Everyone knows that Wally was "into" golf.  He not only loved to play golf, but he watched it religiously on TV and spent considerable time and effort "making" golf clubs (from kits he bought on-line while living in Tucson).  I recall a visit to mom and dad's Del Webb patio home in Tucson where he showed me all of his tools for creating custom golf clubs from shafts, metal heads, and grips.  He was a tinkerer and loved making things.

That experience reminded me that he bought me a really nice set of "used" woods when I was about 14.  We golfed a LOT when I was in high school, despite the fact that I was never on the golf team at Glenbard.  Those used woods (all four of them) were refurnished by a local club pro at the course we frequented outside Glen Ellyn.  It was really cool to have what seemed to me to be brand new woods, and by today's standards, actually made of wood (not metal).  I held onto those four woods for over 50 years until we moved to Northampton in 2017.

On the second anniversary of Dad's passing, I have another story to share.  When I was in 8th grade, I had to decide where to attend high school.  The three options were the local junior high in Wauwatosa (grades 7-9), Marquette High School in downtown Milwaukee, and Pius High School (the latter two were Catholic).  I chose Pius, in part because it was less than a mile from our house in Ravenswood (in Wauwatosa).  As registration for high school drew near, I was faced with a dilemma about whether to go out for a sport.  I had played football, basketball, and baseball in grade school (St. Jude's Catholic school), but didn't really excel in anything.  In football I was a defensive end (5'8" and 120 lbs) and hated it.  In basketball I was a bench rider (terrible jump shot).  And in baseball I was a semi-successful side-arm pitcher.  But I heard that Dad was a hurdler in high school and my mother's father was a cross-country runner.  And a close friend of mine, Tom Flynn, encouraged me to go out for cross-country because his older brother ran track at Pius and said it was a good way to train in the Fall for track in the Spring.

So, I signed up and began training with the team at Pius a week before classes began.  It was terrible.  I remember leaving the parking lot at the high school and jogging down to Honey Creek parkway about 1/2 a mile away where we did stretching exercises and then ran two 1-mile runs on the grassy path along the creek.  I was so sore the next day I could barely walk, but I persisted that entire week and competed in a couple of freshman races over the next few weeks.  By mid-season I was running with the sophomores and by the end of the season we won the sophomore regional school championship and I was the second man on the team.  Late that fall, we moved to Naperville, Illinois and I continued running track that Winter and Spring, with indoor meets at North Central College on their 11 laps-to-the-mile track.  I was a 1/4 miler and never managed to break 60 sec on that small track, but Dad was there to cheer me on.  In the summer we moved again to Glen Ellyn (about 5 miles away) and now cross-country became a pretty serious passtime as the Hilltoppers had been contenders for state titles in the recent past.  My senior year we beat the best team in the State (York High School) by taking the first 4 places (I finished first).  Although York beat us at the State meet, we finished a respectible 6th.

Anyway, back to Dad, there was a photo of me leading the pack of runners around Lake Ellyn during a cross-country meet in 1966 and, ironically, Dad was in the photo, clapping as we ran by him.  It was cool because shortly thereafter, Dad took up jogging (he must have been about 45 years old).  This was the era of the "running boom" and Dad was smitten with it.  He became a steady jogger, lost about 25 pounds, and continued to run for the next 20 years before his knees and back made it impossible.  I will never forget meeting up with Dad at the Boston marathon in 1980 and 1984, the latter in the Lenox hotel lobby after my best Boston time of 2:54 during a light rain and 40 deg temps.  He loved the spectacle and enjoyed driving to several checkpoints along the course to watch me run by.  It was a memorable experience.

On the 1st anniversary of Dad's passing, I'm prompted to recall one of our more memorable vacations.  I believe it was August of 1958 (the song "Volare" was playing on the radio the whole trip, and I checked when that song was released).  We rented a family camper-trailer (one of those bullet-shaped silver ones) and towed it behind our '54 Oldsmobile.  To top it off we had the canoe clamped on top of the car.  Why we brought the canoe along escapes me.  Maybe Dad thought it would be a fun diversion along the way.  Our plan was to drive to Chicago and then head South through Indiana and Kentucky to the Smokey Mountains. 

The first day was pretty eventful.  In that era, the main road from Milwaukee to Chicago was called Hwy 100 and consisted of 3 lanes (a "shared" passing lane -- not exactly safe by today's standards).  As we approached the Northern suburbs it started to rain and rain and rain.  The Eden's Expressway ended on Lake Shore Drive and it was flooded.  Some of the underpasses were completely impassable.  This is when I thought Dad was brilliant for bringing along the canoe, but of course we didn't use it (in fact, I don't think we used it on the entire trip).  I believe it took us 2 hours to get to the Eden's Expressway and another 4 hours to get to Gary, Indiana.  What a mess.

The main road in Indiana at that time was Hwy 41 which goes straight South to Evansville (and still does).  I'm not sure how we got to Kentucky, but I recall vividly that the nice 2-lane Hwy 41 became a bunch of back-country roads, paved but not capable of being driven more than 45 mph.  I know we missed Nashville and ended up in Chattanooga and then parked our Silver trailer in Gatlinburg because it was a pain to pull it up the hills and around the hairpin turns.  I remember visiting two of the dams built in the 1930s for the Tennesee Valley Authority to bring electricity into rural areas in the South.  And I remember driving by (but I don't think touring) the atom bomb factory at Oak Ridge.  And I remember it being very, very hot and humid.  A/C was completely absent from the South in those days and sleeping outside rather than inside the Silver trailer was a clear option.

Life was simpler then.  Families traveled on the cheap.  But every summer we had a week-long vacation, and that one in 1958 was pretty memorable.

I was still a teenager when I met my soon-to-be father-in-law.  Bob was unique in my experience, exuding a confidence and worldliness I found more than a bit intimidating at the outset.  Nevertheless, he and Ellen were so welcoming that coming to visit was a great pleasure, inevitably expanding my parochial horizons.  (To think I would know personally someone whose work regularly took him abroad!) 

My lasting impressions of Bob range from a fine dining experience early on to war stories that emerged much, much later, and from numerous vacations and delightful family get-togethers across the intervening years. 

The most memorable early experience occurred in Milwaukee. Dinner at Frenchy’s Restaurant, of which I had never seen the like – extravagant decor and menu with waitresses in black net stockings and high heels, outfitted like Playboy Bunnies.  I didn’t know where to look! Those who knew Bob know how gregarious he was and true to form, he outdid himself that night, flirting outrageously with our waitress who might have been just old enough to be his mother.  He and she engaged in banter that  I would come to recognize as classic Bob – “Mr. Sociable.” 

Of course he had a serious side, affirmed by his success in the business world.  As Dick noted, he was a problem solver and avid reader, which made him a most engaging conversant and story teller never at a loss for words.  For many years the stories were travel and work-related but eventually Bob began to share WWII experiences, focusing primarily on humorous escapades such as racing cockroaches or rolling pool balls down the Main Street, of Urbana, IL. In 2011 he relayed, and we recorded, the following tale from his stint at Georgetown University following basic training at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

"And then we got to know Washington D.C. pretty well.  We had a couple passes when we were in basic training.  Anyway, we got to know it.  They [powers that be at GU] didn’t, they wouldn’t give us a pass; we told ‘em to go to hell.  So, they had locked the gates.  To keep us in there they had a ten foot wall, big, stone, looked like a prison wall all around this main campus area; it was like being in a prison in a way. And they locked the doors of the dormitory and we’re on the third floor.  So we took all the mattresses off the beds - there was a balcony at the end of the hall – we’d throw the mattresses down. We got a big, big large stack of mattresses.  We’d play Geronimo; we’d go over the top and go down three floors, bounce off the mattresses, and from there to the wall was oh, maybe about fifty feet or so and the first gang going over would organize.  They were the heavers, they were the biggest guys.  They were the heavers and we’d run to the wall, they’d grab us, a foot in their two [hands] – we went over that ten foot wall..."

Those antics are indicative of Bob’s vitality, confidence, and ingenuity.  He was a go-to guy who got the job done.  He was there for family and country and we are forever indebted to him and his war buddies for the lives we live today.

That said, my most endearing recollection of Bob will always be his chuckle.  He chuckled constantly when conversing, regardless of the humorous or serious nature of the topic to hand.   That chuckle, and simultaneous shake of the head as exchanges progressed, are much missed.

No child can really know their parent.  We just live with them for 18 years and then go off to college and visit a few times a year.  But despite this intense early experience, clouded by an immature mind and a failing memory decades later, there are lasting impressions.  I have four such impressions of my father.

First, he was incredibly adventuresome.  Perhaps this stemmed from his experience in WWII when, as a 21 year old from the UP of Michigan, he found himself in the Battle of the Bulge, followed by several months in Austria, which he found immensely beautiful (he returned many times in later life).  His U.S. substitute for Austria was Estes Park, CO where we vacationed many times, starting in the early 1970s.  A good example of his adventuresome spirit was our many family canoe outings, beginning shortly after we built a wooden canoe from a kit he purchased in the late 1950s.  It was put together in our garage on 50th Place in Greenfield, WI with a lot of elbow grease by all four of us (Bob, Ellen, Jim, Dick) and still exists as a testament to our careful hole-drilling and glueing.  The canoe was more fun in a river than on a lake, but most of our river trips were either frightening because of narrow rapids (a memorable trek through the Wisconsin Dells) or the absence of water (another memorable trek along the Rock River, consisting of dragging the canoe through 2 inches of water for miles).

Second, he was a sports fan.  One of my first memories of television in the late 1950s was watching Green Bay Packers games on Sunday in black and white.  Although he loved all sports, his favorite was golf.  He knew all the professional players, men and women, and followed the tour with a passion.  He taught me how to swing a club when I was about 10 years old, nurtured golf as a way to get some exercise and practice a craft, and enrolled me in lessons at the local George Hansen gold course (par 3) where we played hundreds of rounds.  In high school, he joined the Wayne golf club near Glen Ellyn and we played almost every weekend.  He bought me a set of refurbished woods (yes, not metal ones) in 1969 and I treasured how professional they looked (even if my accuracy was poor).  We always golfed when I visited him in Milwaukee or Tucson until he had to give up the sport as his mobility deteriorated.  I think that loss of the ability to swing a golf club and hobble around the course, despite having a golf cart, was one of the saddest parts of his getting old.

Third, he was a problem solver.  Perhaps it was the "MacGiver" nature of being in WWII or his upbringing in Calumet in the 1920s and 1930s, but there was no construction challenge he shied away from.  His set of tools was amazing and he was a pack rat in keeping little jars of every imaginable nail, screw, or gadget.  You never knew when one of those items would come in handy.  This problem-solving ability was also exhibited in his interests outside the home.  He loved to become engaged in "public works" projects, whether it was helping to design a new high school in Greenfield, to working on the water reclamation project in Tucson to help restore the aquafers, or taking photos of "the big dig" in Elm Grove to deal with spring flooding.  His management skills and attention to detail were impressive, and all these projects kept him busy and engaged in retirement.  Another domain within which he practiced his problem-solving skills was working as a medical consultant:  he had business cards printed up with "Dr. Quack" as his moniker.  He loved to do research on his computer (he got a Mac in the early 1980s) and help friends diagnose their illness and seek the best treatment.  He himself was the beneficiary of this passion for medical knowledge: he had dozens of treatments for his various ailments (heart, leg, balance) and was a pitbull in seeking to be enrolled in clinical trials (never the control group).  There is no question that from his first serious medical incident at age 64 (a pacemaker) until his death, he lived much longer as an active consumer of the health-care system  than most passive recipients of medical care would have lived.  He had an incredible will to survive even up to the very end, despite suffering from dementia.

Fourth and perhaps most relevant to my career in academia, he was incredibly curious.  He read volumniously and widely: fiction, non-fiction, travel, news.  He loved to learn about new things, the latest technology (his favorite was innovative medical devices), and the complexities of politics and history.  He was also a pretty smart guy, not just in the sense of being academically talented (which he was, with a masters degree in metalurgy), but also having a lot of common sense.  I remember him saying that when he hired people to work for him, he was not so impressed by grades, but more by how the candidate went about solving problems and dealing with people.  He was a master at both, so it's perhaps not surprising that he valued those skills.

These four characteristics of my dad are just the most salient as I reflect back on my 65 years of experience with him.  Again, it's a small sample, dimmed by failing memory on my part, but nevertheless a testament to someone I loved and respected.