Eulogies

My mother died over a decade ago and the task of talking about her life fell to me at the memorial service. More recently, my father also passed. Though it is off topic even for a blog a wildly diverse as this one, I think they would have wanted some kind of permanent written record of their lives (beyond the inevitable birth and death certificates that in the end are often all that survive). I certainly would if it were me.

So here are Ely and Lorraine’s eulogies for posterity. Below them is another short one I gave even earlier for R. Leonard White.

Ely Simonoff

(August 18, 1928 - October 26, 2018)

Long ago, Ely asked me to give him a eulogy when the time came, which was probably asking for trouble. Or maybe he knew what he was doing. I’m one of those rare individuals who can and does crack jokes at a funeral. My irreverence was often exactly like Ely’s. I’m possibly the closest thing to having Ely here giving us his own eulogy.

But I confess I have two problems. We all love to complain about our parents. Unfortunately, I cannot really complain about Ely. He was always a decent person and father. We need to remember Ely as he was, but that’s hard because he usually held his cards close. He once admitted to me that he was uncomfortable revealing things about himself. Me, I divulge everything. Constant TMI. Not Ely, who loved an intellectual discussion, a political discussion, but seldom a personal one.

Still, our job here is to remember Ely in his prime. To keep him alive in our memories, to remember him at his best. We all die in decline without the friends and acquaintances we once had. Our job is to preserve his success in our memory, a very real kind of immortality we all deserve.

I’m very proud that my father stayed mentally sharp all of his 90 years. My last conversation with him, the week before before he left us, was amazing. Among other things, we discussed quantum physics, cosmology, the genetics of aging, and a new theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a virus that still lurks in our DNA. Ely loved intellectual discussion, always and to the end.

Yet the Ely we must remember was much more. He was also the consummate alpha male and I mean that in the best possible way. He was competitive, hard driving, senior vice president of a huge nation-wide Fortune 500 corporation, with thousands of people working for him. He had two Porches and a Chicago Lake Shore apartment to die for, plus a young, beautiful wife, now his widow after 40 years of marriage. Lots of us raise a family. Ely lived long enough and well enough to raise two.

You don’t reach those heights without being an excellent manager, and Ely was great. The quiet qualities that made him a bit of an enigma, also made him very good at handling people. I honestly never saw him angry at me or anyone else. He could disagree and persuade without fighting, a valuable life tool. He never showed much angst or self doubt either. Maybe we don’t know his inner soul as well as we might, but maybe he and we are the richer for it. I went to Harvard Business School (whoa!), but am a mediocre manager at best. Ely rose to the top without such credentials, with just intelligence and an even temperament.

Let’s see if we can guess where Ely came from, and how he became the person who did so much with his life.

He was born in northern New Jersey to Jewish parents, Simon and Jeanne, who immigrated from what are now Ukraine and Romania. Born August 18, 1928, he grew up in the Depression and came of age during WWII.

Yet his was probably not your traditional Jewish household. For one thing, his father seems to have been the black sheep of the family, with older brothers successful in the early 20th century New York fur trade. I understand that his parents were not observant, that he was Bar Mitzvah only because his grandmother insisted.

My guess is his parents were rebels of a sort, possibly the socialist sort, as many Jews were in the 1930’s. Ely’s father worked for his brothers for a while, then went off on his own, eventually moving to Los Angeles when Ely’s sister Lee was potential Hollywood material. There Simon and Jeanne ran a small but successful diner for decades. Ely joined them there, coming back from Korea.

My guess is that Ely was also a bit of a rebel, moving away from his parents in a different direction, like so many of us. This is conjecture, but if his parents were leftish socialists, maybe Ely decided to he’d be capitalist and a corporate success instead. His father may have quit the fur trade, but Ely choose the related “rag” trade, textiles.

In those days Jews could not usually find work just anywhere. Jews usually worked for other Jews in Jewish businesses. Not that my father, like his parents, was all that Jewish. He usually tried to downplay his heritage, as many did. He has been authentically Catholic for decades. He even chose “shiksa” wives, as so many do. (Shiksa is Yiddish for non-Jewish woman.) I was never inside a synagogue until I converted to Judaism as an adult. By the way, I carried on the family tradition in one important way. I too have always chosen non-Jewish spouses and partners, usually Catholic.

After a brief stint at May Company, the big Los Angeles department store (founded by a Jew of course), Ely went went to work for Wolf Manufacturing, originators of the mitt pot holder still common today. That company was owned by the Wolf brothers, also Jewish. By the time I was growing up, he was Plant Manager of their operation, which was purchased in the early 1970’s by Opelika Corporation, controlled by Charlie Cohen and later by his son, Donald, who survives Ely. With a name like Cohen, I don’t need to tell you they too were Jews.

That transaction was partly motivated by Opelika’s desire to acquire Ely’s services. Think of it, acquiring a whole company just for Ely! That’s how good he was. At Opelika, he became Senior Vice President of Sewing Operations, based in Chicago but responsible for factories around the country.

Fast forward a few years and you have Ely at his prime, top executive living the good life in Chicago with his new wife Mary, and starting a very successful second family when others his age might have been thinking of retirement.

With American textile mills in decline, Ely embarked on a successful second career as a specialty textiles entrepreneur, founding innovative companies which commercialized home quilting. At the time, his South Carolina startup was a key supplier of bed linens to J.C. Penney at its zenith. Of course he never worked for Penney’s. Not a Jewish shop!

Googling Ely, I discovered at least three textile related patents he invented. Not bad for a professional manager. Ely was a very smart guy, creative, yet still even tempered and good with people. We will miss him.

I promised you an irreverent joke and here it is.

In his long battle with congestive heart failure, Ely was hospitalized many times and always hated it. Really hated it. He made Mary promise that he would not die in a hospital, and she delivered. Ely passed at home early last Friday, October 26, two months into his 90th year. I’m happy that until his last few days, he was alert, reasonably happy, not all that sick, and without much pain.

Unfortunately, there was one problem. His apartment building was formerly the Skowhegan Hospital. He died in a hospital after all!

Lorraine Adcock Simonoff

(March 2, 1934 - February 27, 2008)

Lorraine was born in 1934 and her 74th birthday would have been last Sunday.

She did not quite make manage it, having died the prior Wednesday. But she did manage a lot of other things fairly well, including her illness, which she survived in reasonably good health more than twice as long as her doctors expected and then managed to decline through the really bad parts in just two weeks. In fact, I think we can sum a lot of her life up with two words, she always “managed” and she was always pretty “independent”.

This happens to be my second eulogy because I said something at the funeral for my father in law some years ago. My point then was that the duty for survivors is to remember the deceased not as he or she was when they died, but as they lived years and decades before. It is easy to remember someone frail and sick. It is harder to remember them as they really lived.

Unfortunately, most of us here did not really know my mother, especially before her illness. I’m not sure I really did either. But our job here is to try. Our job is to remember Lorraine as she lived rather than as she died.

The first thing we need to remember is that she liked to choose her own name. Christened “Mertie Lorraine Adcock” after an ancestor, she first chose to be called “Lorraine” and in latter years became “Lori” professionally. Even later, she attempted to rename herself from “Grandmother” to “Granda”, an appellation that I for one resisted, believing that names are best chosen by the namer and not the namee.

Lorraine was raised on a small farm in Mesquite Texas, just east of Dallas. The I-635 inner loop around Dallas now runs through what was the Adcock farm. So the place of her rural youth is now pretty urban. She was the middle child of 5, with two older sisters and two younger brothers.

She attended Mesquite Texas schools and was active in 4H and her high school marching band, where she played clarinet. Though of course a lot of her time was spend helping run her family’s depression-era and fairly poor farm.

I tend to think of her as a child of the Great Depression and as part of the World War II generation that became the parents of baby boomers such as myself. But that turns out to be not quite true. Being born in 1934 means that she was only five years old when Germany invaded Poland. So in reality, she was more a child of World War II and a young adult during the 1950’s of Eisenhower.

Being quite a bit more liberal than I am, I always thought of my mother as a FDR Democrat. She may nor may not have agreed, but I now believe that she originally voted for Eisenhower and only latter became disillusioned with him, and possibly with the Republican Party as well. So at least here and so possibly in other areas, my history may already include mythology rather than pure reality.

Lorraine was raised a Methodist. Her family and especially her father were very strict. She married at age 16, probably as the result of a fight with her father, and was forced to leave home and high school, living with her husband and working for Dunn and Bradstreet in Dallas.

Soon after, she followed that first husband to San Diego, California where he shipped out in the Navy. She divorced him almost immediately, but stayed in Los Angles working for Dunn and Bradstreet. She married Ely Simonoff, my father, in LA a couple of years latter. Lorraine was the only Adcock sibling to ever move away from Texas.

Possibly her real reason for moving to Los Angeles was a hope that she might somehow be discovered by the movie industry, because by all accounts she was a very pretty woman. If so, I am truly a child of Hollywood even though neither parent ever worked in movies. That is because my father also ended up in Los Angeles because of Hollywood. His parents moved there from New Jersey to foster his sister’s dancing career while he served overseas in the Korean War.

We moved to Culver City, which is surrounded by west Los Angeles. Culver City was home to several studios, including MGM, and was possibly the real birth place of the west coast movie industry.

There Mom was very active in the community and especially in my grade school PTA, serving in a variety of positions including PTA President.

A decade later, our family moved to the Chicago area when my father was transferred there. But within a year, Lorraine and Ely separated.

At the same time, my mother began working again. She became first a bookkeeper and latter a loan officer and bank executive, learning these trades almost entirely via work experience and intelligence. She eventually worked at the Vice President level at a number of banks around the country, including Wells Fargo, and specialized in commercial lending.

Even though a high school dropout, my mother was quite intelligent. She was an avid reader and knowledgeable in a variety of areas.

There is a theory that intelligence may mostly be associated with our “X” chromosome, because while men and women have pretty much exactly the same average IQ, male IQ scores tend to have higher standard deviation, with more really smart and really stupid men than women at either end of the scale. That could be because men only have a single “X” chromosome, while women have two which probably average each other out intelligence wise. I mention this theory (which I read somewhere long ago), because once I mentioned it to my mother and she immediately concluded the obvious corollary with some pride: that whatever intelligence her son might boast may primarily be inherited from her. For men must always inherit their “X” chromosome from their mother.

I cannot resist briefly digressing by adding that the theory that fathers may be unable to easily pass their intelligence to their sons may go a long way toward explaining the instability of most ruling dynasties throughout history in a male-dominated world.

My mother proved to be a restless spirit. She moved us back to Los Angeles after four years north of Chicago. Then she frequently changed jobs and cities in the period after I was grown. She worked at firms in Los Angeles, Orange County, Washington state, Sandpoint Idaho, Dallas Texas, Eugene Oregon, suburban Chicago, and probably other places as well that I have forgotten. And she held positions at a number of different financial institutions, and not just Wells Fargo banks.

I remember that she admired characters played by Mary Tyler Moore, probably because Ms. Moore (or is it Ms. Tyler-Moore?) often played strong and independent women. She loved the “Man of La Mancha” musical and the Don Quixote story, because unpopular quests, impossible dreams, independence, and perseverance appealed to her.

Lori held many feminist ideals (though she might not have liked that label) and apparently was often at odds with her male superiors. I sometimes got the impression that she never met a boss that she liked. Though it could not have been as bad as I imagine, since I don’t believe she was ever unemployed.

She never re-married after divorcing my father some 40 years ago.

Mom retired as soon as she qualified at age 65 and began what is probably the most remarkable chapter of her story. Instead of settling down in one place, she purchased a small motor home and traveled around the United States.

For a number of years she had no home or apartment other than her vehicle. Her home base was a rented mailbox in Eugene Oregon and a cell phone that we gave her.

And she traveled pretty much all by herself, though she did make a few friends along the way. Her guiding spirit was a 1970’s autobiographical story of lonely journeying called “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat Moon. Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie” was also a favorite of hers.

Lorraine traveled to see the country. She also traveled to learn more about US history, since she always had an interest in both history and historic fiction. Finally, she traveled to research her own genealogy (or as she would say, her “roots”).

She visited many grave yards and ghost towns throughout the south and mid-Atlantic, looking for ancestors and building a family tree for both the Adcock and Smith sides of her family. I cannot give you many details other than the fact that her ancestors came to America in the 1700’s, impressively long ago compared to my father’s family, who emigrated here in the early 20th century.

She never completed the search or organized her findings, but has given us her records so that we may one day either write the story or at least pass it to our children.

I could speak of her illnesses in recent years. (There were at least three separate ones.) But I will skip that because it does not serve our goal of remembering her life rather than her death. Though I will mention the obvious point that smoking can definitely kill you.

Finally, I will also mention that, though I stayed at her hospice bedside almost all day last Tuesday, it was only very shortly after I told her I was going to get some sleep in a nearby room at 12:30 AM Wednesday morning that she died. When the Nurse next visited her room around 1:00 AM, she was gone. As my spouse commented, in the end she apparently wanted to die on her own and by herself.

Lori was nothing if not independent.

R. Leonard White

(May 22, 1921 - May 1998)

I recently watched an interview where a doctor of internal medicine made what I consider a rather profound statement. His practice must often deal with dying patents, and he observed that the way a person and his relatives cope with the process of dying is very important since it often how that person is remembered.

With this in mind, we must admit that Dr. White’s last few years were particularly tragic since they threaten to rob us of a favorable impression of his life as a whole. We must all make every attempt to avoid this. Dr White suffered though what I consider to be the most trying and degrading experiences possible. And he did it with much more courage and perseverance than I think most of us, including myself, could ever hope to muster.

But the real point is that our duty is to remember him not then, but for his earlier life and triumphs. We must endeavor to remember the Leonard White who worked long hours to become a superlative and caring doctor and surgeon. We must remember the man who was a kind and generous host who counted a great many people among his friends and acquaintances. We must remember the person with many sides who excelled an impressive number of hobbies and activities from sailing to golf to wood working. We must remember the Dr White with a fondness for cheap Radio Shack gadgets, the man with a great sense of humor and a working cannon that was probably illegal. We owe it to him to and to ourselves remember only his achievements in earlier happier times.

Comments

[brad pitt]

amazing eulogy

[Joanne Heater]

I cannot tell which one of Lori's children wrote the eulogy--it is a beautiful remembrance. I have thought of her often over the last 25 years, and today (9/27/2010) I decided to google her name. Lori was my boss at Goldrich and Kest in 1980; and at Metrobank from 1981 until say 1985. She originally hired me as her secretary/loan processor when I was 39 years old in 1980 and looking to get back into a career after years as a homemaker. She was a wonderful teacher/mentor and she taught me everything she knew--her specialty was construction lending. I missed her very much when she quit Metrobank and moved to Oregon in the mid 1980's. We may have kept in touch once or twice during her first year in Oregon, but then we lost touch. I continued to go "up the ladder" at Metrobank and then moved up to another bank. All in all, I had a 30 year wonderful career in banking, thanks to Lori Simonoff. I am so sorry to hear of her passing, and I wish I would have googled her years earlier so that I could have thanked her personally for all she gave me. I retired a couple of years ago, but I still miss my work. By the way, I retired on 2/28/2008, one day after she died. Sincerely, Joanne Heater