He was the Man and the Hat. Even in pictures dating back to the 1920s, there he was, and there was the hat.

The man was my dad – Lawrence Harold Mosher, Big Mo, the powerful man with the sweet disposition ... and a fedora.

My dad penned his name as L.H. Mosher, was called Harold by two wives, Larry – a name he hated – by his sarcastic brother-in-law, but was more commonly known by the “Big Mo” moniker.

And if you didn’t know him, you would come to know him by the hat, the fedora he wore everywhere except in the house.

As I grew up and up, I became known as “Little Mo”, even when I passed my dad in height. As long as my dad was around, that was always the case.

Big Mo grew up on a farm in southwestern New York state, where he quietly became both powerful and gentle at the same time.

A man of few words who took after his father – I swear I never heard my grandfather utter more than two or three words – Big Mo was a product of the Great Depression. His main occupation was work, more work, and hard work.

My father was born in 1905 and our country was more agricultural than corporations in tall buildings and CEOs with millions in bonuses. Kids that came out of those times knew hard work. It was their life.

Ron Fairly, former major league baseball player who retired as a Seattle Mariners’ broadcaster at the end of this past season, used to tell me players in the 1940s, 50s and even 60s developed their batting power on farms. Guys like Mickey Mantle, Harmon Killebrew and Ted Kluszewski had strong wrists and huge forearms from milking cows, bucking bales, mucking out stalls twice a day.

Theirs was a life of hard work. And like my father, they never knew how strong they were. Everything was relative, and they never thought about it. They just did what they had to do.

I’ve told the story of how one night at the Mobil refinery in Ferndale a big valve froze on a pipe line and despite the strenuous efforts of six men tugging on a huge wrench could not free the valve.

So they did what was natural to them – get Big Mo.

Big Mo took a look at the problem, grabbed the wrench and unstuck the frozen valve with one mighty crank.

That was my dad: Paul Bunyan.

My father walked with a slight limp. It wasn’t until the 1960s it was discovered he had at some point in his life broken his pelvis. As a result one leg was shorter than the other.

It’s probable he broke his pelvis on the farm as a kid. In those days as long as you were still alive, you continued to work. There were no emergency wards. You got hurt, big deal (or as former West Bremerton football coach Chuck Semancik would say, “He’s OK, he just has a little owie.”), you still had chores to do.

So my dad moved on, never thought twice about the injury. In fact, when the injury was discovered, he had no clue how it happened.

Kids on farms back then had to have fuel in their bodies to work as much and as hard as they did. When my grandparents finally gave up the farm, I was about seven or eight. But I still remember lunches at the farm. Huge portions of meat, potatoes, gravy, home-made biscuits and pies.

Dinners, as you can imagine, were even bigger.

My grandmother worked in the kitchen all day, preparing foods from the farm and garden. My grandfather worked all day (and night) around the farm. That was just the way it was. And it produced kids with a heavy work ethic and an amazing strength that is hard to imagine today.

One of those kids was my dad, who as an adult was 6-foot-3, 230 pounds of raw power. His hands were about twice the size of mine today. His thumb was the size of two of my biggest fingers. He had no wrist. His hand seemed attached to this huge arm and the arm to massive shoulders.

Yet for all his natural power, there was a gentleness to him. I never heard him swear or say anything bad about anybody or anything.

One picture I have of him is grunting and groaning, trying to muscle two drain pipes together under a crawl space in the house I helped him build.

In this picture of him, he’s struggling mightily and sweat is dripping off his nose as he does so. But I know that he’s not going to give up, that he’s going to fit them together, because that is the way it is. He will do it. That’s that. End of story.

And he does.

Always.

His reward for his work as an adult would be to have a beer. A beer always tasted good after another day of sweat labor. One beer, sometimes two. But that was it. Then it was home for dinner. Always at the same time, just like it was on the farm.

I sometimes ran into him at the local pub and he would order me a 15-cent beer as I sat down next to him. A few minutes later, his beer would be gone and he’d turn to me and say, “Ready to go home, to dinner?”

I always followed him.

The new house he built had a big garage with a workshop. He had to have a workshop. A long bench along one side of the garage.

There he would go when there was no other work to do.

To piddle around.

Take things apart, put them back together. See how they worked.

The wonder of this picture of him is how, with those huge hands, he could take things that were very tiny and delicate and somehow take them apart and put them back together again. They would disappear in his massive palm, only to reappear from time to time.

But it worked ... somehow.

I remember years after my dad died talking to my uncle who at one time owned a huge electrical company. I told him dad had an electrical business for seven years after retiring from Mobile. Uncle Bob laughed.

“Your dad wasn’t smart enough to own a business,” he said.

It’s true dad never made it through his sophomore year of high school. His story is that he hit a baseball, a home run, over centerfield and into a third-story window of his high school. Dad’s parents refused to pay for the broken window and he was kicked out of school. Remember this was 1920. So dad went to work for Mobil and 37 years later retired to run his own business.

In between he married, lost his wife (my mother) at a young age to heart disease, remarried, and continued to do what he did best ... work.

That’s just the way he was.

Big Mo, the fedora, and work. They went together like bread and butter.

When Big Mo died 27 years ago, I was prepared for it.

He had been going downhill for years and I went back east to where he lived and said my goodbyes just before he died.

Now Mary and I have two little Mos, who sometimes are insecure because we are bearing down on the age of Big Mo when he died. I was at peace with my father’s death, but Michael and Caitlin are worried about their future if Mary and I die.

So the other day, Michael, 11, says to me, while riding in the car, “You want to live long enough to see us as adults, right Dad?”

Yes, Michael.

Then there’s a long pause.

“If I’m in college and there’s a funeral, I won’t go to school that day. That’s the right thing to do, right dad?”

Yes, Michael.

Another pause.

“If I’m playing in the Major Leagues, I’ll fly back on an airplane. My coach will let me, right dad? Because he knows it’s important to me, right dad?”

Right, Michael.

Right about now, the Man and the Hat would be smiling. He wouldn’t say anything, because that’s the way he was, but he would have a big smile.

Have a great month.

You are loved.