I've been thinking a lot lately about my father, F. Champion Ward, who died four years ago at the age of 97. As of last December, he would have been one hundred years old, an age upon which my 98 year-old widowed mother is rapidly advancing. So I thought I would include in my blog this week the eulogy I wrote for his memorial service at Evergreen Woods, where my parents lived for many years. It was delivered before a gathering of his friends, and of his family, many of whom contributed to the recollection of the stories that follow. 

D A D

My brother and sister worry that if I run on too long we may hear the impatient jingling of our father’s car keys: a sound to which we became accustomed on family trips whenever we lingered at a restaurant. But my worries are rhetorical. Our father loved the English language and hated to hear it abused. “Time to lay down,” a nurse commanded him at his most feeble, a week or two before his death. “It’s lie down,” he replied. One of his pastimes was to ferret out the commonplace redundancies of everyday speech: “following after,” “first introduced,” “end result.”

A week before our father passed away, I read to him from a tribute my son Jake had written on Dad’s 85th birthday. He was so delighted by it that I decided to press on with a tribute I had written as well: all about how Abraham Lincoln had resonated with my brother and me because he bore several similarities to our father: empathy, serene intellectual self confidence, and a disarming self deprecating wit. I choked up a little as I finished, and ascribed the ensuing silence to Dad’s being equally moved.

“You know,” he said finally, raising his head from his pillow, “that’s full of an awful lot of miscellanea. You might think about tightening it up.”

All right, Pop. I’ll see what I can do.

 

Arriving in the New World around 1630, Andrew Warde took time out from founding Connecticut to beget Andrew, who begat Peter, who begat another Peter. And then that Peter begat Levi, who begat another Levi, who begat Ferdinand, who begat another Ferdinand, who begat Clarence who, with Helen Eshbaugh Ward’s assistance, begat our father, Frederick Champion.

With such a long family history in this country you might imagine that our guest rooms teemed with Ward uncles, aunts and cousins. But our branch was a twig on the family tree that the rest of the clan would have preferred to prune. Our great grandfather Ferdinand Ward was the black sheep of a minister’s family, a plausible sociopath who made a short-lived paper fortune with a pyramid scheme for which he was eventually transported to Sing Sing in 1885, leaving his wife and little boy Clarence to fend for themselves. His mother could not bear the scandal and died of an ulcer not long afterward, and when his god fearing paternal grandparents refused to take him in, Clarence was sent off to be raised by his mother’s brother.

Soon thereafter, with his insurance company under receivership, young Helen Eshbaugh’s father jumped off the Staten Island Ferry one evening, leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves. And so it was that one of F. Champion Ward’s grandfathers was a swindler, and the other a suicide. Yet with wit and irrepressible spirit, not to mention the benefit of educations at Princeton and Mount Holyoke, his parents each managed to emerge from their families’ wreckage and reinvent themselves as paragons of marital felicity and unassailable respectability.

As if determined to provide their children with everything that had gone begging in their own childhoods, they raised our father and his slightly older sister Helen in an atmosphere of such love, kindness, and security that their two children did not even know the meaning of the phrase “sibling rivalry.” Such was Dad’s devotion to his gifted and warm-hearted sister that he could never speak of her death in a plane crash in 1947 without fighting back sobs.

Nor could our mother speak of Aunt Helen without gratitude for her assistance in winning our father’s heart. Rachel Duira Baldinger saw in our father the effervescent antidote to the dreariness of her own upbringing in her father’s parsonages. But she would have to fight long and hard, for in addition to her ruthless rivals who contrived to lure him into matrimony by, say, memorizing his favorite sonnets, she also had to contend with Dad’s own cerebral detachment.

Our father ascribed his abstraction to observing how his father suffered by fretting over things beyond his control. But Helen has found evidence in our grandmother’s journal that as early as the age of three Dad was already a contemplative. "You are a great boy at reasoning things out,” Grandma wrote, “and quite logical in your conclusions, though of course you are led in strange channels many times. You asked how God stayed up in heaven, and then I heard you say to yourself, 'I s'pose he's hanged there.' On seeing the crescent moon the other night you demanded to know where the rest of the moon was. Already your mother is afraid of your questions!" And so, Helen points out, were his children, who hoped that by nodding sagely at his mention of Schopenhauer or Mozambique we might avoid revealing how little we knew.

Though he pored over Santayana, pondered Whitehead, revered Plato, woe betide anyone who tried to pin down his own philosophy. He was an empiricist, I suppose; and, if his impatience with his children’s “beefing,” as he called it, is any indication, something of a stoic. But I think he studied philosophy more as a mental exercise than a search for some all encompassing Meaning of Life: a way to sharpen the blade of his wits and doubts before going forth to battle the ignorant armies of certitude and preconception. In that most ideological of centuries, he rejected dogma and taught his children, by example, to favor the evidence of our eyes and ears over the findings of even the most exalted panels of experts.

Though Professor Clarence Ward of the Oberlin College Art Department was also a Congregational lay minister, religion never took with his son. F. Champion Ward put his faith in doubt. He encouraged us always to think twice about whatever it was we liked to think. Any theory made him wary, and he pronounced the word itself with withering disdain: describing, say, some glib ideologue he had encountered in his travels as “You know, one of those fellas with a thee-eery.” He never espoused beliefs, exactly. To him, beliefs were merely opinions that had moved, for their own protection, into a gated community.

He may have lacked religious faith, but God knows he had his scruples. He demanded straight shooting of all of us. Indeed he was almost ostentatiously honest, or so the rest of us thought as he agonized over our restaurant bills when we traveled overseas on the Ford Foundation’s dime, or refused to park his car in the drugstore parking lot when he visited the drycleaner next door. But what kept his scrupulousness from weighing too heavily on his children’s shoulders was the distinction he always made between what was moral and what was merely moralistic. For him honesty was a positive virtue; the closer you got to the truth, he seemed to promise us, the bluer the sky and the brighter the sun.

Dad was an athlete, a baseball fan, a gifted pool player, a raconteur. Nevertheless his professors mistook this scrawny, bespectacled young egghead for an acolyte, and urged him to live a life of abstinent scholarship. Dad might have made the same mistake, for there were times during their courtship when our mother counted herself lucky just to get his attention, let alone win his affection. She remembers pretending to share his disappointment over failing by a hair to obtain a Rhodes Scholarship, which, had it gone his way, would have meant a prolonged and possibly terminal separation. But such was her determination, and her beauty, and her equivalent integrity and intellect, that she prevailed, for which her three children and their descendants are inexpressibly grateful. In fact, our mother so purged our father of his incipient monkishness that Dad would remark to Geoff that family was all; everything else was “a sideshow.”

But what a sideshow. Assembling his curriculum vitae, we were staggered by all the great things our father had accomplished between his four-minute egg and “Hi, Dui, I’m home.” For his children, his occupation was something of a mystery. We knew from all our mother told us that without his labors the world would cease to rotate, but why, exactly, was not always clear. We knew it had something to do with higher education, but we had a hard time reconciling higher education with the lower education we were receiving at school. Nor could we make heads or tails of the mimeographed memos, memoranda, syllabi, ultimata and manifesti he brought home as college dean. All we could do was flip them over and draw on them. In the family archives I once came upon an urgent memo from Milton Singer, on the back of which my brother had sketched our father reading the Chicago Sun Times, and captioned it “A talkative evening with Dad.” Mom likes to say of my sister’s arrival during that same period of engulfing deanly duties that Helen “was born apologetically during a meeting of the Committee on Policy and Personnel.”

Neither of his sons inherited Dad’s early bird traits. But his daughter did. The two of them shared much the same metabolism, and it was her privilege to join him at breakfast while Geoff and I had to rely for the most part on less frequent late night sessions over bowls of ice cream. Dad never treated his youngest child and only daughter with condescension. Even when she was tiny, he seemed to hang on her every word, thereby bestowing upon this soul mate he had presciently named after his beloved late sister all the intellectual self confidence she would need to make her way in the world.

None of us shared our father’s love of sports, however. For that he would have to wait for his grandsons. Maybe we could not jibe the Olympian brilliance Mom ascribed to him with his enthusiasm for watching a lot of grown men run around with balls. But he was no sedentary fan. His love of sports extended beyond the couch to baseball diamonds, golf courses, ping pong tables, and most especially tennis courts.

I tried to rise to his tennis game. After he defeated me six-love, six-three, six-love, I spent eight weeks at summer camp toiling on its clay courts, making my way from next-to-last seed to the senior semi finals, for which I won a cup for most improved. Moved by my dedication and proud of my accomplishment, Dad eagerly led me out onto the court and beat me six-love, six-three, six-love.

Unless you count his will to prevail, and I don’t, sports didn’t necessarily bring out our father’s most admirable qualities. As Geoff reminded me, he would never throw a game, not even to a toddler. His humor seemed to recede in competition, and he was not above engaging in little psychological ploys like following up his best shots at tennis or pool or ping pong by exclaiming, in ostensible self disgust, “Oh, no. That’s not what I meant to do at all.” Well into his eighties, he could reduce grandsons and even tennis pros to tears of frustration and exhaustion with his nasty old man’s game, slicing the ball into a capricious, net-nicking whir.

He was no less formidable at pool, which he played up to about a month before his death. I had the misfortune of playing him in his last game of eight ball, by which time he could hardly stand, barely see, nor remember exactly which balls to sink. By now, playing my father in a game of anything had become a lose/lose situation, because if there is anything worse than losing to an old blind man, it’s beating an old blind man. I needn’t have worried about the latter, however, for as I contrived to sink the five ball into a corner pocket, I managed somehow to tip the eight-ball into a side pocket. Thus, as if by divine intervention, Dad won his very last game.

Our father did not take instruction well. A ferocious guardian of his own autonomy, he met assistance with stubborn resistance. It was not just as an old man that he refused the helping hand. He shook it off all his life. He second-guessed prescriptions and driving directions, misread phone books and train schedules, distrusted waiters, refused the services of bellboys and nurses, and never cracked an instruction manual if he could help it. He once said that his idea of hell was a guided tour.

He didn’t like to be driven anywhere, either. Geoff remembers that while we were living in New Delhi, Dad ordered a Vespa motor scooter so he could liberate himself from the services of a Ford Foundation driver. We all stood around in the backyard while Dad revved up the little scooter for the first time. As he lurched forward, we suggested that he not drive his new Vespa into the neighbor’s swing set, whereupon he jutted his chin, furrowed his brow, and drove his new Vespa into the neighbors’ swing set.

Refusing my offer of help with his hearing aid, he once told me that he’d rather make his own mistakes than subordinate himself to somebody else’s competence. That somebody else was most often my mother, of course, for whom watching our father try to operate anything more complicated than a soup spoon became an excruciating spectator sport. “But that’s not the way it goes, Champ,” she would eventually blurt from the stands as he endeavored to tighten a screw with a vigorous counterclockwise twist of a steak knife. “Dui,” he’d reply, “don’t you have something to do?” The only time I ever suspected that my parents might be going through a rough patch was the Christmas my mother gave him a chain saw.

It may sound strange to say about so deep a thinker and gifted an athlete as our father, but he had a fundamental problem with cause and effect. Maybe none of the philosophers he studied ever stooped to explain it, for throughout his life the practicalities remained as mysterious, capricious and precarious as God hanging from the heavens by a string.

There was the time he decided to defy the directions for gradually rolling out a new piece of linoleum for a closet floor and gluing it down a little at a time. Instead he decided he would turn it upside down, cover the entire underside with glue, then crawl under it and lift it up. As both ends rolled back not only onto themselves but our father, he blindly staggered into the closet and tried to flip the linoleum over and lay it down all at once. By the time he was done, the wall and our father were covered with glue, as was the top side of the linoleum itself, which set forever bubbled and askew. He once summoned me over to his car to complain that no matter how vigorously he worked the car radio’s on/off switch, it not only kept playing, but at the same volume, until I pointed out that what he was hearing was not the car radio but the transistor radio in his breast pocket.

My own favorite episode involved a trip he took to California years ago. Renting a powder-blue Ford in San Francisco, he drove Mom down to Cambria on the central coast to attend my in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary. After settling into their motel, he returned to the car to find that the key wouldn’t turn in the door lock. Indignant, he called the rental company, which sent an agent down from San Luis Obispo. An hour later, the agent arrived, sized up the situation, and pointed out that the key in question was to Dad’s own car back home; the rental car key worked perfectly. Tipping the man handsomely, our father drove Mom to the party that evening, then back to the motel, and the next morning decided he would wash the car for the scenic return drive to San Francisco. So he filled one of those cardboard ice buckets with water and a dollop of shampoo, and went to work on the car with a fistful of motel Kleenex. After scrubbing the exterior to a spotless shine, he took out his key to open the car and clean the interior when, once again, the key – the rental car key this time -- wouldn’t turn. “God damn it,” he told himself, “I was right.”

But as he was marching back to his motel room to give the rental agency a piece of his mind, a woman in a bathrobe and curlers emerged from the room next door. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but my husband and I just want to thank you so much for washing our car.”

Of course, we would not have known half these stories if he hadn’t told them on himself. I once published an essay about his misadventures with the physical world. Though he took it manfully, he once insisted that I had exaggerated his floundering for comic effect. At the time he said this, he was moving a couple of sprinklers around the yard, and after waiting for the spray from one of them to swing to one side, he rushed to the spigot to turn it off. Unfortunately, it was the spigot to the other hose, and after the wand of water arced back and swept over him, he stood there dripping wet and said, “Well, maybe you’re onto something, after all.”

One afternoon, after heatedly rejecting my wife’s assistance with some gadget, he finally set it down before him and remarked, with sly charm, “and tomorrow I’m going to take up brain surgery.” His self deprecating sense of humor derived from his ability to see things from the other guy’s point of view. A few months ago, Helen and I sat with Mom and Dad bemoaning the fact that no matter how many conditions you might lay down as your teenaged children head out the door with their pals, you really have no way of knowing what they’re actually going to do. I cited the case of a party we allowed our son to attend on condition his friend’s parents would be there, only to learn long afterward that the parents had been drunk. After his sister’s death and my brother’s polio, Dad had come to regard children as “hostages to fortune,” and I thought he might say something sage along those lines. But he just sat there in his bathrobe staring straight ahead and gaping. I remember thinking, Well, the Old Man didn’t hear me, or he didn’t get it: either way... But then, after a long pause, he finally piped up. “You know,” he said, “I’d drink too if I had a house full of teenagers.”

Dad’s empathy was deep-seated. I wondered if it derived in part from the eight years he spent as the pupil of an Oberlin tutor named Hand, a woman of dramatic physical impairments who staggered when she walked and drooled as she slurred and stammered her way through her lessons. But Helen has again found evidence that it was deeper seated still. "You are a thoughtful little man in many ways,” wrote his mother when Dad was only three. On Christmas day, 1914, his Grandmother Otis had come down with the grippe but nevertheless descended the stairs to lie on the couch and watch little Champ open his presents. “You were so kind,” his mother, “and took everything straight to her as soon as you opened it, and it was sweet to see you think of her and show her each gift."

Though his parents could be clannish, our father was not. He welcomed every newcomer warmly, and took equitable interest in all their sundry occupations. After Helen introduced my brother-in-law Allen to him, our father would call Helen to say how impressed he was by him, or call Allen himself just to catch up on all his projects. We cherished Dad’s affection all the more for the way he garnished it with his shrewd humor. Four years ago, he wrote to his Jewish son-in-law that I had just determined that sometime in the not-too-distant past my mother Rachel Duira Baldinger’s Swiss-German forebears had been Jews. “A call from Andy in Switzerland makes it likely that the Baldingers were not only Swiss but Jewish,” he wrote Allen. “So, you thought you'd married a shiksa? So did I. Rachel sends her love with mine.”

Finally there was the matter of our father’s humility. In the summer of 1968, Dad and I were having lunch in a diner where they were showing coverage of the recent assassination of Bobby Kennedy, whom our father greatly admired. A large, dyspeptic man seated a few stools down began loudly to declare that shooting RFK’s assassin would be too good for him. Suddenly my Dad turned on the man and told him that that was exactly the kind of thinking that had killed Martin Luther King and the Kennedy’s in the first place. Chastened, the man withdrew into sullen silence. As we returned to the car, I expressed my respect for what Dad had said. But he was already thinking twice about it. “The poor man obviously loved Robert Kennedy,” he said, shaking his head. “He didn’t need someone like me making him feel worse.”

Now there may have been a hint of false modesty in this, I suppose, or simple discomfort with my praise. But one of the costs of a faith in doubt is that things have a way of rebounding. Nothing is as simple as it seems, he taught us, because how things seem is a function of our own limitations and not of the nature of things themselves. Another consequence of raising your children in the church of doubt is that you wind up not with Indians but chiefs. Let one Ward propose an agenda and the rest of us will first praise its general concept but in the name of efficiency, economy, or sparing someone’s feelings, suggest various contradictory alterations, until all that is left of the original proposal are its cold and eviscerated remains. This was as true of Dad’s proposals as anyone else’s, and there were times when he tried to cut through his progeny’s entangling bright ideas by climbing into the car, turning the key in the ignition, and calling out, “Anybody wants to come with me better get in the car now.”

  It is no accident, however, that his daughter, who of all of us has walked most closely in our father’s footsteps, has spent her life arming herself with hard-won facts to battle the bigotries and moralistic fatuities on which this country has based its treatment of the dispossessed; nor that one underlying purpose of his two sons’ books has been to demonstrate that the past was at least as complex as the present and our ancestors as moral and intelligent and complicated as ourselves. But the most far reaching legacy of our father’s sweetness and his joyful devotion to his wife and children has been the steady, felicitous flowering of our limb of the Ward family tree.

Many of you probably heard the jingle of our father’s keys some time ago. So I’ll close with proof that there was nothing false about our father’s kindness, nor his humility. It comes in the form of a note we think he must have tucked into my mother’s desk just after he agreed to move down to the Health Center to relieve my mother of the burden of his care. But Mom didn’t come upon it until after his death a few weeks later.

Almost entirely blind, our father had taken to writing with a large-tipped magic marker. But by now he could barely make out even its broad strokes. So the note is in a wavering, wayward hand, with here and there a letter missing or a word crossed out. But this is what it says, and here is how his children would like to close:

“Dearest,” it said, “if something dire proves me mortal, I hope you’ll tell friends and family members how much I care for them, and how proud I’ve been to know them. Champ.”