Tribute to Wayne Brandon

We are here to celebrate the life of Wayne Valdemar Brandon. I am proud to have been able to call him Father.

He was born September 11, 1907, on an island called Nora Brändön, near Luleå, Sweden, at the far north end of the Gulf of Bothnia. Just below the Artic Circle, it had severe winters with little sunshine. His father was a prosperous fisherman, and he had 11 brothers and sisters. Fishing was a harsh and dangerous occupation. He had a special relationship with his older brother Albert, who would protect him and teach him things. When Dad was 14, he, his father, and Albert got caught in a storm at sea, and they capsized. Albert drowned while swimming to get help. Dad no longer had his brother to protect him from his oldest brother Martin, who bullied him.

Dad's father died on Christmas eve, 1923, when Dad was sixteen. nine weeks later, Dad left for America. Imagine the trepidation and excitement of a sixteen year old, standing at the ship rail as the ship entered New York harbor and passed the Statue of Liberty. After disembarking in New York, he took a train to join a brother in Seattle.

While on the ship he took to America, he had played an exhibition chess game with the Swedish chess champion and beat him. Dad took up chess seriously in Seattle. In exhibition matches, he beat Lasker, the former world chess champion, and the then-current U.S. champion. While blindfolded, Dad would often simultaneously play four other players who were not blindfolded, and he would beat them. He became Washington State chess champion.

In spite of his success at chess, he decided to go back to school. He worked full time at a plywood factory to support himself while he attended high school, and he graduated valedictorian in 1934. He had to choose between going to Harvard or getting married. He decided to marry Mother at age 27. Even though he stopped his formal education, he continued to read and study on his own. He accumulated an 800-volume library, including several books in German, esoteric books on Psychology and semantics, and many self-improvement books. He did not dwell on fruitless musings of might-have-beens, so he did not regret his decision not to go to Harvard. His top priority was his family. Yet he was thrilled when I went to Harvard for graduate school. Vicariously, he was thus able to see the benefits of both alternative decisions.

Dad helped build PT boats during World War II. After the war, he was a home builder in Seattle. In 1952, he bought and remodeled an apartment building in Kent, and he opened a real estate office. A few years later, he joined other local businessmen to form a savings and loan association, where he was first vice president and chairman of the board. He bought and developed property in Kent. His largest project was developing a subdivision from the 36 acres behind the house where Mother now lives.

The simultaneous responsibilities of the real estate office, the savings and loan, and the land developments were too much for a mortal. he suffered from migraine headaches, high blood pressure, and ulcers. In 1961, he got a near-fatal gall bladder infection. In the hospital, Mother overheard a conversation about Dad's case between two doctors: "Should we operate?" "... wouldn't make any difference. Either way, he'll be carried out feet first." They operated, and, despite the prognosis, Dad slowly recovered. Still, with his energy level severely diminished, his doctor recommended that Dad save his own life by retiring. So he semi-retired in the mid-60's. He helped negotiate the sale of the savings and loan and closed the real estate office. Yet, except when he was in bed with a migraine, he was always working - fixing or improving something in the house or yard, studying investment possibilities, or building or fixing his cabin cruiser.

Indicative of his care of his family, while I was attending Cal-Tech and Harvard, I accumulated a thick packet of letters from him, all signed "Love, Dad." Most were personal and financial insights and advice, reminiscences, and analyses of events affecting us and the country. In 1964, he wrote the following:

Life is, among other things, an elimination contest. We get eliminated from this and that and from them and him and her, and finally a germ or faulty pump valve eliminates them altogether. A few find the contest so disagreeable that they eliminate themselves. They are the 24-karat fools who miss the important point about it all; namely, that the major meaning of life is the opportunity to strive and struggle: an opportunity forever denied inanimate things. Striving and struggling implies that the striver is aiming to do something he is not doing now, or get somewhere different than where he is now.

I received a telegram yesterday:

"Mina avled hastigt i dag. - Adelina."

Translation:

"Mina (one of my sisters) died suddenly today. - Adelina (my youngest sister.)"

Mina is the first of my siblings to die a natural death after they grew to adulthood. This death is the beginning of the end of my generation.

I experienced no shock or surprise at the news. It seemed as natural an event as the falling of the leaves of the big maple next door.

However, it made me reflect a little. If, as inevitably must be the case, I am in the final phase of my life; if whatever I have done and been in past years will have to stand as the text of the book labeled "Wayne Brandon"; if whatever what is ahead will be but an epilogue - what passages and chapters in that book now seem worthwhile?

Upon reflection, there was but little:

Love of and with a woman.
My children.
My grandchild. [Chad was born that year. Marc would not be born until 1976.]
Financial Independence.
The striving for intellectual integrity.
Work that accomplished something enduring.
The thrill of learning, especially in youth.
Perceiving beauty.

Dad made many important decisions in his life - to leave Sweden to come to the United States; to leave his chess-playing career to finish school; to forego Harvard to marry Mother; to save his life by semi-retiring; to agree to our proposal to get his first cancer treated at Sloan-Kettering; and so forth.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden back.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted that I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.