once served.

The letter writer said the attack was ordered by President Franklin Roosevelt, and I can’t let that heartless action be hung on FDR. It was ordered by President Herbert Hoover, who asserted the Bonus Army was made up largely of communists and criminals, a charge not supported by a grand jury investigation.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.