Eulogy for Dad by his Oldest Son
In recent days, we serenaded my dad with some of his favorite songs and since I haven’t been singing much in recent years, I remembered being selected to join a citywide LAUSD elementary school chorus to sing at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I stood on stage, unable to see anyone in the audience from under the bright stage lights, and was still terrified. In the midst of an introductory speech by the then-head of LAUSD, people in the audience began to boo. A father yelled out, “we want to hear the kids, not you!” Another father’s voice boomed over it through the din of the packed pavilion: “SHUUUUT UUUPPPP!!!” There was silence. Some kids began clapping, so I joined in. The more independently-minded kid next to me asked me if I knew why I was clapping. I shrugged and kept clapping. I didn’t want to tell him that the SHUT UP that had nearly shattered the giant chandeliers surrounding the audience was the distinctive voice of my own father.
My dad had started to lighten up around kids by 1993, when he was serving as the commissioner of the Watts Friendship Sports League. It provided organized sports and recreation for 5,000 youths – soccer, of course, but also a dance program and drum corps. One day while I was there with him and he wasn’t in the room, a couple of kids were bickering. One thought the other was doing something he shouldn’t be doing. “OOOHHHH! I’m telling George!”
I was 25 years old. Up to this point in my life, “telling George” was something you’d only consider as the nuclear option. Anya, Michael and I would never ever think to Tell George.
I mean, he’d want to know if we were facing mistreatment in the world at large. But to make him sort things out among us kids? The threat of Telling George would be hitting below the belt.
It would also endanger the teller as much as the kid being narc’d upon. This was the man in whose ten commandments to his staff was the phrase “we do not have feelings.” (We Have Beliefs). But really, at one time or another, every kid we knew, and many adults, had come to dread a response from our dad that became known as THE LOOK.
So, in this moment in Watts, I’m looking at these kids, and thinking, they don’t know the look??? What Has The Watts Friendship Sports League done with our father? I understood then just how good this kind of volunteering was for him.
I spoke at his 80th birthday celebration about some of the other strange results of his volunteering for everything and his willingness to do a small favor for someone. How he literally had keys to the city, from cabinets at the local park to the actual Memorial Coliseum. Or he’d have a key to a gated complex with a swimming pool he’d use with a fabulous view from downtown. Things like that. We’d ask what was going on and he’d say “Oh, I did someone a favor.”
He did some favors that were so successful, he was practically asked to apologize for them. His voice lent the most authority to the Burma selective contracting ordinance. When it came before the full City Council, he suggested they remove language that had made an exception for hotel providers. They did. This was the one case where the city was doing business with a company involved in Burma so it became the only real tooth in the law. The proposed law had been written by Loyola Law Professor Robert Benson, and Bob was very worried that this foray by my dad could lead us to a less than unanimous vote.
Meanwhile, dad had also just listened to the current CAO tell the council that enforcement couldn’t be done. So my dad, who had already made the city a beacon of hope for South Africa, said he’d be happy to help. As council debated, Cindy Miscikowsky reminded everyone: “Heck, George said he’ll do it.” It passed unanimously. Up until the vote, Bob had been pretty nervous. Sorry.
Fifteen years later, when I told Dad that my company faced an expiring tax break, and was looking at properties outside of Los Angeles, he brought this up with Councilmember Rosendahl, who became very concerned. When I relayed this back to my company’s general counsel, I was peppered with questions. What exactly had my Dad had said? She had done a great deal of work on the matter and had established relationships already. When I started asking dad, he apologized. Days later, Rosendahl (with Bonin?), Eric Garcetti and Mayor Villaraigosa are standing in our headquarters lobby in front of our Ambassador of First Impressions, surrounded by cameras, to announce the extension of this tax break. Sorry.
Our dad’s sister Jacquie, a poker and blackjack dealer, has observed that her big brother was known to “hold his cards close to the vest.” Indeed, people who had known him for years were often surprised to learn a new quality about him that had been there all along. Throughout our lives, we heard people who had been part of a facet of our dad’s life refer to him as a “renaissance man” after making such a discovery. You now know about the old school grammarian who had written for the school paper, the Malibu longboard surfer, the swimmer, the soccer guy, and the administrator. He was also prolific behind the pottery wheel, could make an awesome tie dyed shirt, once won a rally medal behind the wheel of his ’63 Porsche, sat me as a child over his rear bicycle wheel and pedaled us all the way down to the Long Beach Pike. He completed that infamous Malibu triathalon the year of the brushfires. He took us camping and never glamping. At fishing, he was a natural.
He faced challenges in his life with a slight wince of bitterness followed by graceful and sweet determination. Years ago, he suffered from irreparable rotator cuff damage. That meant no more swimming. No more surfing. No more pottery. Instead of surrounding himself with his completed pottery, surfboard and goggles, picking up a bottle and lamenting about the good old days, he took up running, started going to the gym, obsessively designed and re-designed his daily smoothies and doubled down on his refereeing schedule.
He volunteered for so many things that my mom came up with the same rule that many parents apply to their or their kids’ toys. For our dad, that meant if he took on a new volunteer duty, he’d have to get rid of one of the others.
I still remember the day in 2010 when he told me he’d been drafted to serve on the new LA County Bicycle Advisory Committee. “Don’t tell your mother.” He was off of it a year later. I told mom, the day after he passed.
We’ve brought up our dad being a prolific home chef. To be sure, his ability to delegate played a role. If you failed to arrive an hour late for dinner, you were put to work in our kitchen as soon as you walked in. “But I brought wine,” you may have thought.
His meals ranged from relatively simple Italian dishes to 12 course Indian dinners, all of them according to the rules of proper simmering and the laws of kashrut that he had set for our household. There were those Chinese dinners Mike has talked about. As I understood it, on those walks up to Chinatown he would also corner little old Chinese ladies. He probably did them favors. All we know is that their deepest, darkest secrets made their way onto our plates.
Here’s something perhaps only his siblings know: Early in his life in the late 1940s or early 50s, he had successfully experimented with game theory. While it is very unlikely that he had studied John von Neumann’s “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” which was published when he six, our dad came up with his own marbles game:
Dad cut holes in the top and bottom of a cereal box. He invited his classmates to drop a marble of theirs into one end of the box. If their marble exited from certain holes on the other side, the player would recover their marble and win one of dad’s. If it came out of a different hole, Dad would keep their precious marble.
And here’s something you all know: The house always wins.
He had made a study of the box, repeated drops with numerous marbles before he labeled those holes and made the rules.
He told me this when I was around fifteen. I had, until then, simply stared at the massive jar he kept in our garage in which there sat perhaps a thousand marbles. Until I finally asked about them, I’d had no idea they were blood marbles. But as many of you know, well into his 82nd year, dad still had nearly all his marbles. I am looking forward to hearing more of these stories from his old friends and family in the coming days.