Celebrations of My Father's Life and Death
12/08/07 09:25
My father was born on April 2, 1927, in Cedar
City, Utah. Cedar was a small, dusty town of less
than 2,000 with corduroy roads; it was only a few
years before the Great Depression would wipe out
my grandfather's business, and change our
family's fortunes, as it did to many.
Written by Kathryn
My father was born on April 2, 1927, in Cedar City, Utah. Cedar was a small, dusty town of less than 2,000 with corduroy roads; it was only a few years before the Great Depression would wipe out my grandfather's business, and change our family's fortunes, as it did to many.
My great-grandfather, Thomas Chamberlain, had six wives and 55 children. My father's mother was one of the 55 children of Thomas Chamberlain. In one genealogical book, Thomas stands as the patriarch of the family, next to his wives and children. Upon his death, he bequeathed to each wife, a house; to each child, $600.
The Chamberlain ranch was part of the United Order of Orderville, a polygamist community in the late 1800s; each member gave what they could, took what they needed. Today, all that remains are several houses, a barn, and a plaque from the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. In the 1920s, the polygamy was long gone, but the ancestral roots of the Mormon Pioneers - my mother's people and my father's people who walked from Missouri to Salt Lake with their families' belongings in a small handcart, walking across the Rockies and eating only wild Sego Lillies before they finally settled in their promised land - this was part of my father's upbringing.
It was into this world that my father was raised. Mornings he milked, afternoons he swept the corn flour from the floor of the Esplin Feed and Seed. Life was hard, life was fast. By age 11, my father was smoking cigarettes and driving a truck.
He wanted to be a chemist and he told my grandfather he wanted to go to university. No, that is for rich folks, was my grandfather's answer. A few years later, my father was drafted into the Navy where he trained in San Francisco, and was nearly shipped out to sea when World War II ended. My father married his high school sweetheart, my mother, Billie Leigh, when she was 20; he was 19, still in his US Navy seaman's uniform.
My father had few friends in school; he did not have any real friends until he left high school on the principal's advice that my father quit school and just go to university. After World War II ended, my father did go to college on the GI Bill. It was there that he hit his stride, where he no longer felt like a black sheep.
It was at the University of Utah, where my father he met Louis B.Goodman, M.D., editor of the pharmacology textbook that would become the Bible to medical students and pharmacology students worldwide: "Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics."
My father contributed chapters in the 3rd and 4th editions. The 5th edition has a dedication to him.
In 1954, my father received the only National Science Foundation Fellowship awarded to Utahns for Medical Science.
In 1962, he won the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology for the best pharmacologist under 40.
Between 1954 and 1962, my father published 13 different papers in Science Magazine.
He is listed in American Men & Women of Science, 13th edition, 1971 - 1973.
During this time, my father stayed late in the evening at the lab. It was his work, his life. Soon, a young Polish doctor-woman with a young son came to work with him. Within a year, my father betrayed my mother; a year later, he married the Polish doctor.
But at heart, he was still the farm boy - he was still the cowboy whose left eyebrow bore the scar of when he tried to mount a cow and ride her until she gored him; he was still the cowboy who played harmonica and guitar and hiked in the Wasatch mountains. Yet, he was also becoming a scientist of world-wide renown in his field - a scientist who played violin and Beethoven on the piano, a man who loved literature and writing, with a passion.
My stepmother loved these cowboy aspects about my father; such an unlikely couple they were - she was from the former Communist country of Poland - a family doctor in Warsaw, who'd lived through the Holocaust and who found herself in Utah on a post-doctoral fellowship, next to my father, her beloved teacher.
Both found the other exotic; they were worlds away from their own backgrounds. Even though she loved the cowboy in him, she begged him to give up the cowboy boots and to wear dress shoes and a natty blazer. It was during his early university years that he first flew on an airplane, first heard classical music and became friends with a motley group of beat generation leftists, one who left the USA for Canada, during the McCarthy era. When he became an entity in the scientific community, he traveled a lot—to visit departments who wanted him as their department head, to visit departments who wanted him on their teaching staff, to attend annual scientific meetings. He turned down all administrative appointments, preferring only to do research and teach. On one such visit in 1964, my father, stepmother, stepbrother and I piled in the back of the '59 Chevy wagon, as we drove from Utah to New York City, where my father, in his cowboy boots and jeans pulled up to the New York Hilton, only to be told by an unctious doorman: "You can't park here, Sir; this is only for hotel guests."
And my father, bless his heart, replied: "Hey, #&(# mac, I am a hotel guest, you #&*$."
He was a good father and a great scientist.
My stepmother's attempt to get him to dress more conservatively and less like a cowboy became more successful when we moved back East.
Little did we know that we were moving to the second most culturally isolated geopolitical region in North America: Quebec; the irony astounds me, even now.
He was known as a scientist who could write, and write well.
He was my first teacher and my best.
My father was born on April 2, 1927, in Cedar City, Utah. Cedar was a small, dusty town of less than 2,000 with corduroy roads; it was only a few years before the Great Depression would wipe out my grandfather's business, and change our family's fortunes, as it did to many.
My great-grandfather, Thomas Chamberlain, had six wives and 55 children. My father's mother was one of the 55 children of Thomas Chamberlain. In one genealogical book, Thomas stands as the patriarch of the family, next to his wives and children. Upon his death, he bequeathed to each wife, a house; to each child, $600.
The Chamberlain ranch was part of the United Order of Orderville, a polygamist community in the late 1800s; each member gave what they could, took what they needed. Today, all that remains are several houses, a barn, and a plaque from the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. In the 1920s, the polygamy was long gone, but the ancestral roots of the Mormon Pioneers - my mother's people and my father's people who walked from Missouri to Salt Lake with their families' belongings in a small handcart, walking across the Rockies and eating only wild Sego Lillies before they finally settled in their promised land - this was part of my father's upbringing.
It was into this world that my father was raised. Mornings he milked, afternoons he swept the corn flour from the floor of the Esplin Feed and Seed. Life was hard, life was fast. By age 11, my father was smoking cigarettes and driving a truck.
He wanted to be a chemist and he told my grandfather he wanted to go to university. No, that is for rich folks, was my grandfather's answer. A few years later, my father was drafted into the Navy where he trained in San Francisco, and was nearly shipped out to sea when World War II ended. My father married his high school sweetheart, my mother, Billie Leigh, when she was 20; he was 19, still in his US Navy seaman's uniform.
My father had few friends in school; he did not have any real friends until he left high school on the principal's advice that my father quit school and just go to university. After World War II ended, my father did go to college on the GI Bill. It was there that he hit his stride, where he no longer felt like a black sheep.
It was at the University of Utah, where my father he met Louis B.Goodman, M.D., editor of the pharmacology textbook that would become the Bible to medical students and pharmacology students worldwide: "Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics."
My father contributed chapters in the 3rd and 4th editions. The 5th edition has a dedication to him.
In 1954, my father received the only National Science Foundation Fellowship awarded to Utahns for Medical Science.
In 1962, he won the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology for the best pharmacologist under 40.
Between 1954 and 1962, my father published 13 different papers in Science Magazine.
He is listed in American Men & Women of Science, 13th edition, 1971 - 1973.
During this time, my father stayed late in the evening at the lab. It was his work, his life. Soon, a young Polish doctor-woman with a young son came to work with him. Within a year, my father betrayed my mother; a year later, he married the Polish doctor.
But at heart, he was still the farm boy - he was still the cowboy whose left eyebrow bore the scar of when he tried to mount a cow and ride her until she gored him; he was still the cowboy who played harmonica and guitar and hiked in the Wasatch mountains. Yet, he was also becoming a scientist of world-wide renown in his field - a scientist who played violin and Beethoven on the piano, a man who loved literature and writing, with a passion.
My stepmother loved these cowboy aspects about my father; such an unlikely couple they were - she was from the former Communist country of Poland - a family doctor in Warsaw, who'd lived through the Holocaust and who found herself in Utah on a post-doctoral fellowship, next to my father, her beloved teacher.
Both found the other exotic; they were worlds away from their own backgrounds. Even though she loved the cowboy in him, she begged him to give up the cowboy boots and to wear dress shoes and a natty blazer. It was during his early university years that he first flew on an airplane, first heard classical music and became friends with a motley group of beat generation leftists, one who left the USA for Canada, during the McCarthy era. When he became an entity in the scientific community, he traveled a lot—to visit departments who wanted him as their department head, to visit departments who wanted him on their teaching staff, to attend annual scientific meetings. He turned down all administrative appointments, preferring only to do research and teach. On one such visit in 1964, my father, stepmother, stepbrother and I piled in the back of the '59 Chevy wagon, as we drove from Utah to New York City, where my father, in his cowboy boots and jeans pulled up to the New York Hilton, only to be told by an unctious doorman: "You can't park here, Sir; this is only for hotel guests."
And my father, bless his heart, replied: "Hey, #&(# mac, I am a hotel guest, you #&*$."
He was a good father and a great scientist.
My stepmother's attempt to get him to dress more conservatively and less like a cowboy became more successful when we moved back East.
Little did we know that we were moving to the second most culturally isolated geopolitical region in North America: Quebec; the irony astounds me, even now.
He was known as a scientist who could write, and write well.
He was my first teacher and my best.