The following is the eulogy I gave on September 9th, 2012 in the memorial service we held for my father-in-law, Richard L. Throckmorton, 1928 - 2012.
I first met Dick Throckmorton in 1975 in Colorado Springs. His claim to fame in my eyes was that he was the father of the woman I was falling in love with and whom I was soon to marry. He was a much different man than my father. I come from a family of nomads: my father was, for most of his life, an itinerant preacher, as was my older brother, and I was destined to be the same. I had already spent some of my childhood and most of my adolescence in a tiny travel trailer with my mother and father as they held revival meetings in little pentecostal churches across the country. Dick, on the other hand was a tradesman, a union electrician who had lived and raised his daughters in the same house in Colorado Springs for close to 20 years. His path was about as foreign to me as one could get, and our first conversations were marked with hesitancy and perhaps even suspicion of one another.
Yet despite those wary beginnings, it was Dick's path--the path of the calm dependable tradesman--that I ultimately followed, rather than my own father's. And so, while I still loved and respected my own father, it was more often Dick who served as my example of the craftsman, homeowner, financial planner, crew supervisor, and other roles that I was to take on in my life; roles that Dick filled before me, but none of which my own father did.
But of course no one's life is quite as straight-forward as it first appears. Dick's own father bore some similarity to my own in that he too was something of an itinerant: an oil-field welder who traveled from one drilling rig to another every few weeks. Their years in the West Texas oil fields in the depths of the Great Depression were hard ones in which Dick and his older brother, Bud, would trap quail and hunt rabbit and squirrel with a .22 rifle, providing the family their only meat. By the time Dick was 9 or 10 the family moved to Brazil for Dick's father to work in the oil industry starting there. When the family moved back to the states 5 years later, Dick was speaking Portuguese as his primary language and had to somewhat relearn English. Bernard, Dick's father, had always dreamed of owning a farm, so upon returning to the United States, he took the money he had saved from his Brazilian windfall, and purchased a farm in Fairbury, Nebraska.
In a few years Dick's mother and father took their youngest son, John, with them down to Caracas, Venezuela--once again to work in the oil fields of that country, leaving Bud, Dick's older brother, and Dick back in Fairbury where Dick finished high school. Bud joined the Army and soon found himself fighting for his life in the Battle of the Bulge. Dick finished school, then joined the Army himself just as the war was ending. He was sent to Korea and finished his 2 year hitch driving truck, and was honorably discharged just prior to the start of the Korean conflict.
When Dick returned to the states he joined up with his best friend whom he had met in the Army, Wally Windscheffel, and the two of them went through trade school on the G.I. bill to become electricians. After graduating Wally convinced Dick to go with him back to his home of Smith Center, Kansas where there was a great push to finally bring electricity to rural Kansas. Wally and Dick started their own business together--T-W electric, and thrived for a number of years wiring the homes and farms all around Smith County.
It was on Dick's first arrival at Smith Center that he met Wally's cousin, Norma Jean Beckman when he rented a room in the boarding house Norma's parents owned and ran. Within 5 months Norma and Dick were married. Their first 3 daughters, Brenda, Jane, and Nanette were born there in Smith Center. But once the houses and farms were wired in the area, the work dried up and T-W electric disbanded. Hearing that there was work in Colorado, he went to Colorado Springs, which seemed like paradise after Kansas, applied for and secured a job as a lineman for the city.
There were triumphs as well as bumps and interruptions along the way. An accomplishment of note: while general foreman of linemen for the city Dick proposed to coworkers that they start a credit union, which they did with Dick as the president--it was Colorado Springs' first credit union. Later he quit his job with the city and tried his hand at direct sales, selling Salad Master cookware for a short while, but soon went back to construction as a union electrician. A few years after Nan and I were married and I had moved us back to my home ground here in Oregon, the long construction boom in Colorado had finally ended and work was sparse in the Springs. Dick found out that work was plentiful here and before we knew it, they had sold their house in Colorado Springs and moved here to Oregon. Dick continued in his trade and prospered, ending his career before retiring in 1992 as general foreman for EC, the largest electrical contracting firm in the state of Oregon.
Those are at least some of the facts of Dick Throckmorton's life, but they in no way begin to tell the full story of the man, the husband, the father, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, the father-in-law, and the friend that we all knew and loved. So let me now turn from the mere facts of his life and try to recount the truth of his life.
He was a man of what these days we call the "greatest generation", infused with the values that shaped our country, that endured, with little complaint and considerable resilience, the hardships of the Great Depression, that fought and won two World Wars. He had a work ethic such that when he worked for the city of Colorado Springs and coworkers found him after he had fainted, upon medical examination, it was discovered that he had pneumonia--he had been working while sick because of his sense of obligation, his sense that the homeowners of Colorado Springs were counting on him to get their power back on. He was a man of great generosity. After he retired he spent many years giving his own time and spending his own gas picking up and delivering donated food and goods for the Portland Rescue Mission and he served as the Prayer Support leader for Good Samaritan ministries. He was a man of exceptionally good humor, always friendly and open. He told me once that he loved meeting new people, talking and joking with them. Though not a musician himself, as I am, he loved music. I'll never forget when I first met him the thing he seemed most proud of was his audio-file level (and quite expensive) home sound system and extensive and eclectic record collection. And I have a fond memory of going to the Portland symphony with him and Norma to see Mel Torme. He never smoked, and drank with great moderation--perhaps a glass of wine, or at the most two on a holiday; never hard liquor. I never once heard him utter a single profanity or a racial slur. He was a devoted husband who lived faithfully with the wife of his youth--as it says in Proverbs 5--for 54 years until her death from leukemia. And with the wife of his later years, Marjorie, until his own death. He was a loving father to Brenda, Jane, Nanette and Sondra, and the testament to the depth of his love for them, and their love for him, is this: I have heard not a single story of a harsh word, a hard feeling, a bad memory, or any hint of limitation or equivocation in their feelings for him. Consider how rare this is. He took great joy in and deeply loved his grandchildren. My son Nigel was his first.
And finally, though not raised so, he was a man of faith. He adopted his wife's Lutheranism, followed her into the charismatic movement, and back to Lutheranism until he remarried, then attended the Methodist church with Marjorie. All his daughters went through Lutheran confirmation. He served, on and off, on the board of Ascension Lutheran Church in the Springs, and his youngest, Sondra, he sent to an Evangelical parochial school in Canby, Oregon. I can tell you that he attended church on Sundays almost without fail, first with his wife and family, then, after Norma passed away, by himself at our Savior's Lutheran in Lake Oswego, and after remarrying, here [at the Oak Grove Methodist Church in Milwaukie] with Marjorie. But of course simply going to church is not really any indication of anything other than consistency to convention. I can't say with any specificity what his doctrinal beliefs were because he never discussed them. My real sense of his beliefs come mostly from his prayers at family functions. What I can say is that those prayers revealed his belief in a God with whom he was intimate in the same sense that is stated in Romans 8:15 "...but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father!'"
Abba, being an Aramaic word for father that is a term of affection only used among immediate family. A genuine feeling of relationship with God was conveyed in those prayers, a relationship that I'm confident bore him upon his passing to the presence of his savior, his Lord, and his loved ones who made the journey before him. That relationship, that faith, will afford him a reward for the work, the honor, the steadfastness, the good humor, the generosity, the fidelity, and most of all the love he exhibited in his very well-lived life. And for that, we who loved him rejoice.
