1.
A couple years ago, members of our book club visited Wally Stevens in Minnetonka at the assisted living facility where he lived with his wife, Pat. For about twenty years, Wally hosted our meetings in his big house on the 4th Street in Austin. But his vision failed and old age made him frail and, so, he had to depart from his home and move to the west suburbs of Minneapolis. One of his daughters, herself a prominent politician (Democratic representative to the House of Representatives, District 49A) lived in the vicinity. I was raised in Eden Prairie, an adjacent suburb, about two miles from where Wally found himself living – my mother still resides in the house where I grew up. Because I lived near Wally’s place in Minnetonka, I thought I knew the area. But things had changed in the 45 years since I was familiar with this neighborhood. Nothing endures.
The assisted living condominium was to the east of Interstate 494, the old loop highway and bypass to the metropolitan area. Of course, the freeway is now embedded in a sprawl of suburbs that makes a great, diffuse halo around the Twin Cities. This part of Minnetonka is full of steep hills and, in fact, Wally’s daughter lives on the wooded knoll that is the highest point in the county. When I was growing up, the terrain around the straight bore of the interstate beltway was difficult and had not be developed. The hills were cratered with hollows full of wetlands and small spring-fed lakes, cold slate-grey water cupped in yellow depressions between the ridges. Where the country had been cleared, staked fields of raspberries were planted. A straight-edge of railroad tracks clung to an embankment that arrowed through acres of woods where you could still hunt for deer in the nineteen-seventies. Along the winding country lanes, sinister-looking driveways barred by rusty gates led across barren, scabby places to gravel pit. Bee hives that looked like limestone tombstones stood in clearings and old dairy farms with ancient lathe barns were tucked up against the sheer, brush covered moraines. It was a sort of wilderness where the steep slopes and the swamps repelled development, at least during the time I lived there and, then, for another decade thereafter.
But it’s all built up now and Wally’s townhouse stood among residential cul-de-sacs and big glass-walled office buildings adorning the tops of the hills – these business places are called “campuses” now and the handsome corporate headquarters rose over shady jogging trails with picnic tables scattered among the oaks and maple trees. Some of the rugged, wet terrain remained ungraded, undrained, pits full of bog water enveloped in brown marsh. From Wally’s dining room, I could look down and see a boardwalk floating on the bog, a walking path that looped around the swamp. Birds flickered below, darting from place to place in the marsh. It was a pretty view, the distant corporate buildings at the end of winding roads mostly masked from view. An escarpment of new high-rise apartments hung like a pale glass and steel curtain over the swamp.
“It’s such a nice view,” I remarked. Wally was leaning on his silver tripod-shaped cane attending to something in his dining room.
“How would I know,” he said. “I’m blind and can’t see anything.”
Members of our group arrived and we ate some cheese and crackers and, then, discussed the book. I no longer recall what it was. Wally had a good memory and he kept track of the books we had read over the twenty years that we met at his house. He wrote down the names of these works and their authors. The document looked like a spread sheet. Wally was trained in accounting and, during his career, he worked at Hormel Foods as the chief executive in its financial department. He liked keeping track of accounts and managing the company’s money. Once, he showed me a spread sheet that he had constructed to monitor the cost of energy in his home – he had his utilities calculated to the penny per kilowatt hour.
2.
The first time I was introduced to Wally, we quarreled about Bob Fosse’s movie adaptation of Cabaret. Wally was an expert on musical theater and a particular admirer of Stephen Sondheim. He liked Cabaret as well.
We watched the movie as part of a Summer supplement, as it were, to the Great Books program in which I participated. I remember the room at the Community College where we screened the picture. I came to the showing armed with Pauline Kael’s dismissive review of Cabaret which I parroted in the discussion after the movie. I didn’t know Wally, even by reputation, at that time. Pretty quickly, he began to dispute what I was saying. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and felt that I was overbearing and pretentious and mistaken in my assessment of the film. There was a sharp exchange. You had to be careful with your diction when talking in Wally Steven’s presence – you couldn’t use “unique” with any sort of qualifier without earning his rebuke; if you used “hopefully” as an adjective instead of a adverb he called you on it. The encounter was memorable – you didn’t forget a debate with Wally Stevens. It was like plowing into a deeply rooted tree or running into a wall.
3.
A little later, after this inauspicious first encounter, I had another brush with Wally. At that time, I was serving on a Board that directed Community Education in Austin. This organization underwrote Summerset Theater, a community enterprise in which local people performed under the direction of the instructors in theater arts at the two-year community college. One of the shows had gone far over budget and there was a hue and cry afoot about wasting the Community Ed money, funds that had some connection to the School District, and, so, a proposal was bruited about dissolving the theater group and returning it’s activities to the college. This was a controversial measure and, at the meeting before the vote, Wally appeared with several other people who had performed in Summerset shows. Wally made a pitch to retain the theater as a community amenity. He introduced himself with a slight tincture of false humility as a “mere spear-carrier” and a “supernumerary” in the plays presented by Summerset.
Despite his arguments, the Community Ed board voted to dissolve Summerset Theater. But, a few years, later the teachers at the Community College no longer wanted responsibility for the arduous summer programming, three shows distributed between late June, July, and mid-August. So I was called-upon to reincorporate the endeavor again and restore the program to operation under its own non-profit board. So Wally’s side of the argument had, as it were, the “last laugh.”
4.
Wally must have forgiven me for my misdeeds. When the Hormel Company and the research facility, also operated under that name (Hormel) by the University of Minnesota, wanted to bring internet to Austin, Wally was part of that organization. The non-profit was called Southern Minnesota Internet Group, also known as SMIG. Wally asked me to join the Board of the non-profit and, of course, when an eminent fellow like Walter B. Stevens, an important executive at a Fortune 500 company, asked you to serve, you didn’t turn him down.
SMIG was successful. At first, the enterprise had a monopoly with respect to internet access and services in Austin and Mower County. Subscriptions accounted for a budget that approached a half-million dollars. I had incorporated the Company and, acted in a de facto capacity as its legal advisor. But I’m primarily a litigator, specializing in the defense of fire and explosion cases, employment law, and personal injury. So I doubted my competency to advise a non-profit internet carrier that had become, in effect, a big business – “big”, that is, as far as I was concerned. Wally and his colleagues on the Board weren’t intimidated by the numbers that I found daunting. They were used to thinking in large sums of money. But, after a few years, when SMIG was, at its height, my term on the Board lapsed and I didn’t ask to remain as a Director. SMIG continued for twenty or more years, gradually losing customers to the larger, more competitive, internet providers that had entered the market. About four years ago, one of the first directors, a research scientist at the Hormel Institute (an internationally famous laboratory that studies cancer) contacted me and asked that I dissolve the company. There were still a few dollars in its accounts, money that reverted to the State of Minnesota when the non-profit was dissolved. Corporations like human beings have lives with a beginning, middle, and an end. I brought SMIG into existence by incorporating it and developing its by-laws and, in the end, I filed the papers brought the non-profit to an end.
5.
Wally lived in a distinctive white house on 4th Street. The street leads from the cemetery on the outskirts of town, across the interstate, and, then, past several mansions near the public high school (and the Catholic school), fronting St. Augustine’s, the parish church for downtown Austin, and, then, running south to the riverside park with the bandshell and, across the water, a small concrete ballfield. This is the center of things in Austin, at least, as once construed and Wally’s place was at the center of the center.
The home faced 4th Street with a facade dressed-up like a mansion house on an antebellum plantation. The white porch sported white columns and there was a bulls-eye oculus in the attic above the upper story. Wally had renovated a broad garage built into the side of the structure into a library, a warm and inviting room on a lower split-level below the home’s kitchen. It was in this room that we met. The place felt spacious with a high ceiling and walls lined with built-in bookshelves and, atop those shelves, in a conspicuous zodiacal band running around the upper perimeter of the room, Wally’s wife, Patricia, displayed her collection of fine china, bone-white delicate vessels on which were traced faint floral patterns. These pale ceramics, glazed to a mirror-like sheen, were an emblem for Pat, who was herself, similarly, pale, delicate, and elegant.
It had been an elite neighborhood before the new Company executives, arriving 20 years after Wally built their McMansions around the town’s periphery. 4th Street near downtown was where you lived in the forties so that you could walk to work at the Plant Headquarters or, if you were a physician, walk to the hospital and clinic about three blocks away. Some of the homes lining the street were old with little carriage houses at the edges of their lots or renovated stables along the back fence-line. There was one home constructed like a outsized British cottage, a vast and heavy shingled roof threatening to swallow up the whole structure. This place was a gift to the bride of a Hormel executive, a member, indeed, of the family that had founded the slaughterhouse business and, later, a famous local doctor lived in the home. Two or three blocks to the north of Wally’s place on 4th Street, there was a grim nursing home, a thing of darkness, occupying the manor where the famous poet Richard Eberhart had lived when he was a boy. The house had brick walls and stood apart from the street facing into a neighborhood with a little grassy sward in the middle of the street, a diminutive boulevard, and other Victorian-era mansions surrounding the quiet lane. At one time, the Eberhart estate occupied 40 acres there with woods and ponds and a river – the estate was called Bur Oaks, the name of the poet’s first published volume of verse.
Eberhart’s boyhood friend, Roger Catherwood, lived in another mansion a block or two south of Wally’s home, an elaborate home, also with white facade, anchored by a round tower. Roger Catherwood, whom I knew slightly as a young man, was a real estate lawyer and a poet himself – he wrote sonnets and other highly formal verse – one of his sonnets was read at his funeral. Samuel Doak Catherwood, Roger’s father, was George Hormel’s best friend and the company’s lawyer. He was a figure that you might imagine in a novel by Booth Tarkington, courtly and distinguished and, probably, a bit stern – in those days, lawyers didn’t specialize: Samuel Catherwood tried cases, was elected to be County Attorney, filed taxes for his clients, and worked as Hormel’s corporate attorney. The children of the elite in Austin before World War Two attended Ivy League Schools: Eberhart went to Dartmouth and Harvard; Roger Catherwood attended Yale or Harvard (I don’t know which). Roger Catherwood’s correspondence with his boyhood chum, Richard Eberhart is preserved in the Dartmouth archives.
In the old days, 4th Street was called Kenwood and it was the best address in Austin and this was where Wally lived. Before he left his home to live in Minnetonka, Wally invited us to his library where he gave away his books. I chose a volume by Richard Eberhart, published in paperback by New Directions. During his long life (he died at 101),Eberhart won every prize that a poet could win. He wrote cautious, conventional modernist poetry, most famously “The Ground Hog,” an estimable poem about death – the writer comes upon a decomposing ground hog in the midst of summer’s abundance: the verse ends with a flurry of allusions including “Montaigne in his tower / St. Theresa in her wild lament.” That poem along with “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” were once much anthologized and, when I was a young man, often taught in college or, even, high school. The volume of Eberhart’s “Selected Poems’ was rather cheaply printed and the book was old with brittle paper. After I read it, the pages detached and fell from the volume like leaves from an autumnal tree.
6.
After a few years, the participants in our Great Books group sat in a certain configuration – it was as if we had assigned seats in Wally’s library, although, of course, no one had made any formal designations. I sat to the right of Wally. He occupied a throne-like chair. I think he tooled-up for our meetings with an after-dinner drink. When our discussion of the book petered-out, he would, then, sip another couple of stiff drinks. Wally drank scotch, more or less neat, cooled by an ice-cube. He had a curious glass, built like a puzzle, so that the container and its fluid seemed to be sloping away from his lips and, even, in danger of spilling out on the floor – it was an illusion managed by the shape of the vessel.
In his later years, Wally had a little difficulty managing the steps leading down to the library from the level of his kitchen and the elegant rooms on the first floor of his house. It was easier for him to ask someone to replenish his drink. I sometimes did this for him as did other members of our group. Pat was almost always present, watching over Wally. She disapproved of too much drinking and, so, we had to be prudent and circumspect when we filled Wally’s peculiarly shaped glass. If the dose was too much, Pat would view us as contributing to Wally’s delinquency – it was not that she said anything, but her disapprobation was obvious if you knew her. Certainly, she was too polite and discreet to say anything overt – she and Wally were always the perfect hosts for these gatherings.
We didn’t know the rest of the house. One of our members, Jim McDermott, was a plumber and he had seen other places in the home. But I had no sense of the residence’s lay-out. Once a year, at Christmas time, we were given a short tour of the formal dining room and the front part of the home’s ground floor so that we could see the tasteful, and elaborate, display of holiday ornaments and decorations and Wally’s pale, flocked tree. My impression was of long drapes, muted carpets, expensive furniture with arrays of tinsel and icy blue lights in the white-dusted foliage.
7.
Once when we were in Wally’s library discussing a book (Celine, I think, Death on the Installment Plan), we heard a wild, panicked wail. It sounded like a damned soul crying out from the depths of the house. I asked about the cry and Wally said that he was watching a dog for one of his children and that the poor beast, a poodle mix of some kind, was blind and demented. The dog was exiled to the cellar and it was distressed, whining and howling. I was curious and asked to see the dog.
The steps down to Wally’s basement were next to the refrigerator stocked with his scotch in the kitchen. The cellar had old walls and perilous-looking steps and, on the concrete floor, I saw a shaggy dog, trotting in a tight circle around a drain in the floor. The dog was crying out in anguished tones that could be mistaken for a baby’s wail or the sobbing of a small child. The dog ran in circles and trembled, circling in the light of a naked bulb overhead.
“Can anything be done for him?” I asked.
Wally shook his head sadly and said that, after a while, the dog would get tired of chasing its tail and, then, quiet down. The animal had to run in circles because it was blind and would otherwise bang into things.
We went back to the library to finish our discussion. Wally had his post-conversation drink. I don’t recall if the dog quieted down or not.
8.
Most of all, I remember Wally as being solid. He was a big man and stout. His head was square, a broad, meaty expanse with a bulbous nose. He wore glasses and retained most of his hair. He seemed immoveable – probably this was the reason he had played center in college when he attended Grinnell College in Iowa. You couldn’t budge him.
And nothing really changed about him. At Wally’s funeral in Edina, I saw poster-boards covered with his favorite cartoons from The New Yorker – he apparently cut out the cartoons and kept them. Of course, there were many pictures of Wally, including some taken when he was a three-year old child. An alarming picture showed Wally scowling at the camera, showing his “war face” like a Maori warrior. In that photograph, Wally looks like a menacing brick wall, big and rectangular with hard edges wearing his Air Force uniform. Wally didn’t really age. He was instantly recognizable in every photograph whether taken when he was a pre-schooler or made in the year or two before his death. There was something unyielding and obdurate about him.
This same quality was reflected in the tributes spoken about him at the funeral celebration. It was obvious that everyone was describing the same person, a man with qualities and characteristics that were obvious to anyone who encountered him. The sense I had was that the speakers were describing a mountain peak or a waterfall – the focus was a little different with each speaker and the perspective varied but the man under consideration was indisputably one thing and not another. Often at funerals, one has the sense that the eulogies are somehow false or contrived. This was not the case at the obsequies for Wally Stevens. The force of his personality was only a little dimmed by his death but unmistakably clear.
9.
Wally’s ethnic stock was Mitteleuropaisch – Latvian or Lithuanian or Estonian, something on that order. He was a “square-head” from south Chicago. It’s not surprising that he became a top-ranking executive in a meat-packing company. There was a very slight whiff of the Chicago stockyards about him. At the funeral, I learned that Wally’s mother worked at a tavern on the south side, on some desolate stretch of one of the city’s endless north-south avenues. In Chicago, you can stand in the middle of a street running north and south and look as far as the eye can see, down the flat broad avenue to the grey vanishing point on the horizon. It’s all open and the perspective is like some kind of experiment in disciplining space, an endless recession of intersections, stop lights, and squat brick buildings running away from you to the edge of the prairie buried under the city and suburbs. Wally lived above the tavern where his mother worked and, when he was a child, he pulled beer and served sandwiches on the weekends to the working men who frequented the bar. I imagine the place under Chicago’s humid, murky skies, gutters always running with dirty water and patches of soiled snow lining the sidewalks.
Wally’s mother must have been indestructible. I recall that she was oldest person in the world to survive West Nile disease, a mosquito born illness. She came down with that sickness when she was 99 or something on that order. Wally was thinking about mortality when he told us about his mother’s bout with West Nile. He filled out a form in my presence that night, after discussing the book we were reading. The form donated Wally’s body to medical science. I witnessed Wally’s signature on the document as did my close friend, Terry Dilley, the man who had founded the book club.
I told Wally that his body would be a boon to medical science – “Undoubtedly, you will be their finest specimen.” Wally sipped his drink and was momentarily silent. But, then, his characteristic high spirits returned and he became once more the wise-ass and jovial Chicago city-slicker, practical, sardonic, and plain-spoken, that was his ordinary persona.
10.
Terry Dilley and I used to marvel that Wally, a man of sophisticated taste and culture, had been imprisoned for his whole career at the Hormel Company. I don’t think Wally thought about his work for the meat packing company in those terms and he would undoubtedly protest this characterization. But the Hormel Company, which butchers hogs and puts their meat in cans, was not a place so much hostile to intelligence and culture as indifferent to those qualities. I understand Wally a little through the lens of my own father, a man who was three years younger than him: my father was born in 1936; Wally was a 1933 baby. These were tough guys who did their duty and drew a grievously sharp distinction between work and their private lives. They went to their jobs, concentrated on the tasks required of them, and didn’t let their families or personal lives interfere with their role in the world – which was to be a worker, a bread-winner, a cog in the industrial army. My father loved Dixieland jazz, stamps, and watching television – he watched TV late into the night, mostly alone, eating a Totino’s frozen pizza that he had cooked for himself with a bottle of Coke. Wally was an admirer of Broadway musicals, who attended the Minneapolis Symphony on a subscription basis, subscribed as well to The New Yorker (as did my father) and read history for entertainment. Terry and I imagined that he must have felt out-of-place at work. But, in those days, you left your tastes and interests at home when you went to your job. You checked your culture and taste and sophistication at the door before you trudged to your desk in the corporate headquarters. So it didn’t really matter, I suppose, on a day-by-day basis that Wally labored, I would suppose, among other executives who didn’t share any of his interests (except baseball maybe) and would have been surprised by the sorts of things that interested him. Without a doubt, Wally knew about the hard labor in construction or on the kill floor or digging ditches and was pleased to work in a business suit with a white collar.
In some respects, Wally led a divided existence – corporate executive versus big-city guy, even gad-fly and dilettante with sophisticated urban tastes – he liked Robert Benchley and Thurber, knew a score of poems by Ogden Nash by heart and read e.e. cummings (a taste he shared with my father). Marx imagined that, after the class wars were won and the proletariat had triumphed, men would be free of the burden of dehumanizing labor – they would write poetry at dawn, tend their sheep in the afternoon, and engage in dialectical criticism in the afternoon before going to the theater or a concert or (today) watching TV. Wally lived long enough to enjoy a little of this Utopian existence. When he left the Company and retired, it seemed that he shut off the switch that powered the diligent and aggressive corporate executive and spent the last part of his life in different pursuits. I admired the fact that he seemed to have made a clean break with Hormel, although who knows what effect that packing plant had on the shape of his life and the possibilities that he imagined for himself. He didn’t seem to be a man with any regrets and, so, our solicitude for Wally’s life spent as Walter B. Stevens, a financial officer in a highly responsible job at Hormel Foods was not something that he shared – no one was farther from self-pity and its indulgences than Wally.
11.
Wally was full of names and dates. He had a prodigious memory which never deserted him even in his old age. He knew the sequence of battles in the Civil War and names of the generals who had fought in those battles as well as the political and strategic context and consequences of those fights. He knew innumerable toasts, jokes, puns and witticisms. One of his favorite toasts was to wish “ Here’s to champagne for my real friends and real pain for my sham friends,” an example of the rhetorical figure of a chiasmus. (At Wally’s funeral, the toast was quoted but with hasty apologies to the effect that, of course, the dear departed would never have wished “real pain” on anyone.) He knew by heart some soliloquies from Hamlet as well as many aphorisms. In the best and, most accurate, use of the term, he was a “know-it-all,” someone who always had a bon mot for every occasion. I think he knew the capitols of every state in the Union and, of course, was proud that he had set foot in all fifty states as well. Like my father, when he attended baseball games he carefully filled out a scorecard and thought that only a slacker would watch the game without scoring it. He knew the presidents and their vice-presidents in chronological order. He admired Stephen Sondheim and had carefully considered opinions on each of that composer’s musicals. He liked to rank things by order or date or quality. Each evening that we spent with him, Wally invariably reverted in conversation to his salad days at Grinnell College and the courtship of his wife – Pat had been a cheerleader and Wally wooed and won her after a notable game in which he had been slightly wounded: he had an open cut under his eye when he importuned her for a date. It certainly seemed that the most memorable moments in Wally’s life and the recollections that he most treasured occurred when he was in college. But he wasn’t trapped in the past. My father once returned a kick-off for a run of 102 yards at a high school football game played in Valentine, Nebraska. Photographs published in his small town’s local paper in Albion, Nebraska proved that this heroic event had, indeed, occurred and, sometimes, as children we pored over the printed accounts of my father’s great kick-off return. But my father also had read Irwin Shaw’s short story “The Eighty-yard Run” and made his children read that work as well, expressing his concern about nostalgia and living in a world in which your best days were behind you. Wally knew that story also – I think all men of his generation who had been athletes (and they were all athletes of one kind or another) knew that story – and was similarly cautious about the past. He preferred to dwell upon the accomplishments of his grandchildren, a topic that faced the future which he favored (I’m afraid) at tedious length. All his grandchildren were scholars and sportsmen and remarkably accomplished – they were chess masters and world champion spellers and award winning in every endeavor in which they engaged, handsome people employed by top-notch law firms as top-notch lawyers. It was more than a little annoying but an old man must be indulged and we listened patiently as Wally sang their praises. He didn’t like gossip or malice; I never heard him say anything unkind about anyone, preferring, it seemed, to pass over the crimes and misdemeanors of others in silence. Despite our inquiries, he kept the Company’s secrets. No doubt, he knew a lot of scandal about the operation of meat-packing company, but he never said a word about these things, never expressed any overt criticism of management or for that matter the rank-and-file work force. He had taken the company’s wages and his name was on its paychecks and, so, he would have regarded it as disloyalty or, even, treason, to murmur a critical word about his former employer. The Company had made him rich, at least, as far as the aspirations of a kid who had once pulled beer at a tavern on South Kedzie, and Wally seemed grateful for his station in life.
I’m told that on every Fourth of July, Wally played the Broadway cast album from the musical 1776. In later years, I suppose he and his family watched the video of that show. There was a scrawny old man who worked out at a gym that Wally sometimes frequented. He was a nondescript old man, unimpressive so far as I could see, but Wally knew that the man had fought in the retreat from Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War and he revered the old soldier. At Wally’s funeral, several grandchildren, dressed in their Boy Scout uniforms, marched to the front of chapel where we were gathered. The children earnestly set on the table an American flag folded as per official protocol 13 times into a triangular pillow. Next to the boxed triangular flag, they set down a dark blue and yellow can of SPAM.
12.
Wally’s daughter, Christy asked me to speak at his funeral. Here is what I said:
“I must confess that I didn’t know Walter B. Stevens very well. By reputation, he was a corporate executive, a captain of industry, prudent, cautious and diligent. He took care of the company’s money. His name was on the payroll checks that funded our town. No doubt, Mr. Stevens was an excellent fellow but a bit remote, even Olympian.
The man I knew called himself Wally Stevens. For two decades, our great books group met at his house on 4th Street, maybe 30 times a year. We discussed literature in Wally’s library, among his books and under the gleaming display of Pat’s fine chinaware placed beyond the reach of our slightly inebriated and negligent hands. Wally and Pat’s hospitality was unfailing and generous. It’s a mundane observation, but important: you can’t have a successful book group unless you have a welcoming and reliable place to meet. And Wally together with Pat bestowed that gift upon us – the group probably wouldn’t have survived but for the generosity of our hosts.
But, beyond this gratitude for the warm and inviting library and the drinks and hors d’ouevres, I want to recall Wally’s indomitable presence, his provocative comments, his occasional combativeness, and the wealth of ideas and memories that he shared with us. As you all certainly know, Wally was a rarity, not only in my packing plant town, but everywhere else as well – he was a man of true culture; he was civilized and tolerant, broad-minded with eclectic tastes and interests. Like the best people, I think, he inspected the world from a slightly askew perspective.
Wally contained multitudes – he owned every book written by the humorist Peter Devries, knew Broadway show tunes, and could regale us with soliloquies by Shakespeare – sometimes, he would astonish us by declaiming “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” – he made those vowels moan and roar. He was like a wit at the Algonquin club and had by heart, perhaps, too many off-color poems by Dorothy Parker.
And, of course, Wally was a great student of history: he remembered the generals who had led troops in battles in the Civil War, was an admirer of Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, and could list the names of every American vice-president in the order in which they had served. Wally told us that when he was unable to sleep, he would number the VeePees and list them one after another until slumber claimed him. Who would have imagined that a lullaby could be composed of the names of dead politicians.
At a moment like this, it’s best to honor Wally by recalling the great gift of his conversation, his penetrating intelligence, and his kindness. He was a blessing to us. In his honor, I would like to summon that perfect repose, that sleep unvexed by dreams by naming for you Adams and Jefferson, of course, vice-president Adams and vice-president Jefferson and Aaron Burr and George Clinton and Elbridge Gerry and all that semi-illustrious company of vice-presidents, but I don’t know their names and could never list them in the right order. So rest in peace, my brother. Rest in peace, my friend.”
13.
I have always been deferential to older men and sought their praise. This may have something to do with the way I was treated by my father. He told me that I was an idiot and a fool and that I would never succeed at any endeavor that required courage or fortitude. He said that I would certainly fail as a lawyer because I wasn’t sufficiently competitive. In his world, men competed with one another for wealth and prestige. Weaklings and losers were afraid to throw their hat into the ring. It was okay to get into a fistfight and lose, but despicable to avoid fighting. Wally was reared in the same world but he seemed to me to be kinder and more tolerant of the many different ways that a person might choose to be in his or her life.
Once, after a meeting of SMIG, Wally invited me to go with him to Torge’s Bar. This was a small sports bar with signed pictures of athletes, mostly from the University of Minnesota, on the wall. The bar was empty. In the adjacent room, some middle-aged couples were finishing their steak or walleye dinners, but there was no one in the tavern except the Korean-born waitress who stood silently behind the bar watching us drink. Wally ordered top-shelf scotch. He told me that he appreciated that I had incorporated the Southern Minnesota Internet Group and was willing to serve as a director of non-profit. He bought me several drinks.
A couple years later, Wally asked me to go with him to the Country Club to sample various types of scotch. I don’t have trained taste-buds and so I couldn’t really distinguish between the different malts on offer. Wally was very jovial and happy. He shared with me some of the things he knew about scotch and joshed around with the young woman who was pouring the samples. It was a nice experience.
These experiences made me very happy and I remember those occasions with great warmth and gratitude.
13.
Like many men of his generation, Wally was stoic and didn’t talk about his infirmities. Perhaps, he was slightly ashamed of them. Both he and Pat were cancer survivors.
Wally told us one night that a few years earlier he was undergoing some kind of cancer treatment that was dangerous to his eyes. He had to endure the treatment wearing a blindfold. He said that the darkness made him feel afraid and lonely. Then, a nurse came and held his hand. Wally said that this made all the difference in the world and that the feel of her hand cheered him up immensely.
October 17, 2024
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