This is a story of an aging couple
Told by their son who was
President of NBC NEWS.*
This is a wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of
newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the
Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. It is well worth reading, and a few good
chuckles are guaranteed. Here goes...
My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I
should say I never saw him drive a car.
He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the
last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.
"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to
drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your
feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and
enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."
At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman,
chimed in: "Oh, bull shit!" she said. "He hit a horse."
"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."
So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car.
The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941Dodge,
the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two
doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.
My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines , would take the
streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the
streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the
streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.
My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938,
and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we
had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was
that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of
you boys turns 16, we'll get one." It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us
would turn 16 first.
But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in
1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts
department at a Chevy dealership downtown.
It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts,
loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less
became my brother's car.
Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my
father, but it didn't make sense to my mother.
So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to
teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I
learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my
two sons to practice driving. The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who
can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying more than once.
For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was
the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of
direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits
-- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.
Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a
devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that
didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage.
(Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire
time.)
He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the
next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church.
She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back
until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning. If it
was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my
mother at the end of the service and walking her home.
If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk
and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and
"Father Slow."
After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my
mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If
she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take
a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could
listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by,
he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad
throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base
scored."
If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to
carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said,
he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still
driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"
"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something
bizarre.
"No left turns," he said.
"What?" I asked.
"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your
mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in
happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic.
As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose
your depth perception, it said. So your mother and I decided never again to
make a left turn."
"What?" I said again.
"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are
the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."
"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for
support. "No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It
works." But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."
I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road
as I started laughing.
"Loses count?" I asked.
"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's
not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."
I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.
"No," he said " If we miss it at seven, we just come home
and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be
put off another day or another week."
My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she
handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in
1999, when she was 90.
She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the
next year, at 102.
They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937
and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I
paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never
had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost
nearly three times what he paid for the house.)
He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill
when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but
wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the
moment he died
One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me
when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three
of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging
conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.
A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike,
the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one
point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going
to live much longer."
"You're probably right," I said.
"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.
"Because you're 102 years old," I said..
"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the
next day.
That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit
up with him through the night.
He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently
seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one
in this room is dead yet"
An hour or so later, he spoke his last words:
"I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I
am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone
on this earth could ever have."
A short time later, he died.
I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered
now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so
long.
I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life,
Or because he quit taking left turns. "
Malvary in Ottawa where is it still cold (-34 windchill) and
my furnace is not behaving itself. Iâm waiting for the engineer. On the
bright side it is supposed to be +2 tomorrow.
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