Yesterday, I gave the below eulogy at my father's memorial service. Outside, a pink dogwood was in bloom. I think my father would have liked the speech, and maybe the dogwood, too.
Thank you all for coming. Before I begin, a special note of thanks to my sister Jan and my mother for organizing this event, and to my brother Greg for going above and beyond the past few years, always being there when my father—and mother—needed him most.
I’m going to kick things off with a few words about my father, whose life—and death—brought us here together. My father’s life was long, and it was good. He was 94 years old when he died. He was married to my mother for 70 years. Together, they had five children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. He started a successful business. He was active in his communities. He touched many people’s lives in ways big and small. His list of accomplishments was long, and he had a ton of fun along the way.
David Lee Gallaway was born on January 5, 1930, in Southbridge, Massachusetts, the second son of Sadie and Charlie Gallaway. Sadie used to tell three stories about David. In the first, my father was a toddler. One day at the beach, a group decided to go for a swim, leaving David behind. Frustrated, he plopped down and looked out at the waves with a sullen expression. Sadie tried to console him with his blanket, but he pushed it away. ‘Goddam blanket,’ he said, the first words out of his mouth.
My father loved to swear. I remember when I started working at Shannon Optical, which was his company. After getting set up on the assembly line—we made generic safety glasses—I heard someone yelling on the phone, throwing f-bombs around like a millennial on cocaine. I was like, ‘Wait, what? Is that my father?’ He certainly didn’t talk that way at home. But when he swore, there was a kind of glee involved, especially when he was working, and especially in the warehouse, surrounded by the cast of wayward teens, punks, and other social misfits that he assembled to work for him. It was a bit of a carnival at Shannon, with everyone working to get the orders manufactured and shipped—and we did work—with WDVE on in the background and the air stained with a strange, disturbing mix of lens cleaner, cardboard, and whatever happened to be trailing out of the notoriously squalid bathroom.
Speaking of which—and I debated whether to bring this up, but it was a big part of my father’s life, so I’m just going to say it—David Gallaway loved farts. ‘There’s a kiss for you,’ he liked to say when he let one rip, which was frequent. ‘It means he’s happy,’ my long-suffering mother liked to say. On a related topic, when pressed, my mother will tell a story about how, early in their marriage, my father had a business associate over for dinner—I don’t remember if it was his boss or a customer, but it was more than casual. As my mother cooked, the two men talked shop in the living room. At some point, my mother looked up and realized that David had gone to the bathroom, where he had dropped his pants and taken a seat on the throne, all the while continuing the conversation with the other man. They could see each other thanks to a mirror on the back of the unclosed bathroom door. When I think about it, it seems like a miracle that my father survived to live another sixty-five years.
But getting back to the office, it was where my father was in his element, displaying an exuberance for what he had created that was—and still is—inspiring. We’ve all heard a lot of advice about finding a job that you love, and sometimes I’m like ‘who really loves their job?’ and then I remember my father. He loved his job.
Work wasn’t my father’s only pleasure. He loved talking to people and had many friends. Some of them we knew, and some of them we didn’t, like the crusty Castle Shannon locals he used to have coffee with every morning at Wendy’s. My father loved shooting the shit, which I’m sure is part of the reason he was a good salesman. He loved to make small talk with everyone: the guys at the track where he used to run, with the sassy waitress taking his order at a restaurant. My father also loved giving people nicknames, some nice and some, well, what would you call ‘Big Head’? He called his accountant ‘Slick’ for his creative accounting practices, and he called my brother ‘Slick’ for his notoriously greasy hair after a day without a wash. In an usual twist for a nickname, it was not only versatile, but also multidirectional, given that Tony Capone—his accountant and long-time business advisor—and my brother also called my father ‘Slick.’ We came ‘this close’ to putting it on his tombstone. He also never met a ‘Bruce’ whom he did not immediately and forever refer to as ‘Moose.’ Why? Who knows? When my father latched on to a joke, it was often a lifetime relationship. Let’s not even talk about the broken-finger handshake thing.
But speaking of moose, he loved animals of all kinds, especially the many dogs he took care of, going all the way back to his childhood. When he served in Korea, he and a friend adopted a dog that the friend—whose name escapes me—was able to bring back to the States. One of the things my father liked about Friendship Village was watching the birds and deer and even the occasional stray cat crossing through the fields. If there’s a heaven, his version of it is filled with animals. Although as recently as a few months ago, he questioned the existence of heaven, wondering who would keep track of all of the insects. He was a man of logic, but he also believed in luck, which is probably why he loved playing games, especially cribbage and poker. In his younger days, he was a good bridge player, famous for never arranging his cards when he picked them up, fearing that any gesture would give away critical information about his hand. He was pathologically competitive—he would happily decimate a five-year old—with Down Syndrome!—in a game of ‘Go Fish,’ saying that it wouldn’t be fair to shelter them from the realities of the adult world. He loved the Steelers and the Celtics, and he saw Bill Mazeroski’s famous home run in 1960, when the Pirates beat the Yankees in Game Seven. He loved watching his kids play hockey and the many other sports we tried over the years. He pushed us into sports because he believed in the benefits of physical fitness—especially the discipline of it—and thought that playing a sport offered us a way to be good at something outside of school. He himself picked up jogging in the 1970s and later turned to biking, especially at his condominium in Vero Beach and on the paths at Friendship Village. I like to think that if he had been a bit younger, I could have introduced him to the bike-safety movement, given that safety was one of his passions. It was the reason he did not like motorcycles, lawnmowers (unless you were wearing steel-toed shoes), and slamming doors, which he thought were all good ways to lose a finger or a toe, or worse.
Let’s talk about parties. My father loved parties. In his younger days, by all accounts, with James Dean eyes and a rebellious streak to match, he was wild. He met my mother at a party that he and his roommate—I think his name was John Egan—were throwing in their basement apartment in Boston, where my father was living for the summer before taking his optometry boards. He had been kicked out of his parents’ house in Newton because he almost burned it down one night after falling asleep with a lit cigarette. My mother, who had recently finished nursing school and was living upstairs, saw him passed out drunk at the party and thought to herself ‘Ooh, isn’t he good-looking?’
A few years into his marriage, my father quit drinking, but he never lost his taste for fun. He was always a fixture on the dance floor, where he was as comfortable jitterbugging as he was doing his best David Byrne impression when the Talking Heads were big in the 1980s. He also loved going to the beach, which was sort of an ongoing party, and where he liked to spend his days baking in the sun without a drop of sunscreen as he devoured cheap paperback mysteries and thrillers. He was a gifted swimmer and masochistic body surfer; if the waves were breaking, no matter how close to the shore, he was in there, fighting it out, getting pounded by the surf. I can still see him limping out of the water with his side scraped raw by the sand and broken shells before he stood next to someone napping on their towel (let’s just say my cousin Jeannie, who was a prominent member of our beach family back then) and woke them up with the water dripping out of his nose.
He also loved boating—at the Jersey Shore and at Cheat Lake—and fishing. He was good boat captain—having sailed as a kid, he understood the water—but as with so many things, he could be a bit of a trickster. I get queasy thinking about the times when he, while driving the boat for a water-skier, would accelerate out of a turn so that whoever was being towed—including children and pregnant women (Leslie Evans)—went flying around the corner at like 200 miles per hour, and if they couldn’t pull up the slack, going ‘ass over teakettle, ’ as he liked to say.
Speaking of which, he loved using idiomatic expressions and sometimes making them even more idiomatic. ‘Half dozen one or the other,’ was a favorite. And ‘gitas’ for money, the origins of which are still a mystery to me, although I suspect it has roots in the greenback currency from the US Civil War. To play cribbage with him was to be immersed in another language. ‘Start fast, don’t last; start slow, don’t go,’ was one of his favorites that could be modified depending on his own position early in a game. He called aces ‘bulls’ and kings ‘kinkas.’ Twos were ‘ducks’ but getting two points were ‘dewers,’ and when an eight made an appearance, it was an ‘eighta from Dakata.’ A bad hand was ‘crabs and lice.’ He loved getting a cut ‘right in the gut,’ and if things were tied up, he’d say, ‘Even, Stephen, ‘hi yall!’ Counting points was its own language. ‘Fifteen two and that’ll do.’ ‘Fifteen two fifteen four and there are no more.’ And when he scored big, he liked to lay out his hand and count the points with a slow flourish as if we didn’t all know that it was a 24-point hand. ‘Three, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, six, and eight more for twenty-four big ones!’ We’ll gloss over the snorting noises he made when he skunked someone. More generally, he loved telling someone they had a ‘biiigggg mouth.’ He tended to be more circumspect with his opinions, and liked to advise his kids to follow suit. ‘Keep your mouth shut,’ was a favorite mantra of my father’s. With his grandkids, he liked to say ‘Bye Bye’ in a way that perfectly attuned to their sensibilities.
What else can I say about his likes and dislikes? I assume that he loved fighting with utilities and phone companies, because he spent a lot of time doing it. He wasn’t a fancy eater, but he loved a good filet, cooked ‘medium’ as he liked to say, mimicking the French waiters who were happy enough to say the English word when he and my mother visited me in Paris. He also loved a good, unpretentious meal—especially ‘spag-and-balls’—from a local restaurant. He really loved being ‘a regular.’ In the 1980s, when my mother used to go out of town on business, my father and I would go to the Pasta Factory every night, followed by Baskin Robbins on Beverly Road. I always got a hot-fudge sundae, and he got a vanilla ice cream cone, which was his favorite flavor.
As much as my father liked to joke around, he took his fathering responsibilities seriously. He offered us clear boundaries. He could be very intimidating when it came to enforcing them, but his judgments were never arbitrary, and he was never hypocritical. He was not a father who ever said, ‘Do as I say, and not as I do.’ Although it wasn’t in his nature to be warm and fuzzy, we—his children—never lost the sense that he was rooting for us, in whatever endeavor we happened to be pursuing, no matter how quixotic (except, of course, when we were playing cribbage with him). He was the kind of father who was fearless in his children’s eyes, happy to kill a bug or use the rotten banana on his Corn Flakes, which he liked to eat every Saturday morning, always slathered with a big oozing river of honey, which was a rare indulgence for him. He preferred his apple pie chilled, and when he ate an apple raw, he ate the whole thing, seeds and core included. In a crisis—and there were a few over the years—he was calm, loyal, and supportive. Outside of a crisis, he was happy to give us advice, but it was almost never unsolicited. When I went to boarding school starting in tenth grade, a friend of mine asked my father if it was hard not seeing me around as much as he used to, and my father said [Dad voice], ‘no news is good news.’ He trusted that we would learn from our mistakes and eventually land on our feet. He gave us space to grow.
As an observer, I think that my father—as a husband—brought a similar spirit to his marriage. In the 1960s and 1970s, my mother underwent a personal revolution; she went back to school for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees; she joined the women’s movement; she was radicalized against the institutionalized misogyny that to this day continues to step on the necks of women everywhere. There are many reactions my father, who was by no means a political progressive, could have had to his wife’s burgeoning activism, but to his credit, he was happy to help my mother find her wings. He picked up the slack when she had classes or meetings and the kids needed to be watched or taken somewhere. There’s even a picture of my father—you can see it in the slideshow—handing out fliers in Washington, DC at the Women’s March of 1980. I think it says a lot about the underlying strength of my parents’ marriage that they were able to go through these changes together.
Financially, my father tried to teach us the value of a dollar—or a ‘buck’—and the necessity for work and getting paid for it. He didn’t believe in giving us an allowance, but he was always happy to give us jobs to do. Some could be pretty demanding—like weeding the flower beds at the crack of dawn or washing the storm windows—and some could be pretty easy, like when he let us count the money in his change jar. I mean, that’s a good job, right? There were certain things he hated paying for—long-distance phone calls, Christmas trees, and children’s photos come to mind—but he was never stingy about the big stuff, and he was always sanguine when we made costly mistakes. ‘It’s only money,’ he liked to say when we broke a neighbor’s window playing wiffle ball or—you know—totaled the car. As a teenager, I once cycled headfirst into a parked car and I remember being very embarrassed when I staggered home with a broken bike. But my father was very kind about it. No jokes about ‘that’s using your head,’ and he bought me a new bike the following week. He didn’t like to admit it, but he could sometimes be very sweet like that.
Fortunately, he did well in his career, so money was never much of a problem. He started as a salesman at American Optical, building up a new territory in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, before going out on his own, founding a business over 60 years ago that my brother Greg is still running. In many ways, my father embodied the American dream. He was able to afford nice houses and multiple cars. With my mother, he traveled all over the country and took trips to Europe and Asia. I already mentioned his military tour in Korea. Over the course of his life, he saw the world as it was being remade in the twentieth century. Perhaps most remarkable of all, he—or his business—paid for the education of his children – and for his wife’s higher education, when she went back to school (although technically the money was also hers, of course). At one point in the 1980s, I believe he was paying six tuitions, and he bragged about it. It was one of his values: if you had children, you should pay for as much education as they wanted. (Admittedly, this was easier to say fifty years ago than it is now.) For my father, money was never an objective unto itself; it was a means to an end. There was a time when his business reached a crossroads; rather than go national, which might have been even more lucrative, he stayed reasonably small, reasoning that he had already made enough to live comfortably. It’s a remarkable philosophy to consider now, as American society reckons with extremes of wealth in our second Gilded Age.
In terms of cash, my father was ‘old school’; he always had a roll of bills in his pocket that he liked to peel off one by one when he was picking up the tab for a meal, which he loved to do. Somewhat more mysteriously, he also kept a stash somewhere deep in his closet that he accessed for certain big-ticket items. My brother Michael likes to tell the story about how when his tuition at CMU came due, my father liked to disappear into his closet and from a silver box extract a stack of hundred dollar bills to take care of Michael for the semester. It was like magic. That box is still in my father’s old closet in the apartment, and I think it’s where his soul resides, or it’s one of the places.
Despite being born in the Depression, David was not a Depression baby: his parents had money, thanks to Charlie’s position at American Optical. Money aside, my father’s childhood was not easy, to say the least. It was always something of a black box. He rarely talked about it, and when he did—or when we heard about it from others—the stories were often sad and harrowing. Being locked in the basement, waiting at the train station with the other kids for his father, only for Charlie to show up—if he came at all—drunk with a woman on each arm. Charlie was a violent alcoholic, and Sadie, though often at the receiving end of that abuse, was also a heavy drinker with a sharp tongue, and not above pitting her sons against each other. When she had David, who was her second child, she was hoping for a girl, and I’m not sure either of them ever quite got over it. You can see how differently she presented her two sons in the slideshow; Farrell with short hair, my father in curly locks.
Even as a kid, my father never referred to or called his parents ‘Ma’ or ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad.’ Instead, he called them ‘Sadie’ and ‘Charlie.’ I remember hearing his older brother call their mother ‘Ma’ and being shocked as it dawned on me that my father had made this choice on his own. He wasn’t the type to elaborate on why he did this—‘it’s their name, isn’t it?’ he said to me when I asked him about it—but I think it demonstrates my father’s ambivalence for his birth family. In some respects, I see this as tragic, but in other ways, it’s empowering. My father spent a lot of his life vowing not to raise his children the way he was raised, and to a large extent, I believe he succeeded.
I will now turn to the second story Sadie used to tell about David’s childhood, which I think is also revealing. My father couldn’t have been older than six or seven the first time his mother dropped him off for Sunday School. Watching him walk through the front door, she felt confident that he would attend the classes. But later, the teacher told her that David had not attended class, and so the next time she dropped him off, she waited at the back door, where lo and behold he appeared moments later, having gone in one door and out the other.
I’m sure it wasn’t easy for David or his mother to fight about going to church, but I like this story because to me it shows how in many areas of his life my father, from a very young age, had a strong backbone, and part of his moral code was that he was not a ‘joiner.’ That’s the term he used. If he didn’t like something, he didn’t pretend. Besides pushing him to go to church, Sadie tried to mold my father into an avatar of the high social class to which she herself strived to belong; she paid for lessons in dance, piano, and elocution, but none of this took with my father, who never gave—I’ll just say—two cents about anything we might consider ‘high class.’ He disavowed the rich and their palatial houses, expensive cars, fancy clothes and gaudy jewelry. He detested country clubs. He liked to tell people he was from West Virginia. Not being a joiner, he never wanted to take part in anything religious or spiritual—and he did not believe in God, which made him an outsider to one of the biggest clubs of all. Politically, he was not much of a joiner, either. His politics were rooted in fiscal conservatism. When I was growing up, he made a point of not voting for either party—at least in national elections—but he spent years going to community board and planning commission meetings to advocate for the construction of an ice rink and community center in Mt. Lebanon, which in some ways is the essence of participation in a democratic process.
I will now wrap up with Sadie’s third story. One day, when David was—I don’t know—nine or ten, she caught him smoking a cigar. Taking a page from the Clockwork Orange guide to parenting, she decided to punish him by insisting that he finish the whole box, thinking it would make him sick and turn him away from the vice for a long time. But when she returned a few hours later, she found her son happily puffing away like Al Capone at a poker game. Which is funny to me, and not funny. Even as a child, my father had an iron will, which was one of his most admirable and most frightening qualities. He was incredibly disciplined; when he decided to quit drinking, he just did it and never touched another drop. No counseling, no AA, no sponsors, no relapses. When you think about it, it seems both superhuman and inhuman, which I think is what made my father dynamic, interesting, and at times stoic and impenetrable. Sometimes he could make you laugh, and sometimes he could make you cringe, but he was never boring. He was a man of contradictions, of great joy and hilarity, of great affection—when he allowed himself to show it—and great anger whose effects on others I’m not sure he fully appreciated. He was a man of high intelligence—book smart and street smart—who liked to pretend to be uneducated and uncouth. He was someone who could be aptly described as a ‘character,’ because in so many ways, he was larger than life, which is a rare gift, and one I’ll always be grateful to have witnessed—and loved—in my father, may he rest in peace.
'We need to wake up from the existence of our parents. In this awakening, we must explain the nearness of that existence.'
--Walter Benjamin
