Requiem for my Dad

My father died on April 2, just 10 days after a cancer diagnosis. I’m still mostly numb with shock.

Among the many things Dad’s death derailed in my life, one of the least significant was my spring plan for this newsletter project. He was a big fan of this endeavor, often texting me of a Sunday evening: “Still looking for Saturday letter” — a subtle jab at the hastily-chosen name which tied me to a schedule I almost immediately abandoned.

It turns out this thing I can sometimes do — writing — was … what’s the term? … not irrelevant during this time. I helped my brother and my dad’s wife and her sons put together Dad’s obituary, and I wrote a eulogy for the memorial service we held just over a week ago at Missouri Valley College, where Dad taught for 35 years.

I’d like to share that eulogy here, lightly edited and adapted. I appreciate your indulgence.

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Larry Stockman, my father, was a baptized and confirmed Lutheran whose second marriage began with a Jewish wedding at the Emma Country Club, who never encountered an instruction booklet he didn’t immediately throw out, and whose preferred tools were a can of WD-40 and a roll of duct tape. Which is to say that this service, much like Dad, is unorthodox and very much DIY. 

As we dug through pictures and papers (and more papers and more pictures) at the house this week, we came across a brittle, yellowing page from a 1969 edition of The Concordian. It’s the kind of page the local newspapers still run every year around May — senior picture head shots of the local graduates and a little sentence-length blurb about the student’s plans post-graduation.

Here’s Dad’s: 

“Larry Wayne Stockman, son of Mr. and Mrs. Erwin Stockman. Larry plans to go to college this spring and become [a] writer.”

Well.

I am a writer and a writing teacher, so this detail naturally piqued my interest. It’s the first of what I imagine will be many things I’ll wish I could have asked Dad about. 

Growing up, I had heard, at various points from various people who’d known him back when, that Dad was something of the high school litterateur. He wrote stuff. He bonded with an English teacher. He may have belonged to a poetry club? 

I didn’t think a lot about it at the time, because that picture of Dad was not easily squared with the figure of our practically-minded economics professor who spent his summers in the garden and doing other outdoorsy-type work on the farm.

My father? This man who spared every expense? A poet?

But, on the other hand, you could sort of square it with the man who for years rose at 5 a.m. to start his day with a pot of weak coffee, several cheap cigarettes, and two hours of reading before heading off to work.

And, as I’ve thought more about it, Dad always had an impulse toward — maybe not poetry, but toward storytelling. A mentor of mine once wrote that I had an “instinct for narrative,” which was a fancy way of saying he thought I was a natural storyteller. To the extent that that’s true, I got it from Dad. 

So did my brother. If you know Jon Stockman — and chances are that if you’re in this room, you do — you know him as a storyteller, the loud football coach whose stories are 55% true and 45% bluster. I’m the better writer; he’s more entertaining to listen to.

Well, Dad could tell a story, too. Not that we always appreciated them. Even very good storytellers have their tricks. Jonny and I had heard each of those tricks hundreds of times. 

That’s me on the left, aspiring avid media consumer.

But they still worked. I don’t know how many times I’ve groaned in embarrassment while my wife, Katie, slapped Dad’s arm, “Oh, Larry…!” 

One story I never got tired of dates from 1972. (After high school, Dad had ended up in college for a semester. He’d wanted to go to Wash U. But, as he put it whenever he told this story, “the dairy farmers” didn’t see the need to pay for him to go all the way to St. Louis. He went to CMSU for a semester, but he then left to … well, it wasn’t entirely clear to do what.)

Anyway, in 1972, he hitchhiked down to Miami, site of that year’s Democratic National Convention. He wasn’t a delegate. He had only heard that “some people were getting together in the park.” 

After he did whatever they did there in Florida, Dad hiked his way up the East Coast, and crashed with Louise from back home and her then-husband in Manhattan. After he wore out his welcome there, Louise put him on a bus to Ohio, where he crashed with an old music teacher.

He finally returned to the farm with a severe case of wanderlust. I think if you’d asked him then, he would’ve said he’d never live on the farm again. He moved to Memphis, got a job working for an employment agency and, I think, spent a lot of time on Beale Street spending his wages. I say this because of an addendum to this story he told me within the last year: He and his buddy Bill Camp (also from back home) got the idea to buy the bar at which they’d been regulars. Somehow, they pulled it off. Dad was a Memphis bar owner — for about two months.

One Sunday afternoon, Dad got a call at home from one of the regulars. 

“Why isn’t the bar open?” This guy wanted to know.

Dad also wanted to know. He went down to open the bar himself — only to find the place completely cleared out: of furniture, of fixtures, everything. Come to find out that the manager, who had come along with the bar, had not paid any of the establishment’s bills since the change in ownership. Rumor had it that a very similar-looking bar was soon established down in Jackson, Mississippi. 

“We were so stupid,” Dad said. “I don’t know how we were smart enough to set up an LLC.” Because they had set one up, they just declared bankruptcy and walked away.

So it wasn’t financial ruin that sent him back to Lafayette County. Dad moved home when his dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He helped Elsie nurse Erwin through Erwin’s illness and decline. And then, when Grandma wanted to sell the farm and move to town — that’s what one does, after all — Dad said, “no, I’ll farm it.” 

That was Dad, taking life as it came. Generally sensible, always asking: “Ok, what’s required now?”

Including this one because I (left) am a masochist.

He extended that “take it as it comes” attitude to raising us, for better and for worse. Dad had his own reputation as a high-school hellraiser. I can’t speak for Jonny, but almost none of the stuff I got up to as a teenager fazed him.

For instance, it happened to be Halloween. I happened to be driving my 1975 Ford LTD — a car dad purchased for $100 on my behalf after I’d  wrecked my first car. I happened to get pulled over in Waverly, by Al Crowell, town cop and scourge of generations of Santa Fe High students. Al was working that night with a state trooper. When they opened my trunk they happened to find some items they deemed suspicious: ripe tomatoes, a can or two of shaving cream, a carton of eggs. This was enough for them to invite me to follow them to City Hall (which, of course, doubled as the jail). 

Curious about what was going down, my friend Jeremy and his brother Ben cruised by City Hall to see whether I was in handcuffs yet. As they did, the trooper flagged them down and invited them in as well. 

So there we were — three innocent young men, innocently awaiting our fates. The trooper called Jeremy and Ben’s parents first. Their mom, Toni, answered. And, this being rural west-central Missouri, Toni and the trooper knew each other. I can’t remember now if they’d been high school classmates or he knew her older daughter, or what¹. Whatever the connection, that Toni feigned enough appropriate outrage and/or disappointment in her sons to satisfy the Law. 

Next, the trooper called Dad. 

“Hello, Mr. Stockman?”

…

“This is Trooper So-and-So. I’m at the City Hall in Waverly, and I’ve got your son, Sebastian, here.”

…

“Uh, no sir. This is not a joke. This is Trooper — “ 

(TROOPER LOOKS UP IN BEWILDERMENT)

“He hung up on me.” 

Jeremy and Ben almost fell off their bench laughing. I could feel my cheeks getting hot. I was thinking about another story Dad used to tell from when he was in high school. Back then Alma’s local part-time cop parked his cruiser in his narrow one-car garage. Dad and a dozen buddies sneaked in one night and, working together, picked the car up and turned it just so. They left the car pointing at front and back corners of the garage in such a way that it was going to take something like a 96-point turn to get free. 

Thinking about that while my friends had their hearty belly laughs, I was feeling pretty positive that Dad’s healthy skepticism of authority was going to garner me a night in the hoosegow.

The trooper tried again.

“Mr. Stockman? This really is Trooper So-and-So and I really do have your son Sebastian here at the Waverly City Hall.”

Trooper So-and-So went on to list the stuff that I happened to have in my trunk.

And then, as he told me later, Dad asked, “Well, are you charging him with something?” 

Trooper So-and-So: “Uh, no.”

Dad: “Well then, send him home!”

It’s not that Dad sanctioned any and all illicit activity. It had to be within reason, and it shouldn’t hurt anyone. The most anger, the most disappointment he ever had in me came the day he picked me up from the Missouri Scholars Academy, a nerd camp up at Mizzou where we got to spend three weeks taking classes and hanging out with other kids who thought it was pretty fun to take classes during the summer. 

I’d said tearful goodbyes to all my friends at what really had been a life-changing experience for me. Dad pulled onto I-70 and said “Now, tell me, what the [expletive] is up with these mailboxes?” 

Earlier that summer, the gang and I had, during our weekend country cruisin’, taken up the sport of mailbox baseball. If you’ve never played, you can probably infer the object of the game from its title. We hadn’t gotten away clean. Even before I’d left for Mizzou, the net was closing in. One of our victims — and Louise, I’m still sorry for this — approached and asked me directly if I’d been involved. Other than driving the car and providing the bat, I hadn’t been, so I said no. 

Well, this Louise is the same one whose New York City apartment floor Dad had crashed on back in 1972. So, as he was reaming me out — “What were you thinking? These are your neighbors. These people have known you your whole life.” — that emotion is in there, too. 

It’s one thing to get up to no good every now and again. It’s another thing entirely to get up to no good at the expense of people you know and love.

Dad had a sense of adventure leavened by a sense of duty. He had both a wanderlust and strong attachment to home. 

He left. Then he stayed. 

I left. Jonny stayed. 

Dad understood both impulses. 

Dad loved us both. He was proud of and supported us both. He encouraged each of us to find our preferred paths, and he gave us each permission to be ourselves. I’ll be grateful for that for the rest of my life.

I love you, Dad. We love you. 

1. After I shared this post on Facebook, Toni followed up: “Just so you know...I met the officer while I was working the night shift at Good Old Days in Concordia. He was working a night shift as well and would come in for coffee and a chat. I remember he was being all professional on his end of the call while I was finding out the real issue and telling him to send the boys home. When the boys got home, they were still laughing about Larry. Then I did too. Love you and Jon. And I loved being friends with your dad. He was one in a million.”