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My father, of course, is the one who took me to my first baseball game. Back when I was probably about 8 years old, a neighborhood friend and I had found a promotion with Channel 5 that would get us Senators tickets if we ran a Carnival for Muscular Distrophy. We made a small setup of ring-tosses and the like in my friend’s back yard, and raised probably about $2 from neighborhood children. Soon we were presented with a certificate from Channel 5 for one adult and 2 children for admission to DC Stadium. My father drove us down to the stadium, and instead of using the Upper Deck pass we’d received, treated us to box seats on the 3rd base line. This was before he taught me how to keep a baseball box score, but although I do remember it was against the Minnesota Twins, I regret that I am unable to tell you who won. I’m guessing it was not the Senators.
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Father's Day, 2000
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I also distinctly remember another game that he took John and I to see one summer evening. The Senators were trailing 4-2 going into the ninth inning, and had been sufficiently inept during the game that he decided we should leave at that point. As we were walking through the parking lot, we heard the stadium crowd burst into cheers, and when we turned on the car radio, found out that Frank Howard had hit a 3 run homerun to win the game. I’ve been to several hundred baseball games since that time, but I can still hear the sound of that crowd echoing in the recesses of my mind. Although I’m quite sure he didn’t intend it that way, whether he knew it or not, the lesson he taught was “don’t leave until it’s finished”.
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He was also proud to describe himself as a career civil servant, or a “bureaucrat”. He was a wiz on any keyboard, and I’m not just referring to musical ones. Coworkers would tell of hearing furious typewriting coming out of his office in the morning, and assume it was his secretary hard at work. Only upon sticking their heads in the door to ask a question would they realize that it was my father pounding away at close to 100 words a minute. He was equally adept at the 10 key adding machine. I’m a reasonably proficient typist myself, but even to this day I can replay the sounds of him adding up long strings of numbers, and not be able to comprehend that this was being done by a human being. It’s amazing what long slender fingers and a lot of practice will do for you.
My father had the occasion to write frequent letters to several members of his extended family regarding some jointly owned farm land that he managed from 1975 until just recently. Some of them are quite amusing, particularly the ones along the lines of “the brush clearing we undertook earlier this year allowed us to have roughly 40 more acres under cultivation, which the grasshoppers enjoyed mightily. Fortunately there is enough income leftover from last year to pay the taxes.” In February 1980, he wrote to them “I will be 55 years old (although I don’t feel it) and having served 32 ½ years as a civil servant (it feels every minute of it), I will be eligible to retire. What I’ll do next, I don’t yet know. There must be a bar somewhere that could use a bald ragtime piano player.”
In the almost quarter of a century since that time, I don’t believe he found such employment, at least not on a steady basis, but as many of you know he could be counted up to liven up a room with his impromptu piano playing. Even if it wasn’t a piano he was familiar with, he could quickly figure out which keys stuck, and which were horribly out of tune, and would adjust his playing so the flaws of the instrument wouldn’t mar the music he produced.
In 1993 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and was given about a 5% chance of survival. Once again, proving that one shouldn’t leave until one was finished, he fought thru that one, and stuck around for another 10 years. He managed to fit in more community service, more traveling with his wife Nancy, and he lived to see his grandson Sandy.
And throughout all that, except for very brief occasions, he was always home for dinner.
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