Friday, June 30, 2006
A Death in the Family
My father-in-law recently died. He passed away after a relatively short illness and was surrounded by family and friends. In so many ways he lived the quintessential American life. He grew up on a small farm in Minnesota. During the Great Depression his family suffered greatly. He told me that the government dropped grapefruit and oranges into the town square so that the children would have something approaching a healthy diet. He volunteered for the army at 18 and fought in World War II. He was seriously wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. The carnage of the war clearly affected him as he saw many, many good friends die and he also killed a German soldier at point blank range. Upon his return to the States he met a pretty girl at a bar. They were married shortly thereafter and moved to Seattle. Boeing Corporation needed engineers and he was their kind of man. Together they raised seven children, went to church every Sunday, and had a meat and potatoes dinner after he had said grace.
By nature George was a conservative fellow in both politics and outlook on life. He believed Presidents Truman and Eisenhower when they spoke of the communist menace, and he thought it was only natural that as a life-long hunter he should join the NRA. He thought abortion was a sin. He never watched tv, much less listened to rock and roll, and so he looked with helpless horror as the 1960s seemingly fell out of the sky and disrupted his orderly world. Each one of his kids was touched by this era--some in good ways and some in not so good ways--and that decade forever produced a scowl on his face when it came up in conversation.
When he retired Boeing gave him a gold watch and he immediately moved out of Seattle. It had gotten too big, too noisy for his tastes. He found some land out on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and here, with his wife, he built his dream house--and I mean really built it, nail by nail. It took three hours to get to his new home from Seattle and by the time you reached it you had entered a different world. It was way out in county, and then you needed to take a dirt road for a mile or so to get to it. There were more cows and horses than people around the house, and George liked it that way. And what a house: he designed it, built it, and loved it. His passion was evident when you looked at it and the fields that he tended to. It probably helped that he had the finest tool collection that side of the Mississippi.
George’s general aversion to people did not translate into one of his great passions: reading history. He was an avid history buff and collected a magnificent library, courtesy of the History Book of the Month club. His tastes were pretty eclectic when he sat down each day and opened up a book, though he rarely if ever read a book about the 20th century. “Too soon to know what has happened, if you ask me,” he replied when I asked him about this aversion of his. And so our conversations about history generally steered away from my research and writings. He did, though, read my book and in fact reported his day by day reader responses to me every single morning at breakfast. It was a strange, strange experience to have a family member read one’s labor this way, and though he harrumphed and hemmed and hawed over some passage I had written, he clearly was curious as to what I had been working on over the years. He was generally polite when our politics diverged, but he did have a problem with my reading of The New York Times. He found that wacky, eastern, liberal paper always up to no good, and he wasn’t shy in telling me about this. And yet when it was around on our visits he couldn’t help himself. On more than one occasion, I caught him glancing at a story or two from that newspaper with a kind of snake-induced loathing and fascination.
He never really recovered after his wife died two years ago. He went through the motions of life, but it just wasn’t the same without her puttering around the kitchen or garden, baking him apple pies, or arguing with him about some historical event. And so he did not really fear death. If there is a heaven I’m sure he’ll find her there. George, you lived a good life.