Westside Stories: Don Palmer

Don Palmer is a storyteller by nature, a gift his own family teases him about. But the story he shares this week on Westside Stories isn't one he tells for laughs. It's the story of his father, and of watching a man transform so completely that Don's own teenage self wouldn't have believed it.

Don grew up in what he calls his "first Palmer family," a home marked by alcohol abuse, physical violence between his parents, and a father shaped by a deeply racist upbringing. By the time Don was in ninth grade, his mother had reached a breaking point and left. It was, in Don's words, a broken family that had been broken for a long time before the divorce made it official.

What happened next is the heart of the story. Don's father, desperate to win his wife back and convinced he had no power to change on his own, gave his life to Christ. He gave up alcohol immediately. He started showing up to church, to Bible study, to anything that might prove his change was real. Don, a skeptical teenager at the time, told his dad flatly that he had "an ice cube's chance in hell" of winning his mother back. Less than a year later, they remarried.

Don calls what followed the "second Palmer family," the version of his parents he says he never quite had as a child. His father didn't just stop drinking. He became a different man, one who eventually stood at his own funeral surrounded by close Black friends, a detail Don says would have seemed impossible to imagine given where his father started. When his father passed away this past February, the only three books found in his house were Bibles, worn through and filled with notes.

Don is honest that his relationship with his dad took years to rebuild, and that real closeness didn't come until adulthood, especially after Don's mother passed and father and son spent more time one-on-one. He's also honest about the complicated weight of being named after his father, a name he once hated and has since come to wear with pride, even choosing it as the title of a book he's working on.

Don's story isn't a tidy one. It's a story about what happens when God gets ahold of someone nobody expected to change, and what it costs, and gives, to stay in relationship long enough to watch it happen.

As you listen, we want to invite you to sit with one question: what kind of legacy do you want to leave behind?

And a challenge, if you're willing: take five minutes to write down the specifics of the legacy you want to leave behind for your family, friends, and community.

Listen now on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or find the full episode on our website.