Dad’s Service, Montgomery Place, Saturday, January 20, 2007

 

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         Describing this cold day in January in his usual poetic form, dad would have said that the weather is going from bad to verse. Dad didn’t approve of eating eggs but, as a punster, he had to admit that a boiled egg is hard to beat.  Going to the barber, for dad, was always a hairy situation. He was happy with his first car, a 1937 Plymouth – and never wanted a Mercedes because, of course, Mercedes benz. He would reassure those of you who are not left-handed that you are all right. Dad worried about teachers with eye problems because they can’t control their pupils. Writing with a broken pencil, of course, is pointless. Dad rode a bike to work for many years  -- but a bike can’t stand up because it is two tired. 

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         Dad believed that whatever the occasion, there must be some fun somewhere. And -- for better or for verse -- he didn’t confine his puns and poems to his family audience. 

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Dad took his sense of mischief to work. In the 1970s when a promised projector for his slides proved unavailable, Dad instead opened a scientific meeting in rhyme, six pages of it. His address began “Some of my friends think I’ve a magnificent obsession/ with this process known as atheromatous plaque regression.” In 1989 he delivered an address on the benefits of animal studies: “Rats emerge as useful models, making plaques when fed chocolate.” Somewhere there dad thought there was a rhyme. We’re still looking for it. He was a serious scientist who did important work. But at times he was also a comic in a lab coat -- a poet who seemed to have wandered into the wrong classroom. 

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         Still, the scientists got off pretty light. At home we had all poems all the time. Thanksgiving poems, spring poems, winter poems, and of course Dad’s birthday poems. “Jumping jeepers and man alive! How great it is at seventy-five! To have fun at tennis and to drive! To meet family as they arrive!!”  

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         Dad’s attraction for finding fun worked out wonderfully well for us when we were young. On Saturdays we canned bushels of peaches and tomatoes in the lab’s autoclave and made our own recordings of “little red caboose” on the lab’s recording machine. We took home tiny glass swans and a goose with a golden egg inside made by the University’s glass blower, who was supposed to be making test tubes.  We had Saturday jobs feeding the rats artery-hardening diets and an introduction to a world where students, lab technicians, and professors alike perched on lab stools to share research tasks. 

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         Because dad did some of the first work that showed that heart disease was reversible with a healthy diet and exercise, we grew up eating chicken, margarine, and ice milk while other kids got hamburgers, butter, and ice cream. Scientists admired dad’s work. People started jogging and eating better to reduce their heart disease risks. We dreamed of what life would have been like if the research results came out the other way. What if heart disease was just a matter of fate? Hot fudge sundaes! Scrambled eggs and bacon!  

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        Dad wasn’t just curious about your blood vessels. He was curious about all of the natural world – and his curiosity was contagious. While other children played cops and robbers, we created a diamond mine under our apartment building’s coal chute on Drexel. Dad had mentioned that buried coal turned into diamonds. We were willing to wait. We mixed berries and hand lotion into potions with magical powers, collected butterflies and giant night moths, made gunpowder and rockets that fizzled in explosive chemistry experiments, studied physics by shooting out the alley lights with home-made sling shots, tried to keep track of the pet boa constrictor dad had brought us as Gus-gus crawled among the basement pipes, and joined dad’s excitement at the annual drama of the first garden peas followed by the inevitable tomato fungus, corn worms, and voracious critters.    

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         Dad had fixed principles. People were more productive if they slept only four hours a night like he did. Going to church was good. Sleeping in on Sunday morning was bad. Saving money was good, wasting it was bad. Treating everyone with equal respect was good. Any kind of discrimination was bad. Public schools were good. Country clubs that excluded people were bad. Working hard and getting good grades was good.  Meeting boy friends in Jackson Park after school was bad – really bad. 

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         Dad loved hickory nuts, peppermint ice cream, hummingbirds, butterflies, pretty girls -- preferably in bikinis, E.B. White, Carl Sandburg, teaching medical students, gardening, fishing, grilling, old friends, every sunset he ever saw, the dunes, and big band music. He loved John and David and Barbie and me. He welcomed Jackie and Don and Pat and Cathy into the family. He had a special place in his heart for his grandchildren – Josh and Leah and Jason and Liza and Laura and Will and Molly. And especially for his great- grandchildren, Ben and Emily. But most of all, dad loved mom.              

                          

         As parents, mom and dad did the hard things well. They tried to treat us equally. They told us what they thought was important – education above everything. They told us what they thought we should do -- and when we didn’t do it, they supported our crazy adventures anyway. 

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         They also had some very hard times. Mom got pneumonia. Dad had a cancer scare. In 1986, our brother David died. Mom said that David’s death was the saddest event in Dad’s life.  

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         When we asked dad about growing old, he said the people who did best at each time of life were those who adapted to change. Dad lived that way. When he couldn’t jog, he walked. When he couldn’t garden, he wrote more poems. A few weeks before he died, he was still beating us at scrabble. When we asked him how he was feeling, he would say – “pretty good for an old man.” 

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         I think we all hope that we got a little bit of dad’s sense of fun and a few of his principles – but not the bad jokes – that would unfair pun-ishment.