 |
1966
Hiram College Commencement
Dad was 53 |
I've blogged about my dad before--Charles Edward Dyer (1913-1999). He disliked the "Charles," always went by "Edward" or "Ed." His formal signature: "C. Edward Dyer." I'm not sure what that was all about--that Charles-aversion--but it was there, and it lasted all the fifty-five years I knew him.
I didn't know him right away--and not just because infants don't really know much except sleep-cry-suck. When I was born in November, 1944, Dad was still overseas with the U. S. Army. World War II. Dad was a chaplain and served in both theaters of the war--the Pacific, the Atlantic. Afterward, he stayed in the military reserves, transferring to the Air Force (which separated from the Army in 1947). He would retire as a lieutenant colonel, and he was so proud of his military service that he made sure it was on his gravestone in Becket, Mass. Oh, and my mom, now 98 years old, still receives Dad's pension.
Dad was born on a farm in north-central Oregon, near Milton-Freewater, one of nearly a dozen children (he was the second oldest). His own father died when Dad was a teen; the Great Depression cost the family the farm. And off he went to school and work and work and work and work.
He went to the University of Oregon, then moved toward the ministry and became an ordained Disciples of Christ minister. In a graduate program at Phillips University in Enid, Oklahoma, he met my mom, Prudence Osborn, daughter of a distinguished professor there, G. Edwin Osborn (he didn't like the "George" part of his name!). They were married on October 12, 1939, headed off to Denver to begin his life as a minister.
And then ... the war.
When he came home (my older brother, Richard, who was about 4 when the war ended, asked Mom who that man
was, the one in her bed!), Dad decided to shift his focus to teacher education, got his Ed.D. at the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s and was on the faculty of Phillips University (the provost, too) when he got an offer to teach at Hiram College--to be the head the Division of Education. And so off we went in the later summer of 1956.
Dad would continue preaching, though--filling in here and there. I have a recording of him, an old 78 rpm record, an Easter sermon at Amarillo Air Force Base, where we spent nearly two years in the early 1950s when Dad was called back to active duty because of the Korean War.
I could write forever about Dad. Such a wonderful man. A superior athlete, an amazing tenor voice. We have some recordings, one of which, "The Lord's Prayer," our son played during his own wedding in 1999. Dad then was near his death--too ill to come to the service. But his eyes got red and wet when he heard what our son was going to do.
He was mellow-tempered as well--and during my adolescence I gave him ample opportunities to "lose it"; he didn't.
He supported all three of his
very different sons--different from one another, different from the world in some fundamental ways.
He supported Mom, encouraging her to go back to get her own Ph.D., picking up the slack at home while she was away.
His decline was a slow one, painful to watch: cane, walker, wheelchair, bed. It took
years. But he somehow retained a startling equanimity that I simply do not possess.
He died only about six weeks after his sixtieth wedding anniversary. His funeral service--in Pittsfield, Mass.--featured something I've never seen:
all of his sons spoke--as did others in the family (including Joyce). I cried as I'd never cried before.
Below, I've pasted the remarks I made that day ... and, oh, I scattered some of his ashes at the farm where he grew up--still a farm. And while I was there that day, with his younger brother John, no sooner had we scattered them than the sprinkler system kicked on, and both Uncle John and I got wet.
Dad would have laughed until tears drained from his eyes.
**
For
CHARLES EDWARD DYER,
my father,
9 March 1913 - 29 November 1999
Astronomers tell us that every atom in our bodies was
once part of a star. Who better to
illustrate that notion than my father, Charles Edward Dyer?
When I was born on November 11, 1944, Dad was in Europe
with the U. S. Army. It took a while for
his mail to catch up with him, so the letter announcing my birth did not reach
him until December 2, when I was three weeks old. But when it finally did, he sat down and
wrote me this V-Mail:
I’ve been wanting to write you a personal
letter for some time. I’ve even coveted
greatly the opportunity of a personal interview, but the exigencies of war have
robbed me of that high privilege. What I
really want to tell you is in my heart, and words are rather feeble
conveyances. So I’ll just say you’re so
very welcome to our family circle. You
know already how wonderful your beautiful mother is, and how handsome your
brother is. Well, your old man might be
a bit of a disappointment in that respect, but wait’ll you see him trying to be
your pal! Until that day, then, we’ll
have to be content with a long-range correspondence. Just remember that I love you, too. Your Dad
So among the first few words my 31-year-old father communicated
to me were, “I love you”; at age 86, on November 27, 1999, the last day I would
see him, they were among the final words he whispered to me, as well. And throughout the fifty-five intervening
years, I have felt that love, every single day, even when I was among the most
unlovable adolescents in the Milky Way Galaxy.
There are so many things that I will not be able
to tell you about Dad today. Things that
time will not permit—some things others have already told you, or will tell
you—some things that decorum and my mother and this setting (this building he
loved) will not allow! And because
whatever I say will not suffice, anyway—will paint only the palest image of
him—I’ll tell just a few stories and trust that they will communicate to you
something of the man I miss so desperately today—and will continue to miss all
my remaining days.
In 1959 we were on one of our big jaunts West to see
Dad’s family. For most of those trips we
had no air-conditioning in the car—can you imagine crossing the Great Salt Lake
Desert without A/C? In August? Well, we did it—more than once. As a result, we were constantly on the
lookout for places to cool off: A & W Root Beer stands were our
favorite—when we saw one, we would chant “A & W! A & W!
A & W!” thinking, I guess, that Dad needed convincing to stop
at one. Fat chance. He loved A & W Root Beer—“boot rear,” he
called it—and he always ordered the largest stein, whose foamy contents he
downed in a swift series of prodigious swigs.
We loved swimming pools, too, although we rarely had the
money to stay at motels with pools—we were lucky if there were beds to
accommodate all five of us, lucky to have a door that locked and a toilet that
flushed—or a toilet that was indoors.
Anyway, in 1959 we stopped at Zion
National Park, where we found a public pool.
It was brutally hot—August in the desert, you know—so we hurried to the
bathhouse. My brothers and I changed as
fast as we could, sprinted for the pool, and jumped in. It was ice water. I mean glacially cold. And as we stood there in the shallow end,
forming human ice sculptures, here came Dad, ready for a swim. “How’s the water, boys?” he called to us. Dick, Dave, and I looked at one another. No words were exchanged, just glances.
“Great!” we cried. “Really
great! Come on it—the water’s
fine!” And so Dad dropped his towel and
dived in. He came up rather quickly, as
I remember, popped up out of the water right in front of us, like some kind of
great marine mammal. A blue one. Dick, Dave, and I were laughing ourselves
sick. Dad, to his credit, laughed
too—but warned: “You could have given me a heart attack!” Which, of course, made us laugh all the harder as we scrambled
for the ladder.
Dad loved to laugh.
And he had a great one, full and throaty, and sometimes—especially when
he was recalling ribald childhood adventures with his brothers and sisters—he
would laugh so hard he would have a difficult time catching his breath. His face would glow like a space-heater, and
his breath would come in great gasps.
All it took was a word or phrase from his past to get him going: Old Sid
(a bull on the family farm), Teefy Heeb (a childhood neighbor),
Snatch-‘n’-Grab-It (a game my mother will still not explain to me)—all
these would set him off, and set us off, too, for we loved to watch him
laugh. We loved to laugh with
him, even when we didn’t know what it was all about. What I’d give to hear him laughing right now
. . .
Another view of Dad: Back in the mid-1950s while we were
living in Enid, Oklahoma, Dad had a second major operation for kidney stones
(the first had been during the war). Surgical scars circumscribed his
considerable girth, and I still remember Mom and Dad in friendly debates about
which was more painful: kidney stones or childbirth. Neither parent, as I recall, gave much ground
in that debate. Anyway, that particular
kidney stone produced one of the most frightening memories of my
childhood. We woke up in the middle of
the night to see an ambulance in our driveway—our driveway! A red light flashing on our street! What was going on? They were taking my father away! Mom reassured us (she’s good at that), but
for the rest of that night I was terrified I was going to lose him. It was unthinkable. It still is.
Needless to say, he survived that night—and many, many others. But for a few weeks after he got home, he was
so weak and fragile that he could move only painfully. I couldn’t believe it—my father, the
strongest man in the world, could hardly stand up, could only shuffle from room
to room: a sad preview of his last years when disabilities stopped in his
tracks the fastest high school sprinter in the state of Oregon, the pulling
guard for the University of Oregon football team, the intrepid climber of Mt.
Hood, the remarkable physical specimen that was my father. I like to picture him—right now, especially
now—on the summit of Mt. Hood on that exhilarating August day in 1937, full of
youth and strength and pride in what he’d done, his whole life before him—with
the Oregon he so deeply loved spread out below him like a vast green
dream. To the west he could see Portland
and the coastal mountains beyond, the sunlight shimmering on the Columbia
River; to the east, the Walla Walla Valley where he grew up. His future lay that way: in Oklahoma (where
he would meet my mother), in Ohio, in Iowa, Massachusetts. He would retire before he would ever again
live in Oregon. So unthinkable—that
this powerful, athletic man would slow down so incredibly, would one day find
himself confined to a motorized
wheelchair (which, in his technologically challenged hands, became a weapon,
an unguided missile that left bruises on walls and doorways and furniture residents
throughout Melbourne, the last place he would call home), so unimaginable that
he would one day lie in a bed at Springside and dream morphine dreams of
mountains. And struggle so hard just to breathe
that we often found him soaked in the perspiration of his exertions.
Well, back in 1954
I knew none of this. All I knew was that
I wanted to play catch with Dad, just like always, kidney operation or no
kidney operation, but I hesitated. He
seemed so sick. So weak. One day, though, I couldn’t stand it any
longer. I just had to play. So I asked him. There he sat in that Oklahoma living room,
wearing only a bathrobe and slippers, his stitches still in his side, his face
pale and pained; and there I stood, eager son, in my hands a ball and two
baseball mitts—his and mine. “C’mon,
Dad,” I pled. “Let’s play catch!” And that man struggled to his feet, shuffled
outside, put that mitt on that left hand that was missing its little finger
(courtesy of a hatchet-wielding brother back on the farm), and tossed a
baseball with me. It was a lousy game of
catch—we were only a few feet apart, and we probably exchanged only a
half-dozen throws before he’d had enough.
But he did it, just because his son asked him to. That was enough for him. That was always enough for him.
Oh, did he love his family. One of the last days I saw him, Richard and I
came into his room at Laurel Lake; Mom and Dave were already there. When he saw all four of us together, his eyes
brightened, and he said, over and over and over again, “Wonderful, wonderful,
wonderful.”
Yes, Dad, it was wonderful. All of it.
Every last second of it.
To end now, another quick story . . . my father loved to
perform. He sang with a soaring tenor
voice, as most of you know, and he preached,
and he taught countless college classes, and he spoke to numerous civic
and educational organizations, booming out his words in that stentorian voice
which some prairie teacher of preachers had taught him to use—to keep the
faithful awake, I suppose.
Well, among his many performances was an appearance in a
Phillips University production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Dad played Charles the Wrestler, not a major
role, if you remember. Charles has only
a handful of lines—a little exposition, a little action. But I’m betting they picked Dad for several
reasons: He was a big, muscular man—he looked like a wrestler—he was a
good performer, and, hey, his name was Charles, too, though no one who knew him
ever called him that. Mom used Rit and
her extraordinary sewing skills to transform some ordinary sweat pants into red
Elizabethan wrestling tights, and I can still remember Dad leaving the house
that first night, already in that crimson costume, stopping at the front door
to strike a pose, flexing his biceps, posing like the Superman I always thought
he was.
In As You Like It, Charles is the Duke’s champion
wrestler; he challenges all comers. Our
hero, the young Orlando, decides to take on Charles. We don’t think he has much of a chance—he is
a slight youth; Charles is so formidable, strutting around the stage, his
muscles rippling. And when he arrives at
the ring, he bellows: “Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to
lie with his mother earth?” “Ready,
sir,” replies Orlando modestly. Well,
much to the delight of the onlooking women—and the audience—Orlando defeats
Charles the Wrestler, who has to be carried off.
In his final weeks of life, Dad switched roles: He became
Orlando, and forced Death to play Charles the Wrestler. Time and time again, Dad threw to the canvas
this ancient and awful enemy, surprising everyone—except, of course, those who knew him. Doctors gave him minutes to live; he took weeks. Nurses warned of imminent death; they too
were wrong. He heard final prayers from
Michael far more than once. His wife and
sons rushed repeatedly to his bedside, only to find him watching football or
eating pie, wondering what all the fuss was about.
Six weeks ago, in his hospital room, when we thought he
was surely dying, we played a tape of him singing “The Lord’s Prayer,” a
recording he had made a half-century ago.
And when he heard the piano’s opening measures, Dad began mouthing the
words, half-singing some of it; he raised his right hand from his side and
conducted himself, keeping perfect time, as usual. We were all crying, every one of us. And when the tape was over, Dad clapped
softly and whispered, “Bravo.”
I am not going to whisper “Bravo” for my father
today. Never again will I merely whisper
it. As I look back over his long
life—especially over his last difficult years and days and hours—as I think of
all that he has meant to my mother, to me, to my brothers, to his
daughters-in-law, to his grandchildren, and to all others whom he has touched,
I can not whisper “Bravo.”
Instead, I will cry it,
cry it aloud. I will cry “Bravo!” out
into the heavens. And unto the
stars. Whence he came.
