A last errand

I was always close with my father, and when he died I wrote this tribute.






A DAD WHO GAVE HIS FULL ATTENTION -- AND HIS LOVE
Date: Sunday, August 29, 2004
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


The last real errand I ran for my dad came when he sent me to the library to find F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby in large-type print.

This was his last-gasp effort to try to read. For at least six weeks he had been unable to make out words on the printed page, having fallen victim to cataracts and then an operation that didn't prove to be the cure that he'd hoped for.

For a lifelong reader, a man who kept a constant stack of books by his bedside -- juggling most of them simultaneously -- this was an unimaginable curtailment of his quality of life. It seemed the thing that was finally cutting off his joy of living, forget the dozens of pounds of weight he'd lost in his 10-year battle with colon cancer or the weakness that kept him from walking to the dining room at the North Shore Retirement Hotel.

His eye doctor had suggested large-print books, and he was running with that idea. So three Fridays ago I was in the Evanston, Ill., public library for the first time in many years. And thinking what a full-circle experience it was.

Because almost 50 years ago, going to the Evanston Library was our Saturday ritual. We'd pick up a stack of books to read that week and return the stack we'd plowed through the week before. He and I, and my two sisters as they grew old enough to come along.

In my recollection, we did this every week. We'd go to the library and to Charley Moy's laundry, where he had his shirts cleaned and lightly starched for work, and to the Huddle in the Orrington Hotel for milkshakes. Some years there were YMCA swimming lessons, which never took for me but always ended in the most delicious chocolate marshmallow ice cream cones.

I don't doubt that my own love of reading came from those excursions and his example. I know that it was from his reverence for writers that I grew up thinking that writing was the most honorable of professions.

I know that he had wanted to be a writer himself. As a Chicago teenager in the 1930s, he had in fact edited the Roosevelt High School Rough Rider. But World War II and life's practicalities denied him his chance. I know that I chose to go into journalism in part to fulfill that dream for him. Not that he ever asked me to. And not that I didn't love that dream for myself. I was just lucky that my talents, such as they are, coincided so well with a career goal that had my father's great respect.

I knew even at a young age that those Saturday outings were unusual. That it wasn't expected for a father to take time each and every week just to be with his kids.

All my life I've heard about fathers who were too busy for their children, and I knew -- even in the 1950s, when the absent suburban father was the nation's cultural norm -- that I had something different. I had a dad who gave me his full attention, as well as his love.

Clarence Darrow Day

This story's personal. My dad passed his hero-worship of Clarence Darrow to me, and I tried to pass it on to my son Ben. It all came together on one particular day.





COMING FULL CIRCLE ON CLARENCE DARROW DAY
Date: Sunday, March 21, 2004
Edition: Palm Beach Section: LOCAL Page: 1B
Byline: HOWARD GOODMAN COMMENTARY


You can never know what's in a name, but you can hope.

My wife and I gave our younger son the middle name of Darrow. We did it mainly to honor my father, who long ago had taught me to appreciate the iconoclasm, intelligence and courage of attorney Clarence Darrow.

If that would inspire Ben to emulate Darrow's willingness to stand up for the unpopular, the underprivileged and the underdog, so much the better.

Darrow was the controversial Chicago lawyer who represented labor in the bloody struggles of the early 1900s, who defended the freedom to teach evolution in the 1925 "Monkey Trial."

Against tides of hostile opinion, Darrow kept the wealthy thrill-killers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb from the death penalty. He won acquittal for Henry Sweet, a black man accused of murder when a mob tried to block his family from moving into a white Detroit neighborhood in 1925.

He was idealistic and cynical, honest and conniving, an orator who could wring tears from juries (judges, too) as he paced the courtroom floor, his thumbs jutted behind suspenders. He became an American archetype, portrayed on screen by Spencer Tracy, Orson Welles, Henry Fonda, Kevin Spacey.

I've known Darrow stories for ages. They are part of my patrimony, handed down from a man who was neither an attorney nor a teacher, but a Chicago-area businessman with an active intellect and a sheaf of idiosyncratic opinions.

Every March 13, for some 30 years, my father has dropped whatever he was doing to drive down to Chicago's South Side, to a lagoon just south of the Museum of Science and Industry on the old grounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, perhaps the most wondrous of history's World's Fairs.

Darrow lived near this spot, and for decades he'd stroll to a vaguely Japanese bridge across the lagoon to talk, think or be interviewed. When he died in 1938, his ashes were scattered there.

The famous agnostic mocked all notions of an afterlife or reincarnation. But he joked that if he were ever to come back, friends should look for him at 10 a.m. on the anniversary of his death.

Since 1957, a hard core of Darrow loyalists has done just that: gathered at that bridge on that anniversary, not really expecting to see Darrow come back to life, but to rededicate themselves to causes he championed. And so keep his spirit alive.

Year after year, my father, Carol, joined the academics, biographers, civil rights attorneys and liberal aldermen and judges who would say their few words about Darrow and how he'd still find plenty of things to kick about if he were around.

And they'd toss a wreath onto the lagoon, usually to watch it skid on the mid-March ice.

Fourteen years ago, the tribute took place just a couple of hours after I called my father to tell him of the birth of a grandson.

A boy, I told him. We're naming him Benjamin Darrow.

Would you believe today is Darrow Day? he answered.

I hadn't known.

Flustered, excited, he hurried off the phone to get to the event on time.

My father is 82 now. He has been battling cancer for a decade.

This year, he turned terribly sick. So sick that one doctor recommended we line up hospice care.

When I saw that March 13 this year would fall on a Saturday, I told my father that, whatever happened, he should know that Ben and I, for the first time, would come to Chicago for Darrow Day.