Eulogy for My Dad, June 17, 2023

Dad always said that he had only one prerequisite for his friends: simply that they all be good people. So I’d like to thank all you good people for coming to celebrate Dad today.

Allow me to share some of my thoughts about this great man.

First of all, Dad was a classic, old fashioned dad in many ways. He was always willing to hit me fly balls in my Little League days. On the weekends, he would occupy himself with mowing the lawn and chain sawing out in the woods. Dad was a barber guy, not hair salons, and when he did wear aftershave, it was Old Spice, not that fancy French stuff.

One interesting interaction Dad often had was with the tree-hugging environmentalists in our neighborhood in Northern California. As Dad worked for a major U.S. chemical company, they would argue with him against the use of insecticides and fertilizers. Dad would gently pick apart their claims using his knowledge of science and chemistry, and then say with a glint in his eye, “The solution to pollution is dilution”, or “Chevron says ‘Yes’ to the environment.”

In fact I was trying to find the right metaphor for Dad, and in light of his expertise in chemistry, I landed on the word “element”. In a certain way, Dad was his own element. He was a pretty stable guy. He worked for the same company for 32 years. We lived in the same house for almost the entire period of our childhood. And he was married to the same woman – thank God! – for almost 60 years. When you look in Dad’s wardrobe it consisted of all the male basics – nothing fancy. A bit of tweed and some homemade sweaters knitted by Mom are all that stand out.

Plus Dad had a nucleus of factors and stock phrases that you could always expect from him. These included:

Gustav Mahler, Puccini operas, John Le Carre spy novels, Captan Black pipe tobacco, Oppenheimer, Macallan single malt, existentialism, and minestrone soup.

These frequent discussion topics were bound by his famous sayings such as:

“I’m in the position to do some bar tending.”

“What did we learn from this?”, when we did something wrong.

And “It’s my encephalitis”, when he did something wrong.

“You all go off now and have a good time. I’ll just stay here and watch the cat lick its butt”, when we went out for the evening.

And who can forget Dad channeling Captain Ahab with “He rises!”, when Dad got off of the couch.

But around Dad’s stable nucleus spun electrons, and for all you who knew Dad, his electrons could spin in a pretty unpredictable way sometimes. Examples:

Dad wore a pink sports coat to his 80th birthday party in Salisbury.

Dad built for me an entire horse corral and bought me a real horse after he learned I had a special interest in the Lone Ranger.

He also bought pigs – no one owned pigs where we lived in California!

Dad also had an unexpected interest in that Chris de Burgh song “Lady in Red”. ??

Perhaps one of the best examples of the paradox that was Dad sometimes was his attitude towards automobiles. On one hand, he got very nervous about us driving late at night and he liked to “give the cars a rest” on the weekends. On the other hand, Dad let me drive a black Triumph TR6 convertible sports car – with no roll bar! – to high school 🙂

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Yes, if it was a summer afternoon in Inverness on the sunny deck where we are playing Scrabble and drinking gin and tonics..

I might compare thee more to an early evening in late winter. You are the fire crackling in the huge fireplace in our living room keeping us warm as the single malt and conversation flows…

Thank you, Dad, for everything. We miss you, but you are still very, very much with us in many ways.

Please raise a glass to my dad Chuck Wallace!