Fatherhood is an endless job with no retirement date.
“You always worry,” Schiller said while sitting on the couch with his daughter in her Monroe home. “That’s not being a ‘helicopter dad.’ That’s just a ‘worrywart dad.’”
Perkins said it’s not surprising when she was looking for a husband, she sought a man with her father’s favorable traits. She watched as he worked in the machine shop at Armco Steel so his wife, Marcia, could stay at home and raise their two children, then as he cared for her until she died last year from cancer.
“He is my hero because he is kind, loving, and selfless despite not having the easiest life,” said Perkins, a 1995 Madison High School graduate who married her high school sweetheart, Aaron. “He loves his family fiercely, he never complains, he never asks for anything, and he is grateful for all that he has. He has taught me so much about what it means to be an honorable person, a quality that feels rarer among humanity as the years go by.”
As his daughter praised him, Schiller, 76, looked uncomfortable. It wasn’t the couch. It was the way the conversation was all about him.
“If you want to call it a job, it’s the best job I ever had,” he said when asked about being a father. “I can’t imagine not being a dad.”
He said his two children, Steve Schiller, 49, a 1992 Madison High School graduate, and Perkins excelled academically and never caused any problems.
“They were really good kids,” he said.
After Schiller gradated from Middletown High School in 1965, he worked as a machinist at Armco Steel for one year, then enlisted in the U.S. Army for three years. Then he returned to Armco where he retired in 2005, two months shy of 40 years of service.
Soon after he retired, Schiller became a grandfather when Sarah Perkins was born.
“His skill at fatherhood was only magnified when he became a grandpa,” his daughter said.
Sarah, 17, graduated from Monroe High School this year and is enrolled at Ohio State University. The Schillers cared for Sarah when she was a baby so her parents could work.
Her parents were “instrumental in modeling loving kindness to her from the start,” she said.
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