April's Beautiful Picture From Tennessee

Daddy's funeral

This is the eulogy I gave tonight at Daddy's funeral:

When I was a child, I thought that everyone had the same kind of childhood that I had, and it wasn't until I was older that I learned to appreciate the uniqueness of my childhood. Let me tell you about my dad.

When I was little, before I could say the word "statistician," Daddy and I would pretend to be statisticians. We’d do little experiments in the kitchen, or we’d do a survey of words in the newspaper, and then we would graph our results. We discussed the properties of bell-shaped curves. We figured out the probability of drawing a pair of matching socks from my well-mixed sock drawer.

When I was in third grade, Mrs. Hoffman was teaching us multiplication tables, and I was bored. When I told Daddy I was bored in math, he said he would teach me a magic trick. He got out his book of logarithm tables (back in the olden days before calculators could do logarithms), and he showed me how to look up numbers in the logarithm table. Then you would take the logarithms and add them, but when you undid the logarithm they would really be multiplied. I tried it over and over for any multiplication problem I could think of, and the next day I told Mrs. Hoffman that my dad had taught me a really cool magic trick with logarithms. She called my dad later and suggested to him that he should stop teaching me at home. He ignored her suggestion.

But math to my dad was more than just the kind of math you might use as a statistician, it was the kind of math you used in sports. I learned how to compute "yards per carry" and "runs batted in." There is never a time in my life when I can remember NOT knowing the rules to football, baseball, and basketball, and I've been a Nebraska football fan my whole life. Some of you might know that my dad knew Richie Ashburn who played major-league baseball in Philadelphia and later worked for them as a broadcaster, but my dad had other connections, too. When we lived in Vermillion, South Dakota, Daddy was friends with the announcer for the town baseball team. Daddy and Don and I went to a lot of baseball games in Vermillion, and sometimes I would get to sit up in the announcer’s booth, and one time I even got to run the scoreboard, to turn on the balls, strikes, and outs. Daddy took us to high school football, basketball, and wrestling, and University of South Dakota football and basketball, too. And when we moved to Tennessee, we started going to Science Hill and ETSU games and track meets.

Time with Daddy was more than just math. Daddy read out loud to us, everything from "The House that Jack Built" and "Oh How Do We Get to the Zoo?" to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burrows. Daddy taught me to sing the tenor part on the hymns with him before I could read well enough to read the words of the hymns. We took family vacations out west to see the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone, and trips in the east to every major Civil War battle site, and as many of the minor ones as Daddy could find.

Daddy loved to look for patterns in every day things, from the number of petals on wildflowers to odometer readings on the car. I remember calling Daddy on his 48th birthday and asking how it feels to be 48. He said it felt a lot like 47. I called him on his 49th birthday, and he was really excited. This wasn't just any birthday. I had just turned 25, and he was 49, and that was 5 squared and 7 squared. And to make it even better, on his mom’s next birthday, she was going to turn 81, so then we'd have 5, 7, and 9 squared. I remember that he said, "We couldn't have done better if we'd planned it." And I remember thinking, but who would have thought to plan this?

No matter what happened in our lives, I always knew, without any doubt, that my dad loved me and my brothers, even when (or maybe especially when) we were being punished. I also knew, without any doubt, that he loved my mom.

It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that not every child has this kind of childhood. Not everyone grows up in such a secure and loving home with such amazing parents. I also discovered that not everyone loved math and statistics like I did.

Now I’m married with three kids of my own, and this has given me a chance to see Daddy’s teaching abilities with the next generation. I remember very clearly overhearing my dad watching a Nebraska football game on TV, and hearing him explain the kind of plays you might want to run on second and 7. I went out to see who he was talking to, and it was my two-month-old daughter. I asked Daddy what he was doing, and he told me that it’s never too early to start training the next generation. And it works. My husband is from Iowa, and much to my husband’s chagrin, all three of my girls route for Nebraska. Daddy loved watching his granddaughters play soccer and going to their piano recitals. And Mom and Dad took us all on a family vacation out to Yellowstone and Custer State Park to see Daddy’s beloved buffaloes in the wild.

Besides being a mother, you might have guessed that I’m a statistician by profession. Every day I use the lessons he taught me. I teach classes on time series, and I explain to people how magical logarithm can be. I teach my girls math and music and history, and we visit as many battlefields from the War Between the States as we can manage. I still sing tenor on the hymns in church. I still have a very well-mixed sock drawer.

I could never live up to everything Daddy did. I mean, we are talking about the man who had to walk through the snow barefoot to school every day, and uphill both ways. OK, so he liked to tell stories, and I was fairly gullible, but I did always work hard at what I set my mind to do. I always wanted to do my very best, not so that my dad would love me, but because I loved him, and I wanted to be just like him.

The most important thing that Daddy taught me was to be passionate about God. Finding patterns in nature wasn't some kind of hobby with Dad, or something to pass the time. It was just one way to marvel at all the amazing gifts that God has given us, to appreciate the world around us, to see God’s handiwork in even the little things. Daddy taught me that there is beauty in everything around us. There is beauty in every situation, even the bad ones, when we can see that God is in control. When something miraculous happens and other people chalk it up to coincidence or chance, as statisticians, we can figure out the probabilities and see very clearly the hand of God. Daddy taught me how to see the Power behind the chance.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that if someone doesn't love math, it's only because they didn't have a good teacher. So every day, I can thank God that I had the very best math teacher, right from the start.

This was part of the eulogy given by Daddy's boss, Dr. Bagnell, the Dean of the College of Medicine at ETSU:

I want to express my appreciation to you for inviting me to participate in this celebration of Leo’s life . . . truly, a life well and fully lived. I knew Leo best through the medical school and mostly through the work we shared in Academic affairs, but Leo did not compartmentalize his life and one could not be with him without appreciating his broad range of interests and some of the passions in his life: his family, his faith and his church, his music and the Johnson City Civic Chorale, sports and especially Nebraska and the University of Nebraska team, education and particularly the evaluation of educational effectiveness, the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life, quilting . . . through each of these interests was intertwined his love of order as expressed, for him, through mathematics. As Catherine mentioned, she grew up with a sense of numeric order that applied to all forms of thinking, from football to flowers, and when applied to nature and our universe it simply enhanced her wonder at the role of our Maker. What a beautiful message to convey to your children. It's wonderful to hear her tales of growing up as Leo’s favorite daughter.

Leo loved sports and was an avid fan of Science Hill High Scholl basketball and football, ETSU sports, Johnson City Cardinals baseball team, St. Louis Blues NHL hockey team, and the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. He attended high school in Tilden Nebraska, which is important in understanding his Nebraska roots and one of his baseball connections. He played baseball in Tilden and developed a long-standing friendship with Tilden’s best-known baseball player, Richie Ashburn, who entered the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1995, thus explaining the pictures and memorabilia related to Richie Ashburn on display today.

While working toward his masters’ degree, Leo taught mathematics and science at Seward Junior High in Seward, Nebraska, and also served as the junior high school athletic coach. Later, the legendary Nebraska football coach, Tom Osborne, who also had a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, taught Leo statistics at the University of Nebraska. As the family will attest, Leo found the association between statistics and football strategy to be simply, well, logical.

Leo loved to teach and developed a strong bond with many of his students. On receiving his Ph.D. with a major in Educational Psychology and Measurement, and a minor in Mathematics in 1969, Leo accepted a faculty position at the University of South Dakota in their College of Education. There he met Dr. Jack Mobley, the Associate Dean for Clinical Sciences at USD, and worked with him on faculty development and student evaluation in South Dakota’s medical school. When Jack Mobley accepted the position as the second Dean of Medicine at ETSU, Leo received an invitation to interview for the newly created position of the Assistant Dean for Educational Resources.

There are several tales about his interviews for this position, but Leo most remembered an interview with a newly appointed associate dean who made it clear that he saw absolutely no need for the medical school to hire anyone with Leo’s skills---not the last time Leo would hear this. At this time the medical school still had not received approval from the accreditation body, the LCME, to admit the first class of students, and Leo would later remark that "leaving the University of South Dakota was the biggest gamble I ever took in my life, but it didn’t seem like the odds were too bad at the time."

I’m not sure how Joyce reflected on this decision during their first few months. The family arrived in East Tennessee from South Dakota to discover new experiences and a new culture. They reached Johnson City tired and exhausted from long car trip with three young children and a dog on "race weekend," a term that meant nothing to them at the time. Their reservations at the Holiday Inn had been cancelled because of a delay in finishing the races. Their next housing experience was also a cultural awakening. They found temporary housing for the summer in cramped apartment which had one paper-thin wall separating them from a grief-stricken neighbor who wept and wailed for days after Elvis died in mid-August 1977.

Leo separated his physicians into two groups: ETSU graduates and others. He felt a special affinity for our ETSU graduates and would often mention that he had taught such and such a physician. He had a particular affinity for the first class of 24 students that started in the fall of 1978. When the LCME did give approval in June 1977 for the college of medicine to admit a class of 24 students, Leo was appointed acting Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and held the administrative responsibility for working with Dr. Les Bryant, the new Chair of the Department of Surgery and the Chair of the Admissions Committee, in selecting the class of 24 from 219 applicants. The fact that there were 219 applicants was in no small part related to an effort by Leo---as the school received notification to proceed to admit students well after the national admissions system had closed applications, he had to take to the road and visit undergraduate schools throughout the state to encourage applications to this new medical school. Ironically, one of the 24 students in the inaugural class, Dr. Ray Lamb, became his oncologist and good friend over the last years of his life, a relationship Leo valued highly.

Leo clearly felt a bond with his students and it was not surprising that post retirement he elected to work one-on-one with students who might benefit from his skills in helping students improve their success in taking multiple-choice tests. He was really very good at this. His other main post-retirement focus was to help faculty with the flip side of the test-taking coin, that is, the proper construction of multiple choice tests. I remember the day one of our senior faculty presented Leo with copies of tests for his analysis. Leo always started by asking faculty members to bring copies of old tests as the starting point for helping with the development of good skills in writing examination questions. Leo knew nothing of the subject matter this faculty member taught, but ran down through the questions on the first page stating the correct answer, without error. Well, maybe we might have needed someone with Leo’s skills after all!

Leo had many "firsts" and many wonderful stories of his 30 years in the College of Medicine. He taught the first course offered in the graduate program in the college of medicine, a research design/data analysis course for two graduate students. One of these students later became the first student to earn a Ph.D. degree from ETSU.

With his stories, his sense of humor played a key role in what he elected to remember. One of his stories related to his first day at work as the Assistant Dean for Medical Education. He had two staff members, one being a computer systems analyst, but neither the office not the college of medicine had a computer.

Leo’s years of experience and many accomplishments in the college of medicine culminated with his appointment as the Chair of our Medical Student Education committee in the mid-1990s. He was given a clear and strong mandate to work to develop excellence in medical education and our educational success is indebted to him for creating the structure around with we could develop and maintain an effective curriculum. The system and the infrastructure he created played a major role in our success in the accreditation process in 2003, and Leo quite justifiably derived his greatest feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction from his work with this committee.

I valued Leo’s counsel and his loyalty; he contributed so much in so many ways. I also just enjoyed Leo and will miss his warmth and friendship, his sense of humor, his memory of events that only he and I were old enough to remember, and the presence of his beautiful tenor voice while the rest of us sang “Happy Birthday” so terribly at departmental birthday parties. His was a life very well-lived, and he has left his family and the rest of us with so very much to celebrate as we give thanks for his life and the time we had with him.

The service:

Scripture Reading – Psalm 121

Prayer

Congregational Hymn: "For All the Saints"

Congregational Hymn: "Blessed Assurance"

Speaker: Catherine

Congregational Hymn: "I'll Fly Away"

Speaker: Dr. Bagnell

Solo: Helen Rebmann – "His Eye is on the Sparrow"

Speaker: Arthur Joyce

Prayer



Daddy said that he wanted to sing "I'll Fly Away" at his own funeral, but he never got around to recording it. Maybe he wasn't serious. He and I used to tease my mom about the duets we were going to sing at my wedding, which we didn't sing because we were just joking around. My dad had his own obituary already written, so I don't know why he hadn't bothered to record that hymn.