My father, William Benjamin Abbott III, Captain, USN (Retired) died about two weeks ago, March 25, about 12:40 pm. His wife Marian Abbott and son Ian Abbott were with him. He fell and broke his femur (hip joint) 2 weeks before that, and I’d seen him in the ER the day he fell. I saw him again in the Orthopedics department after they operated to install titanium parts. He was recovering, and we spoke on the telephone several times.
He’d been moved to rehabilitation, then suffered some medical complication that caused him to move back to ER. I am thankful that Marian and Ian were visiting with him when he took a sudden turn and died. He would have been 91 1/4 years old, exactly, on the 27th.
As noted, his first profession was Naval Officer, and he served in the United States Navy for 30 years. He earned a Bachelor’s of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech, a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California, and a Masters in Astronautical and Aeronautical Engineering at M.I.T. in Boston.
He did a number of things after retiring, before going back to school for a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, and worked in that field for some years.
As a boy, he’d been an Eagle Scout. He considered himself a people-person. In no particular order, he was a reader, photographer, cook, artist, jazz fan, civil-rights advocate, mechanic, carpenter, electrician and maintainer of cars and houses, gardener, leader, intellectual, craftsman, son, brother, friend, student, husband, father, grandfather, family member, traveller, citizen, responsible adult. “New Yorker” and newspaper reader. Ready to keep what worked and let go of what didn’t. Polite, often kind, curious, informal, slightly reserved. Serious but not pedantic. A familiar “type”, the liberal, Southern, military officer. A fan of Louis Armstrong and Antonio Carlos Jobim. He exercised to keep fit. Runner, jogger, skier, owned a Nordic Track for decades.
Bill III enjoyed making things. I sat in his lap while he made red and green paper stars, suspended from thread and bamboo sticks, for Christmas presents, in 1959. That year or maybe the year before, he’d put cellophane in Christmas colors over the windows in the front door, green, red, and gold. Sunlight shining through the red seemed extra warming. Until 1972, he had a monaural hi-fi, all vacuum tube powered, with an FM tuner made from a kit, a turntable and tone-arm, a HealthKit pre-amp, a power amp that he rebuilt on a second chassis, and a Klipsch Short-Horn speaker. Only he was allowed to play his Louis Armstrong Hot 5 and Hot 7 78s. He built a robust bookshelf that moved back and forth across the country throughout the 1960s.
While working on his Master’s degree at MIT, he designed a bolt-together playhouse, built a 1/12 scale model from shirt-cardboard, then had the lumber delivered and built it in the back yard. It was 3 pairs of flat pieces: 2 floors, 2 walls and 2 ladders. Floors and the lower parts of the walls were painted green and blue, with a sporty, diagonal, dividing line. The ladders were yellow, everything else a nice tan. 3/8 inch bolts, nuts and washers joined the walls and floors at one corner, the ladders and floors at the opposite corner. The walls were mostly open 2 X 4 framework, ‘windows’ for the lower level and railings for the upper level. Two clothes-line rails kept children from falling off the 2nd floor. It crossed the country coast to coast 3 times, retired at its 5th location after a short, 1200 mile, hop from San Jose, California, to Silverdale, Washington. Returning to San Jose, he built a second playhouse in the 1970s. It was larger, taller, had a shingled roof and 4 walls, framed ‘window’ openings and a hinged door, for the younger children.
Bill III sewed his own Eddie Bauer outdoor gear kits- a pack bag, a down sleeping bag. Made a pack frame from plans, with a curved plywood bow that the belly-band attached to. The bow was laminated from sheets of hardwood veneer, glued in a 2-piece mold made from sub-flooring plywood. The front end of the family’s 1968 VW Transporter clamped the mold halves together while the glue hardened.
Bill III loved (gently) ironic jokes: “Don’t say ‘ain’t’, it ain’t in the dictionary.” “We have met the enemy and he is us”. He was a big fan of “Pogo” by Walt Kelly and “Peanuts” by Charles Schultz. Also “The Far Side” and recently, “Pearls Before Swine”. At some point in the later years of the Reagan presidency, we were enjoying lunch at Vesuvio’s in Santa Clara. After the meal, he leaned forward and said, using a mock-pundit voice, “This country wouldn’t be in the trouble it is, if Ronald Reagan were still alive”. A gentleman walking behind me stopped, suddenly. Bill III looked up at him and said, in a normal voice, “Good afternoon.”
Years later, when telling stories about communication among Navy officialdom, he would always embellish imaginary letters to and from the powers that be with overly familiar opening and closing phrases, such as, “Hugs and kisses, BUWEPS”.
He read widely, laughing his way through “Portnoy’s Complaint”, “Red Sky At Morning”, which I also read, James Thurber and James Herriot’s books. I read his hardback copy of “The Caine Mutiny”, “Death of a President”, and was appalled by the big, probably ‘American Heritage’, coffee table book about the American Civil War. After that, and skimming “The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich”, I didn’t particularly warm to the horror or true-crime genres. Read that, visualized too much.
I read and re-read the “Collected New Yorker cartoons, 1925-1950”, which gave me a strong framework to understand 20th century US history. Steinberg, Chast, Booth, Barsotti and Harris have been my companions ever since I found them in Bill III’s New Yorker issues. All, and more, came off that big, dark-stained book shelf. Copies of “The Sea Wolf”, “White Fang” and “The Call Of The Wild”, in paperback, that Bill III rebound as a Boy Scout. “Fail Safe”, “Is Paris Burning?”, and “Day of Trinity”, about the Manhattan Project. A collection of Scientific American articles about cosmology.
I borrowed, and didn’t always return, paperbacks from Bill III’s desk. “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold” was hard for me to follow, and sad. “The Andromeda Strain”, “Duel of Eagles”, “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”, “Russia At War”, and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, all made more sense. Bill III encouraged me to get or borrow “Catch-22” and when I did, I couldn’t put it down until I finished. Read in one sitting.
Years later, 1990? he came to my home and gave me a copy of “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, by Cliff Stoll, saying, “This is so good you’ll go into mourning when you reach the half-way point, because you’ll know its going to end.” He was right about that too.
In music, Bill III followed a different course. We had the very high-end hi-fi, on which he rarely played his jazz 78s and a small number of classical / orchestral albums. The 3 lps that were out and available to me were “Saint-Sains 3rd Symphony”, the NBC Orchestra’s sound track to “Victory At Sea”, and “My Son The Nut” by Alan Sherman (“Camp Granada”, a dozen more). Later this collection doubled, with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band”, and the Broadway cast albums of “The Music Man” and “Fiddler On The Roof”. The Beatles album had been well spoken of by people Bill III knew or respected, but he found it disappointing and too simple. I’ve never understood that. He had the music from the movie “A Man And A Woman”, which he really enjoyed, but like the jazz and Offenbach, to name one, it was put away when he wasn’t listening to it.
When he bought a stereo, in 1972, he added Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Stoneflower”, another favorite of mine, but also “Jesus Christ, Superstar”, which I never warmed to. But we had Vince Guaraldi’s music for the Peanuts’ Christmas, and the song from the Chuck Jones animation of “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”, in common. Somewhere in the 2000s, he appeared at my door with the Ry Cooder “Buena Vista Social Club” album, and the even better “Introducing RubÈn Gonzlez”. I like “Sgt. Pepper’s” a bit more, most days, but between “Stoneflower”, “Gonzalez” and “Sgt Pepper”, that’s 3 of my still favorite 15 or 20 albums. I’m very grateful. More than one Louis Armstrong album, and “Victory At Sea”, are in my top 100.
Bill III made a lot of abstract and some representational art, in addition to photographs. He enjoyed figurative art over a range of periods and styles- In the 1960s he made inexpensive frames for prints of Renoir’s “A Girl With A Watering Can”, and Goya’s “Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuniga”, and got a glass fronted, hardwood, frame for a 19th century nautical map of the Central California coast. These pictures travelled with us, coast to coast, up to Washington and back, etc., for many, many years.
He was a big fan of Alexander Calder’s Mobiles. In the 1960s, he filed one half a pair of needle nose pliers to a cone shape, and used it to bend neat curves in galvanized wire. He favored flowing, curved lines for his wires, and neat, circular, junctions, instead of the heavier, straight, wire and thicker junctions Calder used. Bill III liked horizontal or downward-sloping droplet shapes at the ends, made from cardboard. He completed several “technology demonstrators”, then made one with black droplets, a large one with primary colored droplets, and an anniversary present for Jeanne with all the numbers (1 to 20-something) for the years they were married.
Influenced, perhaps, by the stitch-pattern samplers made by his mother, and other relatives, he made his own, on an oversize Hollerith (punch) card. It was heavy cardboard, with a 5 sided wooden frame of varnished molding. He painted the cardboard a pleasing yellow tone, and then he masked off and painted bright, crayon colored rectangles where a real Hollerith / IBM / “Unit record” card would have holes punched. The text read, “God bless our happy home, the Abbotts, 1967”. I thought, and still think, it is very cool. My brother Ian has the multi-colored mobile and I have the sampler, but we’ve traded them back and fort a few times and will continue to do so. On the back of the sampler are the remains of a try at a California landscape, trees made of colored tissue paper glued to the cardboard. The abstract sampler works better. He entered it in the 1967 Santa Clara County Fair art contest.
In the 1960s, Bill III took me, perhaps other members of the family, to the National Gallery, to see some avant-garde abstract art. One painting was a narrow, tall, rectangle, solid red, neatly framed. Another was subdivided into ninths, 3 X 3, with 9 different shades or surface finishes of black. All black, all different. Many years later, Bill III, Ian and myself visited the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park, for the astonishing David Hockney multi-media exhibit, a retrospective of a fabulously expensive jewelry company’s work and the view from the 7th floor tower. We paused to admire Andy Goldsworthy’s “Drawn Stone”, a crack built through the entry paving, through stone benches, dividing or guiding the full path to the front door.
Later, across the yard, we enjoyed the multi-story butterfly rain-forest with its aquarium understory, in the Natural History Museum. Another time, we had lunch at Gordon Biersch Brewing Company’s down-town San Jose spot, then saw the San Jose Art Museum for their current exhibits. We enjoyed a photography exhibit, then discovered Andy Goldsworthy’s “Burnt Patch”, local pine branches, selected for different amounts of fire-blackening, that completely covered a room-size area of the gallery floor. The square, sun-burst pattern of sticks, framed a black circle in the center. No paint or artifice, just sorted, partly burned, sticks. Then multi-media installations upstairs: an animation of stars orbiting the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and a blue room containing video of dung beetles using the light to the Milky Way to guide their distribution of sustenance and eggs for their next generation.
This brief list are among the many memories of my father and his complex world, that I enjoyed, my whole life. In recent years, my brother and I visited the SS Red Oak Victory, in Richmond, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Bruce Canepa’s used sports car show-room, open workshop and racing car museum in Scotts Valley, and watched the Blue Angels with him, from Pax River in 1966 (Ian skipped that one) to the Marina Green in San Francisco in 2019. These were all opportunities for seeing new things, enjoying a meal together and taking better photographs.
When we visited Los Angeles to see the airliners at LAX, the Petersen Automotive Museum, the USS Iowa (first of the Fast Battleship class that included the USS Missouri) and visit the La Brea Tar Pits and their museum, Ian took a cell phone selfie of the three of us that is perhaps the best picture of we three boys ever taken. All self indulgent, to be sure. But it was only a few months ago that Bill III sent a note to the Georgia Tech Alumni Association, asking them to drop him from their membership and mailing list if they couldn’t do more for the voting rights of all Georgia citizens, or oppose the nakedly partisan laws concerning vote counting and control of local elections their state government was passing. He’d payed attention when his father told him that the job of a newspaper was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
He was the one who took me into the anechoic (sound absorbing, non-reverberating) chamber at a Naval Postgraduate School open-house, in 1963. Took me with him to drive across the USA, from Arlington Virginia to San Jose California, in the summer of 1966. Took me to a lecture by Louis Leakey at Santa Clara University in 1967. Took me to the VW dealer in 1978, so I could buy my first real car, after I had a real job. Allowed Ian and I to use his garage to replace all 4 CV joints in that same car, 100,000+ miles later.
After he died, I tried to construct an obituary and narrative of his life, but it is beyond me at this point. I have notes, not much more structured than these. I thought if I did a good job writing up his life, it would help, but I think I’ve just been pushing it away. So I’m stopping and sharing this now.
Thank you for reading, and your kind support.
Bill Abbott
bill abbott's weblog 