You should have known this man. His name was Job Clifton Conger, III. He and his wife, my mother, Avis (maiden name Jones) Conger named me after him.
As long as I knew dad, I was the nine-year-old; sometimes the four-year-old. I recognize the attitude. I feel it almost every day from the owner of the business that employs me. By virtue of my LIFE depending in the good will of the all-knowing omniscient one, they have the last word. Some of the time my actions influenced the last word. While I was living at home, his favorite admonition was “I can’t make you do what I tell you to do, but I can make you wish you had.”
As soon as he and mom divorced — I was about 22 and moved out of the house by then — I began a life of mostly beards and sometimes simpler mustaches. It drove him nuts.
This picture shows me reading a Vachel Lindsay poem at a party in my home about 2002, a time when I could afford to have parties; a time when I could afford to have friends who would come to them. behind me is a pastel pencil portrait of me when I was about five years old. A long story for another time. 
I still wear the same red shirt. It shows its age these days, but that’s okay; so do I.
During dad’s final years, we bought a duplex together. He lived in one half and I lived in the other. One of the last conversations we had (We had, sadly, few conversations of longer than five minutes about anything.) he admonished me sternly regarding my beard. They were unattractive. They were unhealthy. They worked against me socially. Nothing I said about great men who had beards when societies were far less antiseptic than they are in this modern age, how no one died from infected beards or diseases carried in beards . . . I could have whistled “Yankee Doodle,” and returned to my half of the duplex on better terms. I had a beard the day he died in December 1994 and kept it.
My most famous mustache is the one pictured next.
I had it in 2004 when I had my picture taken in the cockpit (where the pilot sat) of a famous World War II fighter, a restored P-38 Lightning flown to an airshow I was part of by an equally famous pilot, Steve Hinton, who also took the picture. Steve complimented me on the facial hair. He thought it was pretty sharp. That was the nicest thing a famous person ever said to me. The beard came back with winter that year and stayed with me in one for or another until I shaved it off in spring, 2013. The producer of a local television show was going to visit my aviation museum and tape a half-hour episode of Illinois Stories for WSEC Television (PBS for Springfield)
Two days before the scheduled taping, I “went smooth,” so to speak. I had considered keeping it for the taping, but this was my BIG CHANCE to score something close to immortality, that someone might see the program and make a difference in the life of the museum. I reasoned that based on my dad’s litany of admonitions and other observations through life, some people were genuinely offended by facial hair — especially on women (RIM shot! smile) — and I wanted to offend the fewest people during the TV program. So I shaved. Big deal. The stakes were too high NOT to shave.
I am still clean-shaven. Here I am at a model club meeting a few months ago.
I am a calmer fellow this way, which is to say, I’m still hanging ragged too much of my days, but I feel somehow legitimized. I cannot foresee facial hair in my future. I like the look.
It seems that dad was right.
And come winter, when it’s chilly at work or home or at the museum, and my face gets cold, I’ll take a more civilized, approach to address it. I’ll put on a ski mask.
Live long . . . . . . . . . . . and proper.
Honey & Quinine 