At 8:30 PM on 23 July 2009, my father, Samuel Irving
Bellman, passed away. The funeral
was yesterday, and my older brother Joel and I both gave eulogies, in addition
to my Aunt. My son Benjamin read a
poem he liked—The Darkling Thrush, by
Thomas Hardy; when I had told my father Ben was struck by it he was transformed
from a severely ailing man of 81 or so to . . . “Tell Benjamin that he made
Grandpa feel as he was floating on clouds! Wonderful! Unglaublich!”
So here are our eulogies: first that of Brother Joel, then
mine. No, this isn’t
musicological, but I’m doing it anyway.
My Dad was such a presence, and had such an impact on what Joel and I
became (whatever that is!), that it is only meet and fitting. I present this as heartfelt memorial,
without the slightest apology for non-musicological content, nor for
sentimentality or lachrymosity.
May his memory be for a blessing.
----------------
From Joel Bellman, the older son (reprinted with
permission):
Samuel I. Bellman, 1926-2009
July 26, 2009
Good
afternoon, everyone. I want to thank you all – our relatives, friends and
colleagues – for joining my family and me on this occasion today.
We’ve
shared so many happy times and celebrations in the past that I hardly know how
to begin these remarks, but let me try.
For
years, there was a kind of a standing joke between my father and me. Every time
I met someone in the course of my work who was famous or in any way newsworthy,
Dad, a university English professor, would ask, half-seriously but all
hopefully, “You tell ‘em about your old man?”
Sometimes
I’d lie and say, “Oh, yeah, I mentioned you.” Other times, maybe feeling mean
or immature, I’d say, “Hell, no! Why would I?” Because what he was really
asking was, “Did you tell them where you came from?”
Now,
with your indulgence, I want to tell you about my old man.
You’d
be hard-pressed to find anyone who was more proud and supportive of his family.
My mom, as many of you know, can fend for herself; she’s from Chicago, as we are
often reminded, and while she may not be as skinny as Obama, she too is tough.
Dad adored her and depended on her utterly. And when it came to his boys, he
was invariably our biggest champion no matter what we were up to.
It’s
hard to imagine two more impractical career aspirations than radio journalism
at the dawn of happy-talk TV news, or classical music scholarship in the
blighted age of disco and heavy metal. But Dad choked back whatever
reservations he had and became our biggest boosters.
What
else can I tell you? When I was 10 years old, he took me fishing at Happy
Jack’s Trout Farm – this son of Lithuanian immigrants who had settled in El
Paso, Texas and opened up a tiny country store in what Dad used to call the
“Christ-forsaken place” of La Mesa, New Mexico. He taught me to ride a bike,
without training wheels, when he himself had never learned how.
He
took us on long summer driving vacations - Lake Cachuma, Lake Isabella, Lake
Elsinore and especially Lake Arrowhead, where I always looked forward to
setting off by myself in a little motorboat with nary a peep of concern from
Dad. Years later, as an adult, I finally came to appreciate how lucky I’d been
to have a father who, because he taught, had most summers off just like I did.
He taught me to drive and let me take the wheel on some of those vacations and
never criticized my driving or showed any anxiety about it – a feat I doubt
very much I’ll be able to manage with my own sons.
He
took us on our first trip to San Francisco in 1966 – no, not that kind of trip. Thanks to his friend and
Department Chair Bob Morsberger – and his own enterprise in cutting through the
academic red tape, we had our first experience traveling to and living in
England, during a year-long house swap and exchange teaching visit. This stoked
and solidified my lifelong Anglophilia and led to at least half a dozen later
visits.
He
took me to my first theatrical movie when I was only five years old
–“Cinderfella,” with Jerry Lewis. And more Jerry Lewis: A drive-in movie double-bill
of Gore Vidal’s “Visit to a Small Planet” and “The Bell Boy.” Later, when like
every other 10-year-old boy I was into the secret agent and spy craze, he took
me to see “The Ipcress File” with Michael Caine, one of the coolest ‘60s movies
I ever saw. Still later, live theater: “Man of La Mancha” with Richard Kiley,
“Fiddler on the Roof” with Herschel Bernardi, ”Othello” with James Earl Jones.
One
time, he saved my brother’s life when, before Jon could swim, he accidentally
drifted into the deep end of a colleague’s swimming pool. Dad jumped in fully
clothed and rescued him – despite not knowing how to swim himself.
To
my mother’s consternation, my dad discovered, and fueled, my appetite for dark
and weird and often age-inappropriate fiction – Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka,
the fantasy, science fiction and horror of H.G. Wells, the corrosive cynicism
of Ambrose Bierce, the tragic fatalism of Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad,
Edward Gorey’s eerie Victorian ghost-story anthology “The Haunted Looking-Glass,”
the collected New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, morbid and violent old
radio thrillers like The Shadow, Lights Out and Inner Sanctum.
There
was the lighter stuff, too – Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through
the Looking Glass,” the nonsense work of Edward Lear, Max Fleischer’s Betty
Boop cartoons, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies with cheerful choruses of singing
flowers; his collection of Big Little books featuring comic-strip and radio
serial characters from the 1930s; his L. Frank Baum Oz book collection; and
later, an eclectic and improbable assortment of 60s pop singles ranging from
Ernie K-Doe, Little Peggy March and the Troggs to Joan Baez, Judy Collins and
Peter, Paul and Mary.
Unfortunately,
the world was rapidly changing, and from his standpoint, not for the better. As
a yellow-dog FDR Democrat, he found things more and more politically
intolerable under a succession of disastrous presidencies – that of “Nixie,”
AKA “the anti-Christ;” Jerry Ford and his WIN buttons, too contemptible even to
be graced with a pejorative; Jimmy Carter and his Sunday School pieties, a
nuclear engineer my father derided as the “peanut boy,” Ronald Reagan, “the
Beast” straight out of the Bible’s Book of Revelations; Bush I, who was
“Bushie;” Bush II, who was alternately “the bastard,” “the Illegitimate One,”
or just “The Boy.”
He
was alarmed and offended by anti-intellectualism and tabloid journalism, even
as he occasionally fell victim to both crackpot theories and crank populism.
Prefiguring Philip Roth, my father once informed me that Hitler had a secret
plan to bomb his hometown of El Paso as part of a planned takeover of the
United States. This was news to me – and undoubtedly would have been to the
Third Reich as well – but challenged for proof, he produced a yellowed
newspaper column from the El Paso Times in 1942, speculating that the
anti-aircraft artillery training center at the nearby Civil War-era Army post
of Ft. Bliss might make it a tempting target.
Back
in the early 1970s, he grew enamored with the writings of Erich Von Daniken, a
one-time imprisoned swindler and author of “Chariots of the Gods,” who grew rich promoting the idea that
extraterrestrial aliens – whom my dad reverently referred to as “the Fellas” -
had somehow salted the earth in ancient times with the seeds of the human race.
Several
years ago, he once received a strange package in the mail, bearing no return
address, and opened it up to find a talking Ann Coulter doll. I don’t pretend
to know the actual provenance of this mysterious gift, but I’m pretty sure it
was not, as Dad insisted, personally sent to him by Ann Coulter herself.
The
proliferation of new-media devices – from cell phones to personal computers -
my technophobic father found it increasingly impossible to master. Despite it
all, he remained surprisingly, if obscurely, productive – we’ve found dozens of
essays, poems and articles tucked into every nook and cranny of my parents’
home that I’d no idea he’d ever written.
As
my brother and I grew up, married and started families of our own, he embraced
his three grandsons with the same ferocious affection he’d shown his own sons,
as eager to school them in the fundamentals of scholarship, literacy and the
joys of reading and writing. In the era of the Internet, iPods and video games,
it was increasingly a fool’s errand – but he never gave up.
Oscar
Wilde – another writer Dad introduced me to, through his novel “The Picture of
Dorian Gray” – counseled that we put our talent into our work and our genius
into our life. I guess Dad sort of did – he raised one son who’s a professor
and scholar who teaches and writes for a living, another who writes and
periodically teaches for a living. We both share many of Dad’s crazy
enthusiasms from the most arcane and even disreputable corners of popular
culture to the most respectable highbrow literature and conventional symphonic
works.
With
the passage of time, more and more it’s my father’s face that I see in the
mirror; his voice that I hear when I speak, his values and ethics I hope to
transmit to my children. I am proud to be my father’s son.
That’s
really what I wanted to tell you about my old man.
----------------
From Jonathan Bellman, the
younger son:
Dear Dad,
I guess this means
it will be more difficult for us to visit each other, right?
You told me that
when you were young, a recently departed relative (perhaps Uncle Sol Levenson)
visited three male relatives in their sleep the same night. Your father—Grandpa Max—said (in his
dream), “We sure do miss you, Sol” and he responded “No, Max, it’s better this
way.” Dad, I’m sure it is better, but if you’d like to stop by—while we’re
dreaming, perhaps, or if you would just waft a breeze through our hair or give
a quick kiss on the forehead—please don’t hesitate, even if there are some
tears. Death is unavoidable, but
the separation is a choice, and
you will be close to me eternally.
You used to speak of tribal beliefs that major chunks of parents’ souls
are instilled in their children; as a son I believed it, and now, as a father,
I know it to be true. Whether it
is literally or figuratively true could not matter less. I will always feel you nearby.
One of the last
times we saw each other, you directed me to “keep up the Bellman family
tradition,” and I do: I teach, I learn, I write, I publish—as Joel does, and as
you did your whole life. I go to
school every day, as you did, as your grandsons do, as their children will
do…as we are meant to do. And in the face of life’s losses and
vicissitudes, we—like all teachers—still get to class, because people are
waiting for us, people who need and want what we’re offering. Teaching and Learning—passing it on, in
other words—is the great chain,
reaching back to before Abraham and Isaac, back to prehistory, back to the
animal kingdom even, and it has been our profound privilege to spend our lives as links in that
chain. As you did, Dad, so I
do. We’re still at it, with me
putting my feet in your (bigger) footprints. So as surely as I breathe, I declare: no bond between us
has been broken. Our closeness
remains, and our work continues, as does our family tradition. It will be some time before we see each
other again, but that is the nature of the distance between this world and Olam
ha-Ba, the World to Come.
I miss you, though. Forn gezunt: go well, and fly high and
far, with freedom and joy, with the spirit of the Almighty cradling you and
putting wind beneath your wings.
And I love you forever.
Jonathan
