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What was lost

March 17, 2006

Wednesday, 15 March was my father’s birthday.  He has been gone 15 years now.  He died two months short of his 65th birthday.

I often see statistics on the number of people who die prematurely from smoking.  Let me tell you about one of them.

My father was a college professor of Information Science, taught at several universities, and authored several books in the field.  That’s the ‘one-sentence bio’ that leaves out all the important things.

On Wednesday I opened up a ‘Ronson’ lighter gift box that contained a few artifacts he left behind.  Can some essense of a man be represented by things he frequently handled?  Let’s find out:

I couldn’t guess how many generations back in our family the tradition of carrying a pocketknife goes, but he elevated it to an art form.  When he wanted to shape something, like wood, paper, cardboard, and so forth, it seemed to appear in his hand out of nowhere, with the correct blade open.

The knife you see here was his favorite model.  I say, ‘model’ because he wore out many of them – this is the surviving example.  His choice of this model was both esthetic and technical.  He could describe its graceful shape, and the purposes of its three precision hollow-ground blades in as much detail as you might care to absorb.  He knew the exact alloys of which it was made, and the kind of bone handle it had, and he kept it sharp enough to handle – no exaggeration – thousands of creative tasks. 

One summer in Maine, working from illustrations in an old National Geographic he even carved a set of accurate models of various kinds of whales – with his pocketknife.

He often worked on things too small to easily see with the unaided eye, so a magnifier was never far away.  I had one exactly like this as a child – a trick I learned from him.

Though he could operate a backhoe or a welder, his hands were at home in the workings of tiny mechanisms, audio-visual equipment, clocks, and such.  I often saw him using a dental pick to manipulate something far too small for human fingers.

One of his hobbies was restoring antique clocks.  I grew up reading from the S. LaRose catalogue.  It seemed normal to me that you could buy clock parts and movements, special tools, ultrasonic cleaning machines, and exotic lubricants.  As a child I didn’t realize that was unusual.

He also restored antique guns.  He didn’t do much shooting in The War (as a SeaBee truck driver) but he made up for it afterward.  He was a lifetime NRA member, but in the end I think he just liked guns because they are so cleverly designed. 

Another object that seemed to spring to his hand from nowhere was his Parker pen.  Any nearby piece of paper was his blackboard as he would sketch out an explanation or do arithmetic.

I remember a pack trip we once took in the mountains in Washington.  Twenty miles or so out, he took a tumble off his horse and broke his right wrist.  It was too late to go back, and to make matters worse, the other man with whom we were travelling had lost his bearings and couldn’t find the trail that led to the lake where we would camp. 

So we rode on, and my father, whose sense of direction never failed him, found the lake.  We camped peacefully that night, though I am sure he did not sleep with his broken wrist.  The next morning we rode back to town and found the hospital.  During his recovery, he learned to be ambidextrous.

I gave him this lighter – it was so slim it would fit between the cigarette pack and the cellophane.  He loved it.

Finding himself alone at 55, he began to wander.  He learned to fly a sailplane.  He filled in at various universities for professors who were on sabbatical.  He went to Malaysia to work on an Archaelogical dig.  Having written several textbooks in his professional life, he wrote a science fiction novel.

My father, Raymond Victor Wiman, Jr., PhD, was an expert photographer who believed in graphic communication long before it was fashionable.  An amateur historian, he posessed encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War and of Native American culture.  He was endlessly creative, always fixing something in a novel way, building and inventing. 

He was more likely to spend time with the projectionist or janitor than at a faculty party, and his best friend was an engineer from Moccasin, California. He was certainly not a perfect man; his own temper was an echo of his father’s temper and his grandfather’s.  He knew this, suffered from it, but toward the end his personal demons seemed to have done enough, and backed away.  He was a religious man without the comfort of a working religion and he was most comfortable outdoors in “God’s country.”  He was not widely known outside educational media circles but was a most extraordinary human being.

And yet, he was not uncommon.  The fact is there are extraordinary people all around us; we just don’t always know about them.  I often meet people whose restless intellects and hands give the lie to any notion of a slowdown in human creativity.  They may build things, invent things, write poetry, cook, compose music, or a thousand other things. 

The cliche claims that ‘time heals all wounds’ but that is simply untrue.  As my father’s death recedes farther into the past, I feel the loss as strongly as ever.  Usually this happens when I wish I could ask him a question, or tell him something funny that happened.  Then it is as if I am hearing the news again for the first time.

Statistics are about ‘society’, but such common, extraordinary people as my father also populate the statistics of fatalities while tobacco companies continue to sell their aromatic poison.  The sad part is, these companies are now ratcheting up exports to third-world nations and emerging superpowers alike.  Overseas where there are no clear laws against giving cigarettes to children, American tobacco is becoming the lifetime addiction of choice.

I am not proposing a solution.  But if there are any young people in your life who smoke, and if you have any ‘pull’ with them, consider it one battle worth fighting.  You never know just how extraordinary they may turn out to be. 

Categories: Personal
  1. March 18, 2006 at 02:55 | #1

    Don’t kid yourself DOF.  I work with you and I can attest to your intellect.  I would consider you to be an extraordinary individual, and after reading about your father I can tell where your ingenuity comes from.  I have not worked with you for very long but already I have learned a lot.  I know it seems silly but the drawer that I cleaned up was the DOF coming out of me.

    I am sorry to hear about your loss its truly unfortunate.  I always give smokers I know a hard time, sometimes too hard, but its out of love more so than anything else.  My father used to smoke and as kids we would anger him greatly by hiding and throwing away his cigarettes.  After a couple years he finally got the hint and gave it up.  I wish I could get others, that mean a lot to me, to do the same, but Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on Earth.

  2. March 18, 2006 at 07:11 | #2

    I lost my father to lung cancer although it did not get him until he was a month shy of 84 years old.

    I do not smoke-anymore. However, as a neo libertarian I cannot join in the government led fight against tobacco and the tobacco companies because I believe in freedom and that believe includes the belief that a person has the right to abuse one’s body in any manner that he/she sees fit.  Should we outlaw fat foods because they are not healthy? Should we outlaw automobiles because of accidents? Should we outlaw cowboy boots because they can cause ingrown toenails? Once the door is opened to force us to protect ourselves from one self abuse then what is next? There are already lawsuits against fast food places because of unhealthy food. Will we sue Zebco because the fish we caught and ate had mercury in them?

  3. March 18, 2006 at 09:11 | #3

    Reading your posts the character of McGyver came to mind.  Your ability to take something and turn it into a working unit to fit the need at hand has been fascinating.  After reading a little of your father’s life I now understand your ability a little better.  I envy this and look forward to other ‘inventions’ that necessity will dictate.

  4. March 18, 2006 at 09:21 | #4

    Personally, I would sue Zebco because I can’t catch any fish with their reels.  OK, this wasn’t meant to hijack this thread.

    I wish I’d known Ray Wiman.  I met him once, and was impressed with his calm comfort with himself.

  5. March 18, 2006 at 11:45 | #5

    Personally my fishing tackle consists of a rock.  I sit on the rock and enjoy being next to the stream.  If a fish wants to jump up on the rock and become my dinner, so much the better. ;-)

  6. March 18, 2006 at 15:20 | #6

    I sit in my canoe and call “Here, fishy, fishy, fishy.”  This is why I go to the store and buy salmon.

  7. March 18, 2006 at 16:09 | #7

    I only caught one fish and what appeared to be a tire, couldn’t exactly tell before the line broke.  And my dad made me throw the fish back :( .

  8. March 18, 2006 at 20:25 | #8

    I was 7 months old when I lost my mother.  It’s a pretty sure thing I don’t consciously remember her.  But subconsciously?  I can’t say; how can anyone?  I have a few photos, and I retain some statements by her friends, her foster parents, about her.  If they are even half true, she was the most wonderful woman who ever lived.

    How do you mourn someone you can’t even picture in your memory?  I don’t know, but every day, I do.

  9. March 18, 2006 at 21:28 | #9

    Nicely done. I too still feel the loss, and this is a wound that mellows and matures like fine wine but does not heal. Hardly a day goes by that I do not think of my dad. Oddly, my mom just mailed me some photos of him, kind of out of the blue. I not only miss him for my own sake, I often think about how much he would have enjoyed being a grandfather, and what my sister’s kids missed by not having him around.

  10. March 20, 2006 at 10:10 | #10

    Wow.  That was really well written tribute to an amazingly diverse man.  He sounds like he would be a gas to get to know.  That personality
    (and values) really rubbed off well on you; being around people like that (and you, dof :) ) are reasons why I adore being in academia.  When the pay is for crap compared to Industry, I always count my blessings of being around people that are incredibly interesting and have an environment to foster that innovation in.

  11. Radi
    March 20, 2006 at 14:09 | #11

    You’ve opened my never-really-healed wound with this most moving post, DOF.  My father died almost 17 years ago, when I was in my mid-teens.  Even now, not a day goes by that I don’t miss him, and there are days when just the thought of him makes me cry (and run for a quiet spot somewhere so I can cry in peace and calm down enough to not get strange looks in public).

  12. abhilasha
    March 20, 2006 at 19:40 | #12

    Thanks for sharing the post with us…the pictures of the treasures were pretty cool and so were the stories with each one of them..

    This post made me think of my father and sround 100 emails from my papa (over the course of last three years) My father actually learned typing on the computer at the age of 60 only so that he could email me regularly and keep in touch….

    Boy,…Now i wish I had written more and called less…so that I could have had more and more to go back to…But then…its never enough..right ?

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