Death of a Father

LeRoy Weingarten belonged to that generation which has been titled “The Greatest”. I do not know if I agree with that appellation generally, but it seemed to apply to him. Born on January 22nd in 1918, just two months after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, while World War I raged in Europe and just 8 months before the outbreak of the 1918 flu pandemic that also killed millions, he participated in the extraordinary events of an extraordinary century.

As a child, he was raised in the North woods of Wisconsin as a farmer’s son, but his father was also a trapper who had made good money in 1910, while the area was mostly wilderness, and who had worked in the logging camps. LeRoy became a superb woodsman, hunter, and trapper, often supplementing the family larder with venison and other wild game. These skills were highly valued while growing up during the depression. The times impressed upon his character the value of frugality and the necessity of being prepared for difficult situations. He was raised a strict Lutheran (Missouri Synod).

He attended grammar school at a small, one room school house located a half mile from the homestead, and was one of only 6 people who graduated from high school in his class. The high school was located 8 miles away in the town of Hayward. He stayed there during the week in a boarding house, only coming home on weekends and holidays. He did well in his studies and was able to attend college in Superior for a year before lack of funds required him to enroll in the Civilian Conservation Corps. His education led him to a position of company clerk. While in the company he used his trapping skills to trap beaver from the lake the camp was located on. At that time, beaver were not the common pest they have come to be in the North woods, and their pelts, dried between camp walls and smuggled into town in the official sedan, brought desperately needed cash on the black market. I only heard the story two years before his death, when all the other principles had already died. He was a man of his word.

It was during this period that he met my Mother. She was a beauty with flaming red hair and long legs. They met at a dance, and he remarked to one of his friends that she was the woman he was going to marry. There were other contenders for her hand, but after a courtship that lasted three years and many letters, they married. They moved into the homestead with his parents in 1940. LeRoy was classified as unfit for military service because of a stomach ulcer. He took a machinist course that was offered in Hayward, and with the outbreak of the World War II, took a job with A.O. Smith in Milwaukee. During the war, he bossed a crew of women manufacturing bomb casings, torpedo tubes, and airplane parts.

By the end of the war, they had a family of four girls and a desire to get back to the country. They moved back into the homestead with his parents, and soon bought a farm on the Namekagon River from an older brother, complete with some equipment and dairy cows, only a mile away. The girls went to the same one room school house that LeRoy had. This venture into dairy farming lasted only a few years. LeRoy, because of his mathematical talents and education, was recruited to work part time for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation on a surveying crew. This led to an offer of full time employment, and after the cows got loose and wandered off across the river one too many times, he accepted the offer and sold most of the cows.

This was a very good decision. Dairy farming in the north woods is marginal at best, and always very hard work for the entire family. After moving into the farm on the Namekagon, they had five more children, three boys and two girls. The first of the second group of children were twins born in 1951, and the daughter did not survive birth. By 1959 the Weingarten family numbered eight children, five girls, and three boys.

LeRoy was a pillar of the church and the community. He served on the school board for 25 years, for at least a decade as the chairman. He presided over the centralization of the school district from one with small grammar schools in nearly every township, run by the local parents, to one where grammar school children were bused from the far reaches of the district to only a few centralized schools, from one where locally hired teachers served at the pleasure of the local parents to a centralized hiring system that had to deal with a national NEA union. When I talked to him about this in his later years, he remarked that he now thought the centralization had been a mistake. “But”, he said “All the experts told us that it was the thing that we needed to do.” He ran for and was elected as town chairman, county board member, and county board Chairman, serving for many years. He served on the board of the local cooperative, which had been organized to bring services to the local farmers that no local business had been willing to, as it grew from a small feed store, fuel delivery service and grocery store into a modern, multifaceted enterprise. He devoted time and energy to these organizations to ensure their success, and was paid only expenses, which covered mileage to and from the meetings. He had excellent people and organizational skills, and often took leadership positions because someone had to do it.

His career with the State of Wisconsin went well. He became head of the survey crew, and eventually was in charge of road maintenance for the northern third of Wisconsin. He and my Mother raised their children well, and we became self supporting, responsible members of our communities. Just as their own children were finishing leaving the nest, one of my Mother’s sisters became ill with Alzheimer’s. She was in her middle 40’s, and had a very young daughter. Her husband had died not long before, and my parents took in Linda and raised her as their 9th child. She grew up to be self sufficient and responsible as well.

LeRoy was a competent, well rounded, man. Educated, yet at home in the woods; patriotic, yet devoted to limited government; ethical, but aware of the realities of the world, he could rebuild a tractor engine in a shed in the middle of winter, build a barn or a house, shoot a running deer at 200 yards, give comfort to a mourning congregation, perform the mathematics necessary to show the margin of error in miles of road survey, effectively run a meeting or an organization or a political campaign. One of his enthusiasms was fly fishing for trout on the Namekagon.

He retired from the State in 1979. During the next 27 years, he and my mother became world travelers. That visited Europe, Panama, and Alaska several times. He spent considerable time fishing, and a bit serving in local political office. He read avidly, and became a competent cook when my Mother could no longer do so. He was an avid reader who enjoyed history, biographies, and westerns.

In the church, He was a devout Christian, and raised his entire family as Christians. He devoted considerable time, money, and energy to the church, serving as an elder, Sunday School Teacher, and Bible Study member. Long after he had retired from the State, as an elder, he disagreed with the latest pastor who had come to minister to the congregation. The new pastor had asked for a considerable raise, claiming that he needed it to be able to save enough money to put his children through college. LeRoy disagreed, and said that the pastor should not be paid a great deal more than his parishioners made. When LeRoy refused to back down from his position, the pastor convinced enough of the elders that LeRoy was heretical, and that he should be excommunicated from the church. He told me later that he could have accepted that, but that it was the decision to excommunicate his wife and daughter as well, simply because of their connection to him, that made him examine a lifetime of faith in the church. Thus he found himself, in his late 70’s, cut free from the church that he had been devoted to for his entire life.

This caused a profound self examination of his religious beliefs. I had left the church decades earlier, not with any rancor, but simply because I could not find the faith to believe in a literal bible. As LeRoy had ample time available to study, he devoted considerable time to studying religion, Christianity, and Lutheranism. In the end he became what I would call a Deist. He believed in God, but not in organized religion. It did not change the way that he interacted with the world.

As the years took their toll, he continued to walk in the woods (he usually carried a pistol because the bears had become so common), fly fish, and make his own wood supply. He remained vigorous past his 87th birthday. In his 87th year, a stroke laid him low. He suffered from aphasia and had to use a walker as an aid to walk. Recovery was slow, but a little after a year after the stroke, I noticed considerable improvement in his speech and ability to move about on his own.

Death came in his 88th year, September 17th, 2006, at 12:16. I had been on the telephone with him only a minute before, and was having a hard time understanding him. I thought perhaps it was a bad connection. My brother got on the phone, and moments later, told me that he had collapsed. Within a minute or two, he was gone.

He is survived by his wife of 66 years, three sons, five daughters, fourteen grandchildren, eight great grandchildren, and innumerable friends and colleagues.

My apologies to those who think vanities are out of place on Freerepublic. I wanted to write a tribute to the man who had the greatest influence on my life, and I wanted it to last. Freerepublic seemed the obvious choice.

That was a wonderful eulogy. I just left the hospital where my Dad of 88 years is recovering from surgery on his tail bone where a bed sore worked its way into his bone. He is doing fine, but old age is finally getting him down. He too is of the greatest Generation May 21, 1918. My mom 86 is in a nursing home with stage one Alzheimer's. Never apologize we are the salt of the earth and the patriot's of the Republic. We are the sons and daughters of the best American generation on earth. We are the last stand against the entire world for life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, the American Way. We stand against Democrats, Liberals, The MSM, Muslim Islamist, Socialist, Communist and various Despots of the word. It is your father and mother and mine that made us who we are.

As the Baby Boomers approach late middle age, our parents are dying. There are not many of the "Greatest Generation" left.

This is something that I privately reflect upon quite often. Thank you for publicly sharing your reflections. I am truly sorry for your loss.

I know your pain. I just lost my Ftaher on August the 23rd to cancer. I was with him when he took his last breath. He went listening to his favorite song (walk through this world with me). I put it on for him and my Mom was holding him when he went. I told her that was his way of saying everything is OK.... that was a very incredible moment.

I find myself grabbing for the phone to call him after one of the kids does something or I'm having a bad day....I just plain miss him.

Thank you for posting your thoughts. Our parents were the "Greatest" generation. They arose to the task at hand without whining and made their own way.
Prayers for the comfort of your family.

The most serious event in most men's lives is the death of their father. It was mine, that's for sure, and I was well prepared. My father spent the latter half of his life a fine Christian man in word and in deed, besieged by a body that no longer wanted to support life. And he brought up his four boys to be fine young men. I sympathize with your loss, and I found your tribute touching and appropriate. In fact, I'm sure you could have written volumes more on how this man shaped you into the man you are today!
Know this: the pain of losing him will fade. You will smile again, I promise. But you will think of him often throughout the rest of your life, and you will unconciously seek his council on issues that you face by asking yourself, "what would Dad have done in this situation?". And you can still make him very proud of you!

Many years ago my Mother took me and my siblings to Nursing Homes, she said it makes them happy to see children and you can meet people that were alive during the Civil War, people that actually traveled in a Wagon Train, people that may have actually met "Billy the Kid" (That's the one that got me to go, I bet I asked every one of them if they met Billy the Kid...)

I Love my Mother, God Rest Her Soul, she was a School Teacher and she knew where History resides, I don't have to go to the Home any more, I can just query my friends.

TT

What a beautiful tribute to your Dad.I am sure he will be sorely missed and by reading this post, know he did well raising his children. I could read the love and compassion you had for him.
You were blessed to have him for so long, I lost my dad when he was 29, 55 years ago and often dream how things would have been with him here.
He was one of God's greatest gifts to you.
May God keep him in his tender loving care.
God Bless you, marktwain and your family.
Hugz for your Mom.

I understand. My Daddy was a soldier in WWII who learned how to hunt out of necessity as a boy, a member of The Greatest Generation. I understand; he passed away at 81 yrs. of age four years ago. So sorry for your loss; I understand. We have to rise to meet the challenge of this day in their honor. Tell the children about those men and that generation of people. We are living in dangerous times.

"I wanted to write a tribute to the man who had the greatest influence on my life."

Your father would be proud.

Sorry to hear of your loss.

What a wonderful Man, and an equally wonderful Tribute.

I'm still kinda at a loss for words, your Tribute moved me and inspired me on a couple of different levels.

TT

Condolences on your loss. At least you had the pleasure of speaking with your father to the last. I had a mere 15 seconds of "discussion" with my dad about his latest great "find" at Radio Shack. Mom came on the phone and told him not to bother everyone with such trivia. Those were our last words Nov 26, 2003. Dad passed Dec 17, 2003. He was 73.

Your "vanity" post was perfectly fine.

I lost my dad 36 years ago yesterday. He was only 56, a retired Detroit cop. He and my mother were visiting my wife and myself; we were stationed in England at the time. We were driving around the continent and had stopped in Paris. We were on a tour bus back to the city from Versailles when he suffered a massive heart attack. Within 90 seconds he was in the ER of a Parisian hospital; everything that could've been done was done. I miss him every day. My mom survived 17 years without him and she went in Feb 1987. I lost my wife of 36 years back in 2001. It never gets easier.

My dad wanted to be cremated and buried at sea. We did that, but the burial at sea was special. While at the Pentagon, my dad was the project officer for the patrol gunboat hydrofoils (PGH-1 Flagstaff and PGH-2 Tucumcari). The skipper of the current generation of guided missile hydrofoils lives next door to my sister. His boat is a 2nd generation from my dad's project. The skipper of the guided missile hydrofoil took my dad's ashes out to the Coronado islands on his boat. My nephew played taps on his trumpet before the ashes were dropped in the water.

I lost my Dad Sept 15. I wish I could put his life into words the way you have for your Dad. It was lovely. My Dad was only 65 and was a retired Air Force Lt. Col. He died in my arms and I just can't even believe how much I miss him. Prayers for your family and to the others that have lost their loved ones in this thread.

Beth

This post meant a great deal to me. With thanks to God my parents are both 86 and doing very well. I do, however, sometimes catch a glimpse of a future I don't want to see. I can not imagine life without my parents. They are my parents. They are in the center of me.

I can't imagine how you feel.

I do know that I am so lucky to be the daughter of my parents...it seems that you have the same fortune.

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