Dad's Eulogy

Eulogy

Fred Clark
March 24, 2014

Good slow talk at back road country funerals can make a person remember well the man who’s passed away. Through the filter of that passing, our thoughts can reflect upon the good and bad in our own lives, with him, and after him. What his life meant. What our lives mean, because of him.

My father Fred D. Clark, 75, last of Mineral Wells passed away Monday morning, March 24, 2014 in Weatherford. His passing was not unexpected, though the speed of his final days was a surprise to those who paid attention.

He was born May 30, 1938 in Gorman’s Blackwell Hospital, not far to our south. He grew up on a dry land farm south of Blanket in rural Brown County, between Comanche and Brownwood. His childhood was normal enough for the time and place. He went to school. He hauled hay, worked cattle, milked cows, tilled the garden, had parents and sisters, friends at school, the struggles and quiet victories of a boy in 1940’s rural Texas.

Dad attended Blanket High School. If memory serves there were 11 in his graduating class. Blanket was and is a wide place in the road. His teachers Mr. and Mrs. Lyons somehow implanted in him the ambition that he could go to college. They gave him a dream, or at least the ambition, the self-confidence that carried him on a scholarship down the white dust calliche roads to College Station to go to A & M. He hitchhiked there and back, wearing his full dress Corps of Cadets uniform. That upped the chances he’d get a ride.

The farm boy worked hard, drilled ceaselessly with the Corps, studied and prospered under a very structured, military, disciplined environment, graduating Texas A & M University with a degree in electrical engineering, serving honorably in the Corps of Cadets as an officer.

Upon graduation Dad enlisted in the U.S. Air Force, serving with the National Security Agency a few years after its founding, being stationed just outside Washington D.C. He completed a 30 year career at Texas Instruments in Dallas, working on the U.S. space program and a myriad of national defense programs. Mom and Dad rented a home on Vernet in Richardson north of Dallas, then bought a home on Newberry and then as things continued to get better bought a home on Lakeview, across the bridge, across the creek where the rich folks lived. I was about 15. It wasn’t Highland Park, but it wasn’t the big middle of nowhere either. Upon retirement, he and mom moved to Mineral Wells, traveling around Texas in their fifth wheel trailer and working on genealogy.

As a kid, it seemed like he worked all the time. Missed birthdays and vacations that usually started late - everything fell into second place behind Texas Instruments. It didn’t seem unusual then, but as a kid, I didn’t have anything to compare it to either. He worked on defense weapons systems that produced this country’s first guided smart bombs, that landed this country on Mars and eventually, on the moon. I have to believe the Lyons would be proud. His TI badge was not just his pass into the building, but more, it got him around some of the most exciting engineering and science going on in our nation at the time, integrated circuits, computers, handheld calculators, synthetic voice technology. When he held that plastic TI badge between his fingers, he probably felt liberation from the life that working a dry land farm’s fields he’d lived on as a child would’ve served up.

I didn’t get that at the time.

Dad was pretty regular for Indian Guides, sometimes for Boy Scouts functions. Our family had vacations many summers in Colorado, tent camping in East Texas pine countries, maybe once a trip to Texas’ Gulf Coast. We went to visit his parents on the farm where he grew up and visited my mom’s mother in New Mexico, after a long dark night crossing West Texas listening to WBAP twanging country western, Bill Mack on one of their Oldsmobile’s AM – FM radios.

He couldn’t leave work early. We’d get where we were going in the middle of the night.

Sunday mornings the then-encyclopedic Dallas Morning News was handed back and forth from my father to my mother, did they drink coffee then?, he often reading her articles out loud, just in case she missed something important.

Dad thought and acted like an engineer, detail-oriented, obsessive, compulsive, a list maker, an organizer – some of these sicknesses are showing up amongst his grandkids two generations removed – mostly as strengths. The echoes of earlier generations, genetics or environment or maybe both. It’s fun to speculate where the lights and darknesses in Dad’s life came from.

From whom.

From why.

He was a writer. I’m not sure where that came from. His writing was frequently sentimental, though his words were taut, effective, robust. Part of his job at TI was writing, and he took it deadly seriously.

Dad grew up poor. There is a romance and even nobility to the tales that came out of rural America during and after our Great Depression, Grapes of Wrath and all that, but after the dust settles, the reality was a life that meant doing without. A life of knowing that if it didn’t rain, there might not be food on the table. A life of knowing there were things in other parts of America that a life on the farm could never provide.

Dad didn’t want to be poor. He didn’t want us to be poor either. The rest was details.

When mom and dad moved after their honeymoon north to serve outside our nation’s capital, they were posted to the Air Force working for the National Security Agency a couple of years after its founding. Those were perilous times. Think of what living in the most powerful city in the free world must have felt like to two kids who grew up at the far end of beyond. They remember army equipment limping haphazardly down the hill where they lived on post, to be shipped overseas as the Berlin Wall began construction in 1961, separating East from West. The Cuban Missile Crisis rocked to life in October 1962, with their new hometown nation’s capital on the short list of places not to be. There they found themselves, these kids from the country having a front row seat during some of most terrifying opening acts of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.

When dad retired from Texas Instruments they took up traveling, at first with a fifth wheel trailer, then in a motor home. He worried over every dime, had spreadsheets for expenses, inspected every invoice. Another echo, if you think about it. For a time they were park hosts at state parks. It took a while to believe that it was okay to kick back a little. That the money might just hold. I hope toward the end, he finally believed that.

Probably not.

Dad flew to Paris for the Paris Air Show for TI. Imagine the enormity of his triumph, growing up on a dry land farm before and during WWII, then looking out his plane window at the Eiffel Tower. John Steinbeck meets James Bond.

Dad bled maroon, being a died-in-the-wool Aggie, a member of the Corps. He would scare the hell out of me when I was a kid, when we went to Aggie football games, standing up with similarly insane Aggie graduates in the bleachers, sitting with the corps, singing the fight song, yelling the yells (real Aggies don’t cheer) and doing everything they could think of from the stands so the tea sippers of UT didn’t win the big game.

A & M lifted my father and thousands of farm boys like him out of poverty. Those farm boys fought and died for this nation on battlefields around the globe, and were a vital part of the post-industrial modernization that made America the strongest nation that has ever existed in history.

That demands a little loyalty.

I see that a little better, now.

Dad had grandkids. He thought granddaughters were the best, of course, having only John and I for kids. He wrote Raven poems, usually with a ‘Night Before Christmas undercarriage.

Twas the night before Christmas, then on and on with whatever subject moved him in iambic pentameter.

He wrote Raven such a masterpiece poem on the day she was born, which she still has. Savannah intrigued him as well, sitting in his lap and telling him in her little girl machine gun voice everything there was to know about her expanding, wonderful oh-can-you-believe-it Pappa Fred world. Nicholas was a big tall boy who my dad always tried to get to talk more, a smart boy, going places, dad thought.

Dad was and is proud of all of them.

Dad’s important work for the nation never ended. Within days of retirement, he successfully alphabetized all the can goods in mom’s kitchen, helpfully questioning whether she knew they had 11 cans of green beans. You have to keep track of these things. He then organized her sewing cabinet, then the garage. He had files and spreadsheets on the computer tracking every moving benchmark in their lives with obsessive attention. He could be a hard man to live with in so many ways. Still, he wrote my mother poems on her birthdays, and loved her, as best he knew how.

The last several years were a slow winding down, perhaps better an unwinding as health failed, memories faded and finally Who He Was Before became a retreating misty murky screenplay to the rest of us. His decline these last few weeks, though horrible in so many ways, was mercifully swift.

We are all thankful for that.

Dad’s Christian beliefs are a bit tougher to untangle. He was raised in the church and as a father, he and mom drove our family to services most Sundays whether we liked it or not. Finding myself in trouble as a kid, his sense of justice seemed boilerplate Old Testament to me, smighting and blights and locusts and all that, though he believed in God, and he believed in working hard, believed that hard work would pay off, if you didn’t give up.

That’s really the essence of faith, if you think about it the right way.

Dad grew up sitting in pews where most of life’s problems supposedly had neat tidy answers. I believe now, looking back, his God knew better. Knowing how life can turn from good to bad in a second, can work on a man.

Can whisper to him, late at night.

What appears to an outsider as obsessiveness, can actually be vigilance.

Dad had one of his best friends in Dave Dog, their black and white hound dog. He and Dave would go on walks around the neighborhood or out in the woods when they camped after retirement. Maybe they talked about life, who knows, but they were devoted, one to the other. When Dave Dog passed away it was a hard day for dad. They had walked many miles, friends seeing the world together. My dad loaded Dave Dog up in the car after his death, then drove him to the church in Mineral Wells, then with his departed companion Dave still in the car, circled the church building slowly.

“God, this is Dave. Get a good look. Dave, this is God.” Dad later in life repeated this curious ritual when Blinkers their cat died.

Dad believed in God. And about doing his part.

Survivors include his wife of 53 years Ann, son John Clark and his wife Karen, me, his grandchildren Raven Mariah Clark, Savannah Morgan Clark and Nicholas Dean Rambeau, sisters Peggy Bissett and Naomi Ruth Griffin. Fred was preceded in death by his parents Fred T. Clark and Thelma Clark.

The lessons of dad’s life will keep coming in for awhile, I suspect. The ups and downs of dad’s life fulfilled a promise of a better future. The Lyons were right, it turned out. If he worked hard enough, smart enough, things could get better, and mostly, they did. The fruit of that pursuit, passed through his hard work, through providing for his family’s day-to-day needs, fuels the lives of his kids and grandkids. That future, their future looks promising. Their dreams, two generations past his own dream of big city success and not plowing or wondering or worrying about the rain seem too bittersweet to believe on this day, standing here, a return to quiet rural America.

Dad loved this cemetery. I heard him say that myself. He believed in God, and that God would help him, if he helped himself. He loved his wife. He moved the ball down the field, as best he knew how. He is finally at peace. We thank God for that.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, it comes to me. Then it wasn’t.

We thank you for coming today.