This is Mother's Day, but I can't help thinking about my dad. He died on Tuesday, a couple of weeks short of his 84th birthday.

It came as no surprise. He had been in a coma for more than a week, and he had been in a bad way for several years. In some respects, the father I knew and loved — the guy to work on cars with, to shoot cans with, to putter in the shop with — that father died about five years ago.

What remained was a shell who had a hard time getting up and down and around. He still liked to read, and I was glad he enjoyed the last Christmas present I got for him. It was a Civil War book, the "Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman," and he said he found pleasure in reading about "one American who really knew how to deal with the South."

Formally, he was Edward Kenneth Quillen Jr., after his father who died in 1963. I'm the Third, and since I had daughters, I'm the end of that line. We both generally went by "Ed," which didn't cause much confusion because we lived 200 miles apart — and he was a clean-shaven Republican, not a bearded Democrat.

Other boys grow up with memories of playing catch with their fathers. My dad had terrible eyesight and no feel for sports, other than watching an occasional baseball game.

My memories are of working with him, starting at the family's Crystal White Laundry in Greeley for 50 cents an hour when I was 13 years old. One summer week I got in more than 40 hours and inquired about time

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and a half for overtime. His response: "If you can't get your work done in 40 hours, why should I pay you extra?"

He was something of a romantic about old-fashioned machinery. He talked about the "prime-mover" stationary steam engine that had once powered the entire laundry through shafts and flat belts in the days before each machine had its own electric motor.

I may be one of the youngest people who knows the lost art of lacing a flat belt. I also developed expertise in cleaning steam-boiler flues, making soap inside a washing machine with steam and alkali to clean greasy grill wipers and, once in awhile, getting the starch and bleach and bluing just right to produce clean white shirts.

The laundry washman's craft, as my dad learned it from his father and tried to pass on to me, was a skilled trade and every load required constant observation to see when the tallow soap's bead would break so you could go to the first rinse, and so on through the cycle.

There is, I guess, nothing like working in a laundry washroom to make you want to do well in school so that you won't spend your life in washrooms, where it's about 120 degrees and there are steam pipes waiting to burn you.

The modern machines have computers that handle water temperatures and levels and the insertion of the proper chemicals and the proper times. One of my brothers, continuing the family trade in a modern way, designs and builds such systems, and his son is buying a laundry — so the family trade continues.

But it's a business of tight margins and controlling costs, not the skilled trade that my dad learned long ago. May he rest in peace. As for my now-widowed mom, this can't be a happy Mother's Day, but I hope she has many ahead of her.

Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.