There was once A Man, born in a small railroad town tucked up in the northeastern corner of Texas just down highway 80 east of Dallas. It was 1929 and the great Stock Market Crash had already occurred. It was the start of the Great Depression.
The train stopped here for water and the town had grown up around it, as so many towns did back in those days. This Man's parents owned a jewelry store and managed to keep food on their table through the business that they conducted in this little Texas town.
A few years later This Man's parents had a daughter. A few more years and they had another son. This Man's mother loved the younger son. This Man's father loved the younger daughter. But they did not so much love This Man.
Throughout the Great Depression This Man and his family learned to survive in extreme hard times. They learned to live a life of doing without that would shape their thinking and their habits for the rest of their lives.
As This Man grew older he became aware that his parents loved his brother and sister, but not so much The Man himself. Out of sheer necessity his parents would work long hours down at the jewelry store, while he and his brother and sister sat outside on the curb, afraid to go inside the dark house alone. They were only children and afraid of the dark.
As he grew older he developed a fascination with chemistry, as apparently did all his friends, including the preacher's son. Being a boy and doing as boys do, he learned to use his growing knowledge of chemistry to make things go boom. He and his friends would spend what money they had going to the drugstore to buy new chemicals to build new devices to make new things go boom in new ways.
This Man lived in an era when a boy with a dime could buy a stick of dynamite and no one thought anything of it (This Man and the Preacher's Son eventually became the reason that this little Texas town now has a law against setting off explosives within the city limits.)
One day, as this man set off a new and particularly powerful explosion, he heard a piece of metal shrapnel fly just past his head, nearly hitting him like a bullet to the brain. It was then that he decided he no longer wanted to blow things up. Instead, he wanted to become a chemical engineer. And so he set out to find a way to get out of the small Texas town and into college in order to make his new dream become a reality.
The options were limited for leaving the small town and so This Man found little choice but to join the Armed Forces. He wanted to fly so he joined the Air Force. The Air Force sent him to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he would later say the snow would pile as high as the roof of his barracks and the cold would freeze you in your tracks. He wasn't overly fond of the snow or the cold, but if he could fly then it would all be worthwhile.
But he could not fly. The Air Force said his eyes were not good enough to fly and he would have to do something else. As luck would have it, something else came along in a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Federal Government had begun a program to pull specially qualified men out of the armed forces and send them to military schools. For various reasons, a slot came open for the Air Force to send one man to the Army's West Point Academy. He wanted to go, but he was not chosen.
The man who was chosen, though, didn't want to go. The Korean war was imminent and he wanted to fight. So he declined and the opening came available again. The offer was extended again, this time to The Man from the small Texas town, who gladly accepted.
West Point was not fun, as he would later admit, but it got him further on his way towards his dream. Meanwhile, all the men from his former unit were sent to fight in the Korean War. This Man, though, would graduate from West Point as an officer, meet and marry a woman from Houston, Texas. And be sent off into the Army to begin serving his term of service as mandatory payment for the academy education he had received.
This Man and his wife were sent to Tokyo, Japan. While there they had a daughter. The year was 1957. The entire time in the army would be spent there, living in a paper house in Japan.
After leaving the Army This Man and his wife and daughter moved to Austin, Texas, where he would enroll in the University of Texas at Austin's school of engineering. His area of focus, of course, was chemical engineering.
After spending a great deal of time working in chemistry labs surrounding by an army of aspiring engineers and their chemical experiments he found that he disliked the overwhelming smells of the lab more than he could bear. It was something he hadn't had to deal with while working alone with his own chemicals at home. And it was enough to change his mind. He quit chemical engineering and shifted to electrical engineering instead. And it was in this new field that he would obtain his degree.
Meanwhile, he and his wife had another daughter, born in a little house in the middle of Austin. He would find a job there, working in his field, but would shortly thereafter be laid off.
In searching for work he found a great new opportunity far away in a strange little city hidden between the mountains of North Alabama. It was a very young Rocket City, and he would move his family there to begin the new job that would take him far from home. Upon leaving The Man and his family all swore they would be back someday. Austin was home and nothing could take its' place.
Once moved into the Alabama Rocket City he and his wife built themselves a red brick house and had another daughter, a little hellcat who ironically would have been far more at home in the untamed lands of Texas than in the sleepy hills of Alabama.
A year later a son was born. Several years after him another son was born. And the family was completed.
Throughout the 1970s This Man struggled to find a way to relax and settle into an Alabama City in which every man was an engineer and every woman a school teacher. No one in the Rocket City was actually from the Rocket City, and so it was an odd little place without roots, a place in which everyone swore that one day they would go home. But no one ever did. Who could have imagined that this missile program into which he had entered from its' very founding would become so important, so enormous, and so long lasting?
Through Watergate, an oil embargo, an Iranian hostage crisis, a giving away of the Panama Canal, and the bankruptcy of the Chrysler Corporation, This Man and his family grew quietly comfortable in their red brick house in their odd Alabama city surrounded by mountains and missiles.
The Man found that in order to relax he needed to swing and ride motorcycles. He bought a Harley and spent his weekends riding far and wide throughout winding Alabama roads, exploring and escaping. At night he would sit in his big wooden swing on his back porch and look at the stars while telling his children stories about blowing things up in a small Texas town, sitting scared in the dark on a curb while waiting for his parents to come home, and about the Army. Every summer the entire family would pile into a Dodge van and travel back to Texas, where his children would find that everywhere they went in the tiny Texas town everyone who saw them immediately knew whose children they were without being told. And the children thought it was a very odd thing indeed.
"How do they know who we are?" they kept asking each other.
In the 1980s, This Man turned 55 years old. Government work had changed and the ugly politics of socialism was increasingly weighing down upon the engineers who built America's spaceships and armies. This Man was fed up and took advantage of his opportunity to retire. His wife was less than thrilled at the sudden change, having grown accustomed to having the house to herself all day long. She also felt that as young and highly qualified as he was, he should take a new job and keep working. But This Man had a plan, a plan for something completely different than the work he had been doing all through his career.
Every day at 5 a.m. This Man would leap from his bed and rush downstairs to his office in the basement of his house. He would turn on his computer and being entering data about the stock market from the Wall Street Journal that was printed the day before. He would study company after company, trend after trend, trying to find a way to make something more out of his retirement money. The timing was both unfortunate and incredibly lucky. He lost a fortune in the Stock Market Crash of 1987, learning a hard lesson about buying on margin and the dangerous illusions that greed often creates in the market.
"I should have seen it coming," he would kick himself and say. And then he went back to work, trying to build something worthwhile with what money he had left. Finally, one day he found what he considered to be his perfect choice. He found a little company that wrote databases and sold them to corporate America. He began to pour money into the stock, bit by bit, convinced that the numbers were all there and this company was rock solid. The company took a dramatic turn and dropped to alarmingly low numbers. This Man's broker called him in a panic.
"I think you need to sell. This company is a dog," the broker would say.
But instead he bought more. "It's a fire sale," he insisted. "The company is solid. The market is wrong."
Soon the market realized its' mistake, and the little database company began to rise again from its' ashes. Meanwhile, never wavering in his confidence that his decision had been right, This Man had already moved on to look for another diamond in the rough that he could put the rest of his remaining retirement fund into.
He found a new software company that created the operating system on most new PCs. The company produced various other software packages that were moderately popular, but it was its' virtual monopoly on the operating system itself that caught his attention. Even though the company was brand new and headed by a very young man, he poured all the rest of his money into its' stock. Having done that, all that was left for him to do was to watch. So, each day The Man continued to rise at 5 and continued to watch the market, trying to learn everything about it that he could. But as for new investments, he was out of money.
The late 1980s was the beginning of an unprecedented stock market rise. For the next 11 years the market would go up and up, defying all odds, and enabling a great many investors to build a healthy retirement and more. Some people made millions, some made tens of millions, and some made far more. For This Man, he had a goal and all he really wanted was to prove that he could reach that goal. He reached it within a few years of retiring and was justifiably proud of his achievement. He wasn't rich by modern standards, but he was comfortable and he had proven that he could do what he had set out to do.
Other than the stock market, the only goal that seemed to interest This Man was grandchildren. He had wanted to have 8 kids, but could only coax his wife into having 5, barely getting the 5th one. Even so, with 5 kids it seemed reasonable to assume that he would have at least 10 grandchildren. Unfortunately, the world had changed and all he managed to get was 2, a girl and a boy. But he loved that girl and that boy as if they were his own children and was very happy with them.
Just a year ago, This Man's granddaughter produced his very first great-grandchild, a little girl named "Mia." When asked if she had named her baby girl after Mia Hamm, the mother responded, "Who?" Apparently she had named her baby after a dress, called a Mia dress, and had no idea who Mia Hamm was.
This Man was absolutely thrilled to see his great-granddaughter and spent as much time as he could with her. Unfortunately, the time he had for her was shorter than he knew. 3 weeks ago This Man had a massive stroke. While in the hospital's ICU This Man's children would cheer him on by reminding him that Mia needed to see him. It always made him feel a little better to think about her, and he slowly seemed to get better.
Just 2 days ago the hospital moved This Man out of the ICU and into a private room. They began his therapy and fully expected that despite the extremely dangerous type of stroke he had experienced, he would recover. Unfortunately, he did not. Last night at around 9 p.m. This Man died suddenly at the age of 76.
This Man was my father. And I miss him.
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