Eulogy for My Father

Dad with Sean the golden retriever...sometime in the mid-'80s, I'm guessing.

Dad with Sean the golden retriever…sometime in the mid-’80s, I’m guessing.

As you know, my father was a journalist. In that role, he was a storyteller: he relayed information about lives and events that readers could use to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.

What occurs to me is that what we remember about my father were HIS stories — stories that serve as signposts illustrating a truly amazing, well-lived life.

There were anecdotes about growing up during the Great Depression — with which we would tease him about by saying, “we know, dad, they cut up your little red wagon for firewood when you were a boy” — that provided a background for the person he became.

And there were stories about growing up around Medford, stories he would bring to life for us when he’d show us around that area and point out how things had changed.

And of course, there were the stories from his time during World War II…stories that are all the more amazing to me for having been lived when he was just 20 years old. Pleasant stories such as:

  • Christmastime in 1944, and being so close to a German patrol that he could hear them singing Christmas carols, or…
  • Teasing a newly-arrived-at-the-front soldier by saying they used their bayonets regularly. After pausing for effect, Dad and his buddies showed the newbie how the bayonet was the best tool with which to open a can of food

And of course there were the not-so-pleasant stories such as describing the horrors of tree bursts in the Hurtgen Forest and the horrible weather conditions that winter and the horrors he’d seen.

But there were a lot of other stories — incredible stories, to my mind — that maybe some of you haven’t heard. I’d like to share a couple of them with you.

While a student at Dartmouth Dad met poet Robert Frost, who was in residency in Hanover at the time. Dad told Frost that he didn’t particularly care for poetry and when Frost asked why, Dad said it was because he didn’t like professors dictating what a poem meant. Frost asked for an example and Dad cited Frost’s poem “Birches.” Dad said he thought it a wonderful description of a joy he had enjoyed as a poor boy having fun in the woods, but the professor insisted it was about the poet’s latent desire to commit suicide. THAT got Frost’s hackles up and he gruffly told Dad, “Don’t tell me who that was or I’ll kill him.”

When we kids came along, Dad read us the poetry of Robert Frost.

Some of my favorite dad stories were ones he told about meeting Ernest Hemingway, his writerly idol, in Cuba in the 1950s. Dad was there on business and was introduced to Papa at the famous bar in Havana where Hemingway held court. Dad described a specific location where he’d fought in the war, an obscure spot that Hemingway also knew, and the two bonded. Dad ended up hanging out with Hemingway for the rest of his stay in Cuba.

Years later, Dad would pull a Hemingway volume off the shelf some evenings and read us passages from his work.

And then there was a story that prompted a nickname for my father used by several of the boys who played hockey for him:

While coaching the 78th Division hockey team in Germany after the war, Dad was told to show a visiting Russian man how the team trained and played. Dad said he had long discussions with the man, and diagrammed and demonstrated drills and plays the team. That Russian man turned out to be Anatoli Tarasov, the so-called “Father of Russian hockey” who created the Soviet Union’s dominant hockey culture of the second half of the 20th century. So my father at times would say that he could lay claim to being the founder of Russian hockey.

Some of my teammates and I took to calling Dad “The Founder.” It’s a name that stuck so well that one teammate Tim Caddo, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, brought it up again in an email exchange this week.

There were many other stories Dad lived and told…to me, to my siblings, to you. I would ask that you remember those stories…and live and tell your own amazing stories.

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Untold Stories

Springsteen asked, “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true,” but what happens to a story that doesn’t get told? Surely it disappears, right? Evaporates like so much dew as the sun warms the morning. But the events of that story, the lessons, do they disappear too? And the person who lived the story, who dreamed it up and made it a reality, what happens to that person, after he or she has passed on, if the story doesn’t get told?

I ask all of these questions because one of the great regrets I will take to my grave is that I never got my mother’s stories down on paper. Mom, who lived an amazing, interesting life shaping a field that is the coin of the realm in modern-day America, had stories so riveting that award-winning authors and screenwriters offered to help her get them published. Mom always declined, saying that such privacies and privileges had been entrusted to her by her clients, by her place in her industry, and that she wouldn’t betray that trust. I picked up where those writers left off, telling her that just letting people know what it was like to have worked with these famous people on such high-profile movies would suffice, that she wouldn’t have to divulge any secrets and insider scoop.

In recent years, Mom had begun to lighten up a bit. I bought Dragon Dictate transcription software and we created her profile on this laptop. The plan was we’d talk for an hour or two and after a few months I’d have a pile of notes and quotes that I could edit into the book many had hoped she’d one day write.

We did one brief session where she recounted her early days in Brooklyn and Malverne, New York, but then she put me off a few times and I didn’t press her. Months later, she warmed up a bit again and asked if we were going to resume talking but it never happened, not before she took her fall in October and the chance for us to ever talk again disappeared.

I find myself wracked with guilt over having let Mom take those stories with her. Many people have said I could talk to those my mother worked with and get a similar book, but it really wouldn’t be the same. Who can I ask about what it was like to walk down Park Avenue with Marilyn Monroe for a photographer? Countless other similar tales are now gone, and though there are photos to illustrate the events, the faces on the film are mute and they keep their secrets to themselves.

And now I find myself once again facing the similar loss of equally amazing stories. As has been chronicled in this space, my father and I are currently on the outs, not talking, not really getting along at all. We are, to stay with Springsteen quotes, “too much of the same kind,” it seems. But I’ve written before of my father’s World War II service and how I believe it affected everything in his life to this day. Of how he is still in the Ardennes, almost 70 years later. I’ve written that seeing what he’s gone through, what he’s missed out on, is too high a price for anyone or any country to pay. And make no mistake about it: he saw some serious shit at a way-too-young age not to have suffered.

The tales of those experiences, and those of others like my father, shouldn’t be lost to the mists of time. They should be enshrined so that hopefully we as a society can stop making the same mistake over and over and over again. And on a personal level, getting him to share those stories would hopefully give our family something we’re still seeking: an answer to the question, “why?,” that has pervaded the entirety of half a century.

My father also has some amazing stories to share that aren’t focused on war. There aren’t many people left of whom I can ask, “What was it like to drink with Hemingway in Cuba?,” but my father is one such person. I’ve heard the story many times, but to get it on paper would preserve the tale for my nieces and their children and on down the line.

Maybe, as it turns out, I never was a very good journalist, because I don’t know how to break through the wall to get to the great stories. I let Mom’s stories get away and I don’t know how to reach my father to save his stories. And that’s a shame. Because we as human beings think in language, in words, in stories. And we as societies live in the exchange of that language, of those words, of those stories. If our stories don’t get told and shared and passed down, do we really live?

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Memorial Day, One Generation Removed

Last night, PBS televised the national Memorial Day Concert/Celebration from Washington, D.C. It’s an annual event and is a deeply moving tribute to those who serve in our armed forces. I watched the show for a few minutes after Sunday dinner with my parents, watching with one person who served in those armed forces: my father, an infantry veteran of World War II.

Those of you who know my father know what a big, tough guy he’s always been. At the peak of his power, he was a solid 6-foot-2, 200-pound man with broad shoulders and a sheer size and force of will that, even though I’m physically bigger than he was, I never had and never will.

You may also know that, deep down, my father is a marshmallow: he cries whenever some young athlete wins an Olympic medal and his voice breaks at the sight of sappy commercials. He especially chokes up at any news involving our troops — past or present — so it’s not surprising that the made-for-TV event in Washington, D.C., got to him so deeply. And it’s at times like those, when I watch this formerly fierce, powerful man break down, that I realize where my hippie, anti-war sentiment comes from.

And that realization happens more often than just the final Monday in May each year. Unlike many Americans, my father observes not just Memorial Day but also Veteran’s Day (which was Armistice Day to his father, who’d served in World War I) in the fall; the anniversary of D-Day, and V-E and V-J Days in the summer; and other dates that don’t get mentioned in the news: the day he shipped out from the East Coast for Europe, the day he and his platoon crossed the Rhine, the night around Christmas 1944 when he and a few mates ran into a German patrol and both groups turned and walked away, and other such dates that mark those days in the Ardennes — days he went through as a 20-year-old.

Twenty years old. I can’t comprehend going through something like at any age, let alone as someone just out of his teens. Whenever I try to imagine those times — and I do, often, in my quest to understand my father just a little bit better — I shudder. I physically shudder. Mentally, well, let’s just say it’s a frightening place to be, and I don’t know what it was really like. I like to think I could have withstood such horror as well as my father did, but I highly doubt it. And it’s when I come to such realizations that I get angry. Not at myself and certainly not at my father, but at a society that glorifies war and combat so easily and lightly.

Rather than listen to Selma Blair tearfully recite the story of a young father whose death in Afghanistan left his two young children fatherless and his young bride a widow, I want to hear that we really do support our troops — so much so that we’re bringing them home. Rather than hear Joe Mantegna tell us that the American Idol finalist who sang the national anthem has a father stationed in Singapore who’s so proud of her, I want to hear that he’s actually stationed in Seattle…or some other place here on this continent where he’s closer to his loved ones and here to protect our country, not the interests of some far-flung corporate tax haven. Rather than hear about the eleventh year of hell our troops in Afghanistan are entering, I want to hear that they’re being brought home, and that the chicken-hawks of both political parties who sent and keep them there aren’t doing so just to prop up the bottom lines of Lockheed-Martin and other military-industrial complex corporations.

Yes, I’m angry. Watching what my father goes through on all of these dates of infamy is painful for me, and they must be infinitely more painful for him. Not only can I not imagine what it was like to be there on the front in 1944, I can’t imagine what it’s like to carry that with you every single day of your life since.

So when I see my father break down as he did last night, in a lot of ways I wonder if he isn’t still in the Ardennes, alongside Red Lynch and the other two guys — all three now gone — in his band of brothers.

Certainly, as my father has gotten older, the memory of those days has moved more to the forefront of his mind and soul than probably any other images he carries — more than the sad memories of the deaths of a wife or a son or other family members, more than the joyous present of a multi-generational family living a broad range of lives, and more than the hopeful thought of the future embodied by four granddaughters. And I find that heartbreakingly tragic.

Yes, my father is proud of his service in World War II, as well he should be. But when I see him breaking down over the plight of others who have shared his experiences, I wonder if he didn’t pay too high a price. And I want us, as a society, to stop paying that price. For my father’s sake. For the sake of all servicemen and women. And for the sake of all the rest of us who know and love them.

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