My 87-year-old father died on December 30, 2017. I shared the eulogy that follows at his funeral on January 3. - GL
I have trouble even imagining the world of my father’s
childhood.
Fred Harry Land, the fourth of six children born to Holman
and Mary Land of Crawford County, Missouri, entered this world on the night of
December 21, 1930, the night before the winter solstice—the longest night of
the year. As the story of that event has been passed down, it was a night of
heavy snow and bitter cold in the Ozark countryside just a few miles south of
the little village of Leasburg.
Dad was born in a weathered, rough sawn, oak slab, cabin with
a rusty tin roof. It boasted neither electricity nor plumbing. An old wood
stove in the front room and a wood cook stove in the kitchen struggled to
provide such heat as there was, but this was insufficient to prevent ice from
forming in the chamber pots in the two small bedrooms on such a night as that
one. Kerosene lamps offered dim illumination at best. Water was hauled by hand
from a nearby spring. As an alternative to the chamber pots, there was a privy
out back for those willing to brave the elements. Newsprint, pages from old
catalogs, and as a last resort, corn cobs served as toilet paper. In many
respects that cabin wasn’t much different from the far more spacious oak barn
that provided the family milk cow and a mule shelter from the elements. But at
least the cabin had a wooden floor.
Dad grew up deprived of the many advantages that he and Mom
gave to Mona, Lindell, and me. The Great Depression was barely into its second
year late in 1930 and for millions of people around the world things would continue
to get worse long before they got better.
Life on my Grandpa Land’s farm would have been tough enough
had the economy been booming. Those rocky clay ridges begrudgingly yielded a
living at the price of cruel toil. Boyhood for Dad was little different from
what his ancestors many generations earlier would have known. Two adults and
six kids were crammed into a tiny cabin—personal privacy was the luxury of the
rich. Food was what you could raise, grow, or bag hunting. Meat on the table
was salted pork, fried chicken, or squirrel taken with the heavy old 10-gauge,
double-barreled, black powder, shotgun that was the only gun in the house. Most
meals were accompanied by thick flour gravy. The rest of the meal came from Grandma’s
garden. It was a high fat, high calorie, high salt diet in which lard figured
prominently, but long hours of hard manual labor demanded it. Obesity was never
an issue.
Bathing was limited to a once a week ritual when a big
galvanized wash tub was hauled into the kitchen and filled with water heated on
the cook stove. The same water that rinsed off the lucky guy who got first dibs
was still in the tub for the hapless soul at the end of the line. The soap used
was the harsh homemade lye soap that Grandma was still making when I was a
little boy in the early ‘60s. After all these years I would still instantly recognize
its distinctive smell.
It was a tough world that demanded toughness from those who
survived. That was certainly true of my father. When he graduated from high
school at age 17 he was a wiry 5’9” and 150 lbs. By this point he had survived
a bad concussion that left him blind for a couple days and a broken arm that was
improperly set by the local saw bones, leaving him with a slightly crooked right
arm. (Believe it or not, he got the concussion from running down a hill jumping stumps. He lost his footing and
did a header into one of them.) He had a quick temper, a tendency to boast, and
a habit of settling arguments with his fists.
Dad was no scholar. Educational opportunities in Leasburg were
rather bleak in those days, and to make matters worse, Dad had vision problems
that glasses never completely corrected. Consequently reading for any length of
time tended to give him a headache. But his educational attainments had nothing
to do with his intelligence. He was certainly bright enough to know that there
was no future in remaining in Leasburg. He wanted to see the world. So in 1948,
shortly after graduating, he got Grandpa to sign for him so that he could join
the navy.
The first bit of the world beyond Leasburg that Dad saw was
the U.S. Navy’s Great Lakes Training Center just north of Chicago. He wasn’t
impressed. In fact, he was convinced that he’d made the biggest mistake of his
life. Just eight days after enlisting he petitioned—in vain, of course—for a
hardship discharge.
But in many respects the navy was good for him. With the
high protein diet that he enjoyed in boot camp he quickly added 30 pounds of
muscle to his lean frame—mostly on his chest and upper arms. He maintained the
upper body strength that this gave him until just a few weeks ago by which time
cancer had finally taken its toll. One of the contributing factors to his
muscular upper body was the fact that Dad was the undefeated company boxer in
boot camp. He boasted of beating the Golden Gloves champion of Chicago in the
ring. He particularly liked boxing because after a bout he got all the steak he
could eat.
Dad avoided most of the usual sailors’ vices. He didn’t
drink, smoke, or womanize. But he did gamble, both poker and craps, and he was
good at it. So after a few hours in port, when many of the ship’s crew came
back aboard from liberty hungover and broke, Dad was saving his pay—and putting
it to work with a little payday loan business for his cash-strapped shipmates.
Consequently, when he was discharged he had enough money saved to pay cash for
a brand new ’51 Chevy and to make the down payment on a house. The financial
futures of his shipmates I leave to your imagination.
It was in the navy that Dad learned the trade that he would
pursue until he retired. He was discharged with the rating of Electrician’s
Mate 3rd Class. Not long after moving to High Ridge, he went to work
in St. Louis for American Car and Foundry rewinding electric motors for trains.
It was a dirty, dangerous place to work, so when an opening in the electrical
shop at the Anheuser-Busch Brewer came up, he jumped at it. He would work at
the brewery, first as an electrician and then as an electrical foreman, until
he retired. He soon became known as the best electrician in the brewery. Plenty
of men could fix a piece of equipment if told what was broken, but Dad was a
troubleshooter. He could study a piece of complex electrical machinery and
figure out why it wasn’t working. It
was his rare skill as a diagnostician that made him so valuable to the company.
When lesser men were stumped, the order would go out: “Send for Land!” I have
often wondered what Dad might have accomplished with a first class education.
He had a good head for math. Combined with his mechanical aptitude and his
analytical ability, he would have made a fine engineer.
I must confess that it was this very ability that used to
frustrate and exasperate me no end. I grew up hearing Dad say—and if I heard it
once I heard it a thousand times—“What man has done I can do!” And though there
was a lot of hyperbole in that boast, it also reflected a solid core of
optimism and self-confidence that defined who my father was. Faced with a
recalcitrant piece of equipment, maybe something that he had never worked on
before, Dad would tear it down and tackle the repair, confident that he could
master the problem, leaving us lesser mortals shaking their heads in shamefaced
wonder when he succeeded. I recall one particular winter Saturday when Dad left
for work having assigned me to a day of woodcutting. I headed to the woods but
try as I might, I couldn’t get the chainsaw started. (I never have been on very
good terms with 2-cycle engines.) When called to give an account at the end of
the day, I reported to my father my tale of woe. To my lasting mortification, he
went outside and had the saw running in five minutes.
But Dad’s biggest accomplishment while in the navy wasn’t
boxing, loan sharking, or learning the difference between AC and DC. It was
marrying his sweetheart back home. On May 31, 1950, while on leave, Dad married
Beverly Faye Pennock, a young girl from the neighboring town of Bourbon. After a
whirlwind honeymoon Dad reported back to his ship, the USS Abnaki (ATF-96), and headed out to sea, bound for Korea. They
wouldn’t see each other again for a year. Perhaps that is why for the rest of
their 67+ years of marriage, they did almost everything together. Theirs was
not a relationship that included poker nights for the boys or coffee klatches
for the ladies. Whether it was work or play, they almost always did it
together. Mom would provide the creative impetus—there was nothing of the
artist in my father—and Dad would provide the muscle. They made quite a team.
Together they built and remodeled multiple homes. In fact, I would argue that
they were never happier than they were sweating together in the middle of some
big project.
Dad is one of only a handful of men that I have known in my
life who could literally build a house from digging the footings to the finish
work without having to contract out a single task. He could do it all. He
really didn’t have the patience to do fine finish carpentry—he was much better
at framing. Of course wiring the house was no challenge for him. And he was a
self-taught plumber. His water lines didn’t leak and his toilets always flushed
properly. But as I was reminded just a few weeks ago when spending the night at
Mona and Joe’s where I used a shower that my Dad had installed many years ago,
he had this weird quirk, as many of us can testify, of getting the hot and cold
water lines crossed. After Mona and Joe bought the house from Mom and Dad, Joe
set about uncrossing numerous mixed up waterlines. That shower was the only one
he hadn’t gotten around to. I kinda hope he leaves it as it is—a memorial if
you would. But if so, a warning label needs to be added for the benefit of the
uninitiated.
Generosity is perhaps not the first trait that leaps to mind
for those who had the occasion to share a meal with Fred Land. How often I
remember Mom’s exasperation with Dad as he inevitably took the first place in
line at the buffet table at some family gathering. Nor was he shy about laying
claim to the last piece of pie. If challenged it was hard to fault his logic.
“I’m the one who worked to earn the money to buy this food, who better than me
to eat it?” But any greediness in such petty things was more than compensated
for by his extraordinary generosity when it came to the big things in life,
especially when it came to his children. I remember the pride in his voice when
years ago Dad told me that he realized that he had become a millionaire. He had
added up his cash plus the value of his stocks, bonds, and property and for the
first time the total topped one million dollars. Not bad for a kid who left home
with the clothes on his back.
Most of that million is long gone. In part this was from
some bad investment decisions. But the fact is that Mom and Dad have given much
of their hard-earned assets to their children and grandchildren. A car here, a
house there, a school loan paid off, a farm signed over, a big wad of cash
handed over free and clear… the list goes on and on and on. If nothing else, my
parent’s generosity is an effective curb on any tendency toward pride that I
might have. When I get in one of those self-congratulatory moods I need but ask
myself, “Where would I be were it not for the help of Mom and Dad?” I was once
tempted to tell a pastor search committee: “I was born in Bourbon and
Anheuser-Busch helped put me through seminary.”
One of my early memories—I was about six at the time—was
seeing my father baptized by Pastor John Sullivan at Fellowship Baptist Church,
our church in High Ridge. Just a couple years later I would follow his example.
Dad was never a Bible scholar. Reading typically put him to sleep. Nor was he
inclined to talk much about his faith. But I never doubted the reality of it.
For by the time I was old enough to watch and learn from his example, that
brash young man from Leasburg had matured into a solid, sober, faithful, loving
husband and father. The life he lived was a far stronger testimony of what a
godly man is like than any sermon that I’ve ever preached. There wasn’t a lot
of “do what I say” in my father. But there was a world of “do what I do.”
Dad taught us the meaning, importance, and value of work.
I’m sure that he must have called in sick on occasion but such occasions were
so rare that I can’t remember one. What I do remember is Dad getting up early
to put chains on his pickup so that he could make it to work on time in the
teeth of a winter storm. I don’t think he ever missed a day of work because of
weather, even when he was commuting 80 miles from the farm to St. Louis. And
when he got home from work he worked at home. I still remember the winter in
Caledonia when he overhauled the engine of his old Chevy pickup in an unheated
barn, handling those pieces of cold metal dripping with gasoline with his raw,
chapped hands. When he did relax, he enjoyed nothing more than following his
beloved St. Louis Cardinals. And unlike many baseball fans, Dad really
understood the game.
Dad taught us the importance of loving and caring for your
family. Not once did he ever lay a hand on my mother in anger. He didn’t
hesitate to spank one of us kids if we had it coming, but he never struck us
with a clenched fist. And when we needed him, he was always there. He never made
a promise to me that he didn’t keep. He never disappointed me. He never let me
down.
I never saw him drunk. I never saw him paralyzed with fear.
I never caught him in a lie. I never heard him make an excuse. My father taught
me what it means to be a man. As a young man his dashing good looks included a
mane of thick, wavy, jet black, hair. He bore a striking resemblance to how
Superman was depicted in the comic books of my childhood, which is appropriate,
since that is how I always thought of him.
He had plenty of opinions but he wasn’t one to offer
unsolicited advice. After I left home he only did so twice: Always buy good
tools and have your kids close together so that you get them out of diapers
quickly. He also told me, “When in doubt, vote Republican,” but I think that
was before I moved out.
Over a decade ago Dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form
of prostate cancer. The doctors attacked it with a vengeance: surgery,
chemotherapy, hormone therapy… the works. And though in the end all of their
efforts failed to permanently eradicate the disease, they did buy him over a
decade of continued life. But such aggressive treatment was not without a cost.
For the rest of his days he would cope with such unpleasant side-effects as a
leaky bladder.
How he responded to all of this tells us much about the
measure of a man that some of you knew as Fred, others as “Grandpa,” who my sister
called “Daddy,” who my brother called “Pop, and whom I simply knew as “Dad.” To
be reduced to wearing a diaper in your old age might cause a lesser man to
slide into a permanent state of depression. But not my Dad. Optimism tempered
by pragmatism has always defined his outlook on life. He seldom complained and
he NEVER whined. Instead of bitching about the umpire’s call, he just hit what
was pitched. A pithy comment he made to me soon after the cancer treatment
ended, succinctly summed up his attitude. He said, “A man only has two
pleasures in life. At least I can still eat.” In an email a while back my
friend, Bob, put it this way, “Your dad would survive a concentration camp
while others perished out of frustration and hopelessness.”
I once made a list of the most influential people in my life.
Four of those individuals are in this room today:
- My mom, who first opened my mind and heart to the truth of
God’s Word.
- My old friend, Bob, who for some 50 years has been there for
me through thick and thin and who kept me honest through it all.
- My beloved wife, Joyce, the one great love of my life, who provided
a much needed civilizing influence on me.
- And my Dad, who taught me to be a man.
Late on the night of December 30, lying hand in hand beside
my mom, Dad peacefully slipped into eternity to stand in the presence of his
Lord.
A couple weeks ago in the Belgrade Bank Selma Akers briefly
mistook me for my father. Joyce tells me that with each passing year I look,
sound, and act more like him. And some mornings when I look into the bathroom
mirror I think, “What’s Dad doing in my bathroom?” That said, I close with this. I can think of
no greater honor than to have it said of me, “He reminds me of Fred Land.”
