Friday, May 29, 2009, 7:30 am

 

We had a chalkboard in our dining room.

 

It took a while for me to realize that this was unusual. Even after going to lots of other kids’ houses, it still seemed fairly ordinary, until someone (no doubt someone chalkboard-deprived) asked me about it. Evidently not every family had dinner conversations that regularly – frequently – required charts or drawings to explain. We did, and so there was a big green chalkboard dominating one wall of the dining room at 1504 Harris Drive in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

 

I’ve been thinking about that chalkboard a lot the last couple of days. I’m writing this on Friday, May 29. On Wednesday morning, I was in my office at the law school, packing up for the move to the deans’ suite for my new job. Along with packing boxes of books and decorations and toys, I took the chalkboard off the wall to move downstairs.

 

The chalkboard made the move with the family from Oklahoma to Minnesota back in 1983, but there was no appropriate wall for it, so it lived in the basement. I took it with me to college, and then it was with me in law school, and it was on my wall through my time in practice in D.C., and it’s been on my wall of my office at the law school since I started there in 2004.

 

I usually use the chalkboard-in-the-dining-room concept for laughs. But as I took it off of the wall of my office, and erased it – ideas for articles, explanations of torts doctrine from office hours, my kids’ doodles, and so on – I thought, just for a bit, about how the oddity of a chalkboard in the dining room had affected me. Not that I think it is exclusively responsible for, well, anything in my life except for some chalk dust on my clothes, but it is indicative of how we were raised: to ask questions, to learn, to challenge, to always – always – think.

 

On Wednesday afternoon (my cell phone “recent calls” listing tells me it was at 4:32), not long after coming home from packing the office and taking the kids to their violin lessons, I got a call from my mom, telling me that my dad has pancreatic cancer.

 

After a moment of shock, my reaction – and I expect the rest of the family’s – was to sit down and research pancreatic cancer. I (and I bet my siblings) found the Mayo Clinic’s site, we found the site about the chemo treatment that looked promising post-surgery (we don’t know as of this writing whether surgery will be an option), we probably all giggled, and then felt a little bad for giggling, at the name of the surgery (“The Whipple Procedure” – c’mon, you giggled a little too).

 

Back to the phone call, though. After telling me the news and a quick overview, my mom handed the phone to my dad.

 

After pleasantries and such and a brief acknowledgment of the diagnosis, he turned to what he was really wanting to talk about, which was not his diagnosis or prognosis – no, he wanted to talk about a global warming skeptic’s column that had been published by the local paper. As usual, he’s going through multiple iterations of a response to the column’s silliness, with challenges interspersed into the Word document. We talked about how best to try to get his response out there, where the author had gone wrong in his assumptions and his thinking, and so on.

 

Always think, always challenge. That’s what the chalkboard was about, at least in part. (To be fair, we also used it for messages.) That’s what he’s taught his kids and grandkids, to the extent that I have a graph on my desk from my daughter and him testing the widespread (but, they showed, wrong) notion that hot water freezes faster than cold water.

 

And thinking and challenging is what we’ll be doing with whatever comes.

                                                                   

Remarks at memorial service of Ves Childs • Bill Childs

 

I’m talking today both on my own behalf and on behalf of my brother Mike.

 

But I’m going to start with part of a speech that my dad gave when he was accepting the award as a distinguished alumnus of Southern Arkansas University; it’s one of his more thoughtful and philosophical commentaries. Here’s the excerpt:

 

We live between two golf courses and a lot of geese raise young right on the course.  (This is when they were living in Minnesota.)  The geese like the water and green grass… For the past few weeks those geese and several hundred others have been practicing flying in formation.  They start out flying three or four in a line and now they have worked up maybe fifty or sixty and they are flying in vees.

 

Have you ever noticed how one side of the vee is always longer than the other?  I found out the other day why that is so.

 

The long one has more geese in it.

 

When our preacher told that one, the Germans groaned, the Swedes laughed, and the Norwegians still haven’t got the point.

 

He liked starting remarks with a joke, and I figured I should follow suit.

 

One month and a day ago I wrote a short essay about growing up as part of the Childs family, and how that upbringing was going to affect how we approached Daddy’s diagnosis.  Two days earlier, we’d gotten word that Daddy had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. 

 

It stuns and devastates me to be standing here such a short time period later at his memorial service.  He died just over three weeks after his diagnosis. 

 

The subject of that essay is the same thing I’d really like to focus on for a couple of minutes today, but instead of focusing on how the way we grew up affected our process of going through his illness, I’d like to focus on it as his legacy – it’s a major thing I will remember about him, and that I know my kids and nieces and nephews will remember it about him too.

 

And it’s symbolized by the fact that we had a chalkboard in our dining room.

 

It took a while for me to realize that this was unusual, and that seems to have been true for Mike and Lisa too. Even after going to lots of other kids’ houses, it still seemed fairly ordinary, until someone (no doubt someone chalkboard-deprived) asked me about it.

 

Evidently not every family had dinner conversations that regularly – frequently – required charts or drawings to explain. We did, and so there was a big green chalkboard dominating one wall of the dining room at 1504 Harris Drive in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.  My mom says she bought it for him very early in their marriage when she realized how often, when asked how his day at work was, he would reply that “It’d be easier to explain with a chalkboard.”  So she bought him one.

 

The chalkboard made the move with the family from Oklahoma to Minnesota back in 1984, but there was no appropriate wall for it, so it lived in the basement of that house. I took it with me to college, and then it was with me in law school, and it was on my wall through my time in practice in D.C., and it’s been on my wall of my office at the law school where I teach since I started there in 2004.

 

I usually use the chalkboard-in-the-dining-room concept for laughs. And it’s pretty good for those.  Very few of my students grew up with a chalkboard, and it’s a nice icebreaker with them when they come in for office hours. 

 

But it’s also a good indication of how we were raised: to ask questions, to learn, to challenge, to always – always – think.

 

That was central to his being a father – Mike remembers building great real-world examples of scientific concepts, including building electromagnets (one is still around the house somewhere) and boiling water in a tin can, sealing it, and demonstrating atmospheric pressure through its consequent collapse.  We all did science fair projects that went well beyond the baking soda volcanoes.  It continued into adulthood for us, too,– he was a key editor and commenter on my scholarly work (which focuses on the intersection of law and science) and, maybe a little more mundane but still important, designed the treehouse that Mike and I built in my yard that you saw in the photo slideshow (which will run again after the benediction, by the way).  Even though his ataxia made travel difficult, stuff like that treehouse made it so he could be a nearly daily part of our kids’ lives over a thousand miles away.

 

Asking questions and challenging accepted thought was a big part of his marriage too, supporting Mother in her work for women’s rights and all of her other political work, and in her going back to graduate school in chemical engineering.  There wasn’t much conventional about their lives, especially in that time and place, but it worked, completely.

 

And it was obviously the foundation of his career – he loved telling stories about both challenging established scientific authority (with success) and about him being the scientific authority challenged, most notably by a junior engineer in his lab at 3M, who tried something Daddy thought would never work – and of course it did. 

 

(One of the things I love most is how much he relished telling that story on himself.  It was a measure of his own humility that he was happy to be proved wrong in that sort of situation.)

 

And it was a huge part of his retirement, whether in mentoring local entrepreneurs, or, more notably for me, in sharing his love of learning with his grandchildren; I can’t tell you how often one of their questions would be answered with, “That’d be a great question to ask Granddaddy.” 

 

Last week, I spent just a few minutes going through some of his old e-mail exchanges with my kids, and came up with a few examples of the questions he answered for them – every one with a thoughtful and understandable answer, often with a PowerPoint accompanying it.  (This was despite the fact that he was known in his Sunday School for asking unanswerable questions – there were lots of questions he could and would answer.)  He never ever spoke down to the kids, either. 

 

So here are some of the questions I came across from Ella or Liam:

 

·      What is in onions that makes your eyes water? (that one got a full page, including a mention of Leonard Pike, a former student of his dad’s now teaching at Texas A&M)

·      Do fish sleep like we do?

·      Why do gymnasts in the Olympics use chalk?

·      How would you make an egg cracking machine where the egg rolls a little bit?

·      How do they make things glow in the dark?

·      What is fire made out of?

·      Why does hot air rise and cold air sink?

·      I put four pennies in vinegar and after two days they had blue things on them.  What is it?

·      Can water have no surface tension?

·      Can people make water?

·      How are crystals made?

·      How do people make elements?

·      What was before the big bang?

 

So. 

 

They were all pretty easy questions, obviously. 

 

But he loved to answer them; his joy was palpable in the e-mails.  I’m so sad that he can’t answer more of them, and especially for his younger grandchildren too, but I know they’ve inherited his love for learning and his curiosity.

 

One more little story about how he loved to teach the grandkids.  Ella and Liam were here for Spring Break a few months ago and Ella and her granddaddy did an experiment to test the long-standing assertion that hot water freezes faster than cold water.  They worked together to design and perform the experiment and analyze the data to reach a conclusion that, despite its persistence, the idea is wrong.  Last week – probably the day after Daddy died – Ella and I were talking about him, and she said that her best way to remember him was to never stop learning.  She’s got a fierce grasp on that idea and I think it’s a lot because of him.

 

And that’s the positive we can focus on today – or at least it’s what I’m going to focus on.  Countless people have learned a little more about the joy of learning and of asking questions from him, whether it’s people he mentored in his career, his friends in churches and organizations in the communities in which he lived, his kids and grandkids, or any of the myriad other people with whom he came into contact.  You can see it in Lisa’s work with the University’s inventors; you can see it in Mike’s work advancing technology with Intel; you can hopefully see it in my work teaching lawyers to be challenging and creative; you can see it in Ella reading constantly (even when that tries her parents’ patience) and her desire to be a paleontologist; you can see it in Liam’s love of math and learning; you can see it in Maggie’s curiosity, even when it leads to multiple bee stings; you can see it in Ty’s eternal questioning every day and finding new myths for MythBusters to test; you can see it in Kian’s taking things apart and putting them back together again (usually working); and you can see it in Hope’s exploration and learning.  And you can see it in Mother taking classes at the University and becoming a master gardener and all the rest.  That’s the theme I was trying to capture with the pictures in the slideshow, and I hope you’ll watch that.

 

His dad, our Poppaw, used to say that your influence for good is the only thing that lasts, and the influence for good that Daddy had is immeasurable.