Glenn Duddleson

Garrison Keillor has famously observed that, when telling a story, you need to make sure the facts don’t get in the way of the truth. That is a very good admonition when talking about the story of my father’s life. As with every life, there are many facts – birth, education, work, children, travel, retirement, hobbies, and so on. They are important, and I will recount some of them. But they are not the truth about my father and I will try to get at that, too.

Glenn Duddleson was born on July 30, 1912, and died Friday, February 25, 2005. He was always very precise about dates, so we should begin with them.

Dad was born in the small, rural village of Three Oaks, Michigan, in the front room of the house next door to where his parents lived and where he would grow up. No doctors around and no hospital sufficiently convenient to bother going to. He was a large, sturdy-looking baby weighing in at more than 10 pounds, born to his almost certainly uncomfortable 4’ 10” mother. He grew into a sturdy-looking man at a little under 6 feet, a little over 200 pounds with unusually large, strong hands and forearms. My mother frequently had to move the buttons on his long sleeve shirt cuffs over an inch or so, because they would be otherwise too small in the wrist to button as they came off the rack.

He was a good student through high school. Although rural schools of the time may have had, in general, less demanding curricula than we expect today, he studied Latin, read Shakespeare and other classic literature, and discovered classical music. With his remarkable memory, he retained much of this and, in particular, enjoyed classical music for the rest of his life. In the fall of 1929 he went off to Purdue for an engineering degree. A couple of months later, he was back home, his school money gone in the stock market crash of 1929. Over the next several years jobs were scarce. He chopped wood, picked grapes, worked in a slaughterhouse and a factory, and like most young men of his time during the great depression, did what he needed to do to get by.

In the mid-1930’s, two events which set the course for the rest of his life happened at about the same time. First, he met my mother, and second, he got a reliable job that paid a decent wage with the U.S. Postal Service.

My mother was a violinist. She came to town with her Model T (rumble seat version) to run around teaching music to kids in various small school districts in the area. Dad saw her one Sunday playing a solo (Meditation from Thais, by Massanet), and was completely captivated. Dad always said that she was beautiful and she had a violin and a car – what more could a man want? On their first date, he took her for a romantic walk among the ice floes along Lake Michigan in February. Miraculously, she agreed to see him again, and within a few weeks they were sure they had found each other, forever. And they were right.

Dad got his job with the Post Office Department in 1937 and worked for them for 32 more years. For most of that time, he ran on the railroad as a railway mail clerk. In the days before the interstate highway system and airplanes and zip codes, mail moved entirely on trains and was sorted while it moved. Dad was proud of the fact that at that time you could mail a letter with a 3 cent stamp in Chicago on Monday and have it delivered in Los Angeles on Wednesday, service that you will be lucky to duplicate today without paying FedEx double digit dollars.

The key to making the system work was the clerks who sorted the mail on the trains. They had to keep in their heads the entire train routes and schedules for most of the country. Additionally, for the particular cities in which they specialized, they needed to memorize the entire street system so mail could be sorted to go the appropriate mail sub-station, from which a letter carrier would bring it to your door. Dad memorized the street systems for Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, and several other mid-major cities. He was deferred out of World War II, because he was one of the few people in the mid-west who could properly sort mail destined for the west coast. Throughout the 1940’s and 50’s, he continued to study and take exams to keep up with growth and change in these cities.

Some time around 1980, he went to Los Angeles for the first time, by plane, to visit his granddaughter. He remembered the street system well enough without ever having been in the city, to drive from LAX to her house in south L.A. without directions, without getting lost, and arrived directly at her front door.

He may have talked himself out of his job one night when he was deadheading from Three Oaks into the Chicago station and happened accidentally to be seated next to some important post office official. He observed that the younger guys coming into the service seemed less dedicated, less willing to study, made more mistakes in sorting the mail. He told the official that if you divided up the country into areas with a sort of numerical tree structure, it would require very little knowledge on the part of individual clerks to sort the mail, making it easier to hire people who were not otherwise qualified. Whether he actually invented the zip code system on that fateful train ride, he never knew for sure, but it was introduced a few years later pretty much as he proposed it. Not too long thereafter, railway mail cars became unnecessary (because the mail was sorted statically, by zip code, in district mail centers before being flown and trucked) and they were decommissioned. Dad finished the last few years of his career in the post office in Buchanan, Michigan.

My mother grew up in the South. After the February, 1936 walk along Lake Michigan, she said that she never felt warm again in the winter in Michigan, ever. In 1971, Dad retired and they moved to Pinellas Park, Florida. After that, his job was to keep her warm and properly cared for while she played the violin for him and they listened to Bach and Mozart and Beethoven together. He did that for another 33 years, until Mom died in January, 2004 at the age of 94. They had been together for 67 years, and neither of them regretted a day of it except for the few times when they were apart. During that time, not a harsh word passed between them, and neither of them ever raised their voices. I didn’t realize how unusual that was until I got out in the world and discovered that most couples don’t live that way. They understood harmony and discord, both in music and in life.

Dad liked quality, a measured pace about things, and the Chicago Cubs. He did handyman jobs around our house and for others. I tagged along when I was a kid. The life lesson to be learned from these kinds of daily tasks was the importance of doing them carefully. If you were careful and paid close attention to what you were doing, a good result would follow. I have found this to be true, about both household tasks and life generally, which was the intended lesson.

He always did things at his own pace, and tended to serenely ignore impatient people who wanted him to move faster. When I was a toddler, I banged my head into the kitchen table while learning to walk, knocking the top to our bean pot onto the floor and breaking it in half. Many was the time my mother wanted him to fix the top before she had to take the bifurcated thing to another church supper. I’m not exactly sure when he got to it, but it was some time after I went away to college.

He inherited his love for the Cubs from his father, and I from him. WGN on cable came in time for his move to Florida, so he never had to go long without them. Steve Goodman, in A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request, sings about friends and relations gathered around the bed of a man about to die, feeling sorry for him. The man replies that “I’ve got season tickets to watch the Angels now, while you here on earth are stuck with the Cubs, so it’s me who feels sorry for you.” While the prospect of death did not trouble him greatly, I think Dad will still miss the Cubs.

So there are some selected facts from Dad’s life. But they are not the truth about him. The truth about my father lies not in what he did, but in who he was.

He was gentle. Many boys learn aggression from their fathers. I learned kindness and gentleness.

He was a caregiver. He liked bathing babies, and gave my older daughter her first one while staying with us for a week after she was born. He said many times in the last decade or so that it was his job to outlive Mom and take care of her as long as she needed it. As always, he did his job well.

He was honest and straightforward. He disliked bluster and slick salesmanship. He taught me that the louder and faster someone talks while trying to convince you of something, the less they really have to say and the more likely they are trying to mislead you. He was a lifelong Republican until after Nixon and the Vietnam War. Although he kept his Republican registration, so far as I know, after that time he voted mostly for Democrats, out of the conviction that they brought more honesty and less destruction to the world.

He had an unwavering moral compass. He was a lifelong, active, and contributing member of the Methodist Church. He was deeply certain of his beliefs, which were formed from, but not directed by his religion. He had no use for bombastic preachers or long, censorial sermons telling him how he should behave or what he should believe. He believed in the Bible, but was comfortable with his own interpretations. He wasn’t sure whether there are angels, but was confident that, if they exist, Mom is one of them. He said that if he didn’t make it to heaven, he was sure Mom would finagle a visitor’s pass.

During his last months, his most prized possession was a picture of Mom with her violin. While Dad enjoyed the rest of his life after her death, he was eager to join her. Now he has done so.

He was, in short, the best man I have ever known. I will miss him, and be inspired by him, always.

In memory of Glenn Duddleson, from Bill Duddleson, his son.