from his first daughter, Sandra (nicknamed Sha Sha )
As I float through the vast clouds today on this airplane I remember times with my Dad, if now his presence is floating in an out of the different shades of blue and white. I see him as an angel in a book I remember as a child “the littlest angel “on a cloud jumping from one cotton cloud to the other dissolving into the vastness above us and around.... bringing us closer.
Frederic Butler Higbie a veteran of the navy during World War 2, broker for Merrill Circle (the top 75), White Weld, & Company, Wachovia, primarily skilled with investments in oil, an avid piano player of popular music during gatherings. He was partly self made as in those days you didnt a need fancy education to succeed. His drive and what he loved to do made him.
He also loved attention, Birthdays, Holidays, family gatherings, and the market, sports, and all kinds of information. He was warm and enduringly expansive and I always got a call every holiday and recently every chance we got. My only sadness was I was going to call him the day I got to Quebec for a performance job but I had no reception and he had his stroke, that evening.
Through my 60 or so years of having my Dad from the time I was born in Michigan in 1952 to his move to San Francisco in 1958, through to the divorce of my mum then Julie Higbie, I was shared time between my mum and my Dad between Chicago and SF. I always used to love visiting my Dad when I was 6-10 years old, as I would be able to get away with anything, which usually meant hours in the playroom upstairs building mazes and fantasy worlds with peek boxes and cut outs, making paper birds, and pasting flower stickers on all the walls. I loved drawing birds and cutting them out. My Mum tried to limit the number of birds made by only allowing 100 marked with brads. But my Dad would let me fill up trunks of them without counting. My mum tried to control my obsessions, but My Dad didn't seem to notice or worry, he seemed to have remembered his train set that he spread throughout the house (refer to “track” story).
When I was 6 years old, My Dad just let me do anything I wanted and happy I could keep my self-occupied. We were both just “one more thing” type people. It wasn’t until I picked all the pansies and flowers in his backyard and was selling them on the street in front of his house, THAT he really noticed. That was one of the few times I remember as a child I saw him mad. He never got mad, only just huffs …a Very stable man.
I never played golf but he always told me fondly that when he took me out on a golf cart as a child, I asked him where the birdie was and will it sing, couldn't it fly?
Then through the 1960s throughout his marriage to Helen Bashford Kennett, which happened after his mothers passing Yaddie in 1956, (a lady of Louisville, Kentucky) and his father, He lived in a big 30-room house on Broadway in San Francisco with a bohemian folk singer. She provided my Dad an interesting interlude up with a mountain cabin near the Dardanelles on HI way 4? It had 20 beds under the stars. She collected obsidian rocks. Even my step dad, Jim, came to help build a water tank as he had helped Bash on a folk singing TV show for children. She shared my Dads love of music and we would sit around campfires. They went to Cabo san Lucas and he luxuriated at the Palmira Hotel while we went down to Baja in a jeep went there was still just a dirt road near Bahia de Las mujeres near an island of Tiburon, then a beautiful unspoilt place with a few brightly painted cement cube buildings on the beach with just sand and a sunset and piñatas. My Dad also flew up there with the plane, what a lovely life he had.
I used to love those drives to the mountains in the gold country, and we would go to Chinese restaurants and eat chop suey in Auburn. And he had a boat called the “Bull Market” boat where we went with his friend Bill Jansen. He had an airplane with his brother and we would go up to the delta and spend nights on the slough and visit people and they would have drinks in Lodi on the Delta Sloughs. While kids fished off the piers.
I have many stories of Dad’s preoccupations of brilliance or demise, which I too share. He did funny things always unawares. For example, my mum told me he went to a costume ball and wore a baby bonnet as his costume, or he went on a trip and he packed his ski pants by mistake to go with his tuxedo. Another story was when he was in the mountains in this cabin; he always took a nap at 6 before dinner. ...The place was dark with a hug wooden dinning room table with a bed and lofts above. He laid down to rest and went to sleep. The guests for the dinner arrived and took of their coats in the evening light laying them one by one onto the bed. When it was time to have dinner and play the piano, everyone said “where’s Fred, where’s Fred". He emerged out of the dark mound of coats. There was Fred!
Everyone drank so much in those days and there was a barbecue always around 9 pm and all the children had to wait. Sometimes there was left over sweet breads (brains) and vodka for breakfast. But I was his little girl and always occupied myself making stuff, writing stories, and building little sail boats to float on mountain streams. I loved a car trip we took together to the mountains. He was always so late departing everywhere. We went to the ghost town in Nevada at dusk, but he was always endlessly curious of all the details to go everywhere and turn everywhere. Recently I was able to talk to my dad over the phone about these years and we recollected together this other slice of his life.
Then he married Brenda and produced his lovely daughter Tara, 18 years younger. I was off in the world abroad living in Indonesia & and Japan for 6 years and not home much. So my sister had to be an only child as well and I could never fill that gap she needed. So in a way we both ended up being consecutively an only child.
By the way there was always the stereo, and the latest thing and complex wiring of speakers and “don't talk to him till he figures it out,” syndrome. As I grew older I realized I shared this part of his wiring up electricity for my art. He loved to wire speakers up in every room and then turn on the stereo first thing in the morning with the jungle parrot calls full blast of the movie West Side Story.
He had always been late but maybe because his mother was neurotically on time arriving way before the party waiting outside and looking at her clock and walking in on the exact moment. But he was saved by Carol who gave him structure in life and gave him much joy with all those things he loved to do. And I ended up appreciating my Dad more after he had found his match. My side of the family had always been more subdued, and introverted possibly snobby. The then overly loud character of my Dad seemed to transform into a vivaciousious, warmth, taking life never submerged in any depression or details. If you find your best match you reflect in a balanced way in the world. And He always chose first class people.
After my Mum grew ill 10 years ago, I discovered things we both had in common: Plugging in electronics, lighting and electricity, self centered or preoccupied, or fixated on finding something or putting something together. From now on my Dad will come back to me when I do these things .I will love him.
Filling every minute full, I am sure he could have filled another set of lifetimes with his interests. He was so informed about everything, endlessly curious and flexible without an attitude, having a great sense of humor in the darkest of times. When we were traveling, he let the original plan dissolve, exploring this site, and that hotel, and where does that road go? Flirting with the environment, he wanted to know more all the time. Life gave him more than double time to enjoy it all.
He accepted everyone for what they were, and that is what his clients and friend loved him for. Having an open young mind, often walking naively into situations like a child. This is why I thought he might survive the stroke, thinking he had a very special brain, but he made it farther out than all his brothers and sisters, Bud, Larry, and Sis. His eyes were open on this extraordinary world for 93 years, the miracle of life.
Last week when Tara and my family got together for lunch at the beach, he scrambled on the phone that he was so jealous and wished he could be there. Thank you Tara for giving your children a strong chance to know him.
Yesterday Albert (my husband and I went to this beautiful monastery of Saint Sebastian a peninsula over a river and the monks just happened to be chanting the early evening sermon. I prayed to Dad en wrapping his form in protection spiraling to the sky.
(From his older daughter Sha Sha (known to him as Sandra)
