Today would have been my father’s 87th birthday. The first since he passed away last June. I had the honor of eulogizing him at his funeral. This is what I said.
To Kill a Mockingbird was a big part of our lives growing up.
Mom would read the book to us on long car trips and if the movie was on TV, we would stop what we were doing and watch. I still do.
I knew him as his child. His youngest child at that. I was born late to a father that in my mind, was already old. He was 37 when I was born. He didn’t play sports. He read books. He watched the news. He was interested in documentaries about history. He wasn’t at all like my friend’s younger dads that hunted and played catch and went to Tiger’s games.
Like Jem, from To Kill a Mockingbird, I was sometimes frustrated that my dad wasn’t younger, wasn’t “cooler.”
I saw him as bookish and professorial. He was smart. He was concerned about civil rights and social justice, not box scores or the Lions game.
Like Jem finding out Atticus was the best shot in Macomb county, when I found an old picture of him from college, I was surprised to learn the man in the football uniform had ever existed. There were so many parts of his life that I didn’t have the chance to experience directly. There were so many facets of him that I never knew.
But in the world of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I identified more with Scout and Dill than I did with Jem.
I wasn’t very athletic either. I would rather read a book than play baseball. Reading doesn’t make you the most popular kid in school. But that was okay with him. I knew I was welcome to sit by him and read. If I needed help with math homework, he knew the answers. He had been a teacher once.
To me, he was “Dad.” He defined the term. In the very best sense of the word, he was “Dad.” Growing up I heard stories about Dad’s that were angry, or mean, or absent. To me, those were foreign concepts. To me a dad was reliable, caring and loving. Not just to his children, but to everyone he knew and to many he never knew.
He is the only Dad I knew that vacuumed, and made dinner as much as Mom did.
Not because he was asked to, but because that’s what dads did. In our house, Mom and Dad were equals. Both smart, both wise and equally responsible for doing the dishes.
He loved mom. I don’t think love is a strong enough word. They were like one person. I learned only recently that they had their own private way of communicating with each other. They would lightly squeeze each other’s hands, in Morse Code fashion. Most of the time to say they loved each other.
There was never a harsh word between them. Ever. If they disagreed, they must have done it in private, because they were an unbreakable team. As kids, we tried every trick in the book to bend them to our will. I don’t think we ever succeeded.
My mother once told me that the most important decision you will ever make in your life is choosing who you will marry. She was right. And she knew she had made the right choice.
They were the ideal role model of a married couple. Filled with love, respect, and loyalty. After 64 years of marriage they still marveled that they had been lucky enough to marry each other.
He was nice. So many people have told me how nice he was. I’ve never known anyone to not like him.
He was funny. He didn’t tell jokes in the traditional sense. It would be a quick comment, out of the blue, that caught you off guard. They were sporadic, but if you caught one, it was the funniest thing you heard all day.
As a father and grandfather, he was patient, caring, forgiving and supportive. I think he knew his children better than we knew ourselves. He loved each of us as we are. He knew what each of us needed.
He encouraged us to be the best versions of ourselves that we could be. But he didn’t coddle us.
He had high expectations. He knew what we were capable of and expected us to do our very best. If we didn’t, he let us know. I was always more afraid of disappointing him than making him mad. He didn’t yell, his voice just got low. And as my sister Jessica says, “He had that look.”
He was proud of each of us for who we are.
His eyes would light up when we entered the room. The mere thought of us made him smile. And I know he’s smiling right now. One of the greatest joys of his life was that his children got along. (We didn’t always.) But, as adults, we are not just siblings, we are friends. He loved that.
He never let us forget that we were born into a life of privilege.
We weren’t rich by any means, but he let us know that we had been born into a world where we had a lot of advantages. He once told me that although I might think my life is a home run, I had to remember that I was born on third base. And that he and my mother had pushed me half way to home plate, and pointed me the rest of the way there.
No man is perfect. No man is a saint. He wasn’t always easy to live with.
Let me take you back to the winter of 1981-1982. My freshman year in high school. I was 14. It was the year we built the cottage just south of Pentwater. Perhaps the snowiest winter in the history of Western Michigan.
Here was his plan: In October, he would have a contractor roughly frame in a three-bedroom cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan. We (his family) would complete the construction (interior walls, electrical, plumbing, kitchen, bathroom, drywall, finish carpentry, flooring --- everything!) in time for the summer rental season in June. And, yes… he already had renters reserved. He was under pressure, we had to get the job done.
All of this would be completed on weekends.
Others may tell you a different story, but I’ll tell you my version… The truth. I lived it.
By that time Lib and Sam were grown and out of the house. Not much help there. Jessica was a junior in high school. A cheerleader with a VERY active social life. She helped… sometimes.
That left Dad, Mom and me.
For most of the winter the cottage had no running water, a wood stove for heat and only sporadic electricity. Every Saturday morning, he would wake me up at 5:00am and we would drive two hours West to work very long days. I was the only kid in school who looked forward to Mondays.
That year, in addition to valuable construction skills, I learned:
My Dad invented the five-minute lunch break.
It is possible for an otherwise reasonable man to ignore State Police warnings to take shelter from a blizzard. And that during the darkest part of the storm he may even look out the window and say “I think I see the sun peeking through.”
A 14-year-old boy can single handedly push a hopelessly stuck Chevy Chevette from an enormous snow drift.
If the wind is blowing hard enough, your dad can’t hear you swear at him as he drives the car right back into that snow drift.
During a blizzard, when all roads are closed and there is only one room left at the Hart Motel, your parents get the bed. You get to sleep in a chair. And you like it.
But we finished. He was determined. He was persistent, and even though I was often a sullen teenager, he made it fun. He instilled in me a belief that if I set my mind to something, I can do it.
There are a few things most of you probably don’t know about him:
In high school, he and his friends kept a shotgun in the backseat of their car and at lunch time they would go down to Kollen Park and shoot ducks.
Once, while camping in Florida at Christmas, it got so cold, for several nights he heated our tent with an electric frying pan. I thought it was ingenious. My mom though he was just too cheap to pay for a hotel room.
As a school administrator, he excused students from school so they could attend civil rights marches and rallies.
Someone once called the local talk radio show and called him a “communist” for doing it. I think that made him proud.
He was almost arrested for peacefully protesting at a Dick Cheney political rally. I think he was proud of that too.
He was my moral compass.
He fought for justice.
He walked the walk.
He was honest to the core.
He wasn’t churchy, but he was the most Christian man I have ever known.
He never said it, but he sought to live “The Sermon on the Mount”
His children and grandchildren have grown up with the lessons of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Growing up, there were times I felt like Jem, or Scout or Dill. And sometimes Dad was Atticus.
We all have parts of the book we can recite from memory. There are some we can’t say out loud without choking up.
“I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
“We’re the safest folks in the world,” said Miss Maudie. “We’re so rarely called on to be Christians, but when we are, we’ve got men like Atticus to go for us.”
“Neighbors bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between. One time Atticus said you never really knew a man until you stood in his shoes and walked around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.”
“Well, the Summer that had begun so long ago had ended, and another Summer had taken its place, and a Fall. I was to think of these days many times, of Jem, and Dill and Boo Radley and Tom Robinson and the Ewells and Atticus -- his fairness, his stubbornness, his devotion, his courage, his love.”
Thank you, Dad. Thank you for showing us how to live, how to love, and how to care. Thank you for loving and encouraging us. We are all better for having known you.
