I’d like to take a non-real estate moment to honor my personal and professional role model. Last week, my father passed away, at the ripe age of 85. He was an auto insurance salesman for 38 years, and for as long as I knew him, he broke down the stereotype of your typical insurance salesman. He was widely loved by his clients and co-workers, would bend over backwards to help his clients, and would do it all with a smile, 6 days a week, 365 days a year, until he retired at 78. What I write below is part of the eulogy I gave a few days ago at his memorial service.
In 1936, when my dad was 16 years old, President Franklin Roosevelt said to the country, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny”.
I’ve always been a bit of a history geek, but even more so in my adult years. For me, there’s no better book that epitomizes what my dad means to me than a book entitled “The Greatest Generation” by Tom Brokaw.
In it, he talks about how these young people came of age during the Great Depression and the second world war and went on to build modern America – men and women whose everyday lives of duty, honor, achievement, and courage gave us the world we have today.
There’s certainly no shortage of stories, anecdotes, and funny sayings about my dad…everyone does have their own memory or funny story with him, and though I told myself I’d keep this simple, there’s really just one I’d like to quickly relate which happened twenty years before I was born. It’s one of the few war stories that shows his willingness to give, his humor, and his compassion.
My dad was a medical technician in World War II, and landed on Normandy on June 9th, 1944, three days after D-Day, an event he rarely if ever talked about with us. But there’s one incident he always told us about. At some point while he and the rest of the Allied forces were liberating France, he stumbled through a small French village that had not seen a doctor in two years. With his red-cross armband on, people naturally assumed he was a doctor, and subsequently at some point, he got pulled into a house and delivered a baby, never telling the grateful villagers that he had no idea what he was doing beyond cutting the umbilical cord. As my sisters and I all had our children, and with my dad’s self-professed birthing expertise, one constant thing he would always jokingly volunteer is deliver our children, which, we would politely decline.
My dad was a funny, exuberant character, and lived an exciting life, and one which, to me, would just be hard to compare to. By the time he was 35, he had survived the Great Depression, grew up in Hollywood, canoodled with people who went on to become famous movie stars, took part in the liberation of Europe, and most fittingly, had his own dance party TV show…yes, in the 1950s, my dad was the Dick Clark of Peru in South America. His perpetual desire to entertain and amuse certainly lives on in all his kids and grandkids. In fact, in our family, I’d say there’s definitely no shortage of drama queens.
Finally, on behalf of my mom and my sisters, I want to thank everyone here, for coming and honoring my dad. This indeed is a celebration of his life, and it’s a fitting tribute to him as a good friend, a good husband and a good father and someone we will remember forever. He has now reached, his final rendezvous with destiny. Thank you.
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