“Boredom. Days and weeks and months of boredom . . . mixed
with . . . dread!” he shook his head and shuddered, as if to
shake off the thought. As he spoke the house was filled with the smell of turkey in the oven.
That’s how my father-in-law, Huvie (pronounced like
“Groovy”) described his days on a mine sweeper in the South Pacific in World War II.
“We’re taught to avoid danger, but it was our job to look
for mines. We were looking for bombs. It’s boring. And it’s terrifying, let me tell ya!”
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| Huvie & Carolyn, circa late 1940s |
“We knew the Japs were at Iwo Jima because there were no
mines. Later, after the fighting I was just randomly looking
through binoculors and saw the flag the marines raised atop Mount
Suribochi.”
The cadence of his accent was a midwestern mashup of
Missouri and Michigan. He wore black glasses and a white ring of hair around
his bald head. He was tall and lanky, with welcoming, friendly body language.
I’d married Huvie’s 4th daughter in the adjoining living
room just a few years earlier. When we discussed plans for marriage, he looked
at me across the dining room table and said, “I’ll give you $2,000 and an
extension ladder if you’ll elope.”
I laughed.
“I’m not joking," he said. "I’m serious! It would all be
easier that way, and you’d have a ladder!”
His name was Robert Huvendick, but almost nobody called him
Bob. He was Huvie to everyone.
He was raised in Missouri during the depression in what we’d
recognize now as poverty. The austerity and deprivation of that childhood would
frame his view of money for the rest of his life. He sold fuller brushes before
heading off to the war and came home to marry Carolyn. He went to college on the GI bill and
played basketball until he blew out his knee. From that day on golf was his
sports obsession.
On perhaps another Thanksgiving, over yet another Meister
Brau and a paper plate of potato chips nestled in a wicker plate holder, he
laughed about the birth of his first daughter, Sally and how he left the
hospital and drove through town honking his horn and whooping and hollering out the window to alert the world.
He worked his entire professional life for Corning Glass,
first in Albion, Michigan, and then in Bluffton, Indiana. In the years after
his retirement, my family spent many summer weeks at his lake cottage on Duck
Lake in southern Michigan.
The tackle box on his pontoon boat displayed the austerity
he brought to everything he bought. He could afford a big, fancy tackle box and an expensive rod and reel, but that would be foolish. The box was small and maybe a kid's starter tackle box. It was filled with assorted hooks, sinkers, a half rusty pair of needle nose
pliers, spare black rubber worms and a Durkee spice-rack bottle of anise oil. He dipped the
rubber worms in the oil, convinced it attracted the bass that lazed under the
docked boats on a hot summer day. A live box beside the dock gathered bass
during our visits and if the catch was big enough he’d clean them on a rickety
picnic table.
Once he asked my littlest, also named Sally, if she'd like to watch him clean the fish. Perhaps 6 or 7 years old, she happily said yes, thinking they'd scrub them with soap and water. But as he cut the head off the first one she screamed in horror, "You're not cleaning them, you're killing them."
She cried hard. He laughed hard.
She cried hard. He laughed hard.
 |
| Huvie & Carolyn, circa 1990s |
While at Duck Lake, he read the Detroit Free Press everyday and was always in the middle
of a book, beginning a book, or finishing a book. Library books and loaned
paperbacks littered both home and lake cottage. In the afternoons he’d putter
on a project, wash the sail boat, paint some trim, tidy up the wood pile, or sit before the TV
watching golf, his legs crossed, working a toothpick in his mouth. From time to time he'd sit in a chair in the front lawn with a towel draped 'round his shoulders and Carolyn would give him a haircut. Most days, he'd bath in the lake with a bar of soap kept at the end of the dock.
He made martinis promptly at 5:00, or a little earlier, because,
“It’s 5:00 somewhere,” he’d mutter, pouring inexpensive gin into two glasses, then a whiff
of vermouth, and a slice of lemon. He never made just one. The first he took to
his wife, who he’d remain married to for 68 years until his death. He grilled steak or chicken and warn of its imperfections when he brought it in. And though eating
it on garage-sale plates and all of us sitting on a madcap assortment of second-hand chairs most other families wouldn't bother keeping, he’d say in a deadpan tone, “I wonder what the poor folk are doing
tonight.”
Huvie’s explosive sneezes would scare children shitless and his
hearty laughter could make a dark day bright. He would maddeningly retell the
same stories and jokes and worried about practically everything as if it was
his full-time job. Presented with a toddler, he’d cross his legs and saddle the
child up on his foot for a horsy ride to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.”
On one of the last Thanksgivings spent in the den back in Indiana before the
Lions’ game with Huvie, he shared details of the death of his oldest daughter,
Sally, decades earlier when she was 16. This story, seldom uttered in their
home for the shear oppressive, suffocating weight of its sadness just came out
of him – the confusion, the terror, the unexpressable and unnecessary guilt that
nagged at him every single day thereafter. When I told my wife later that night
what her father had told me she sat up in bed in disbelief.
In ways I’d never realized, he was a 2nd father
to me. Over the years that I knew him he showed more appreciation for my hard
work and creativity than my own father did. But sadly, my connection to Huvie
ended 4 years ago amid my separation and divorce from his daughter. It could be
said that in Huvie’s world I proceeded him in death by 4 years. That put a
little burning coal of hurt in my heart that I will probably never get over.
Still, in the summer when I cross the Little Chicago or
Carrigan bridges and catch the silhouette of a man fishing from a pontoon boat,
I immediately think of Huvie. When the smell of turkey fills the house and the
Detroit Lions are on TV, I forget about my snooty beers and wish I had a
Meister Brau. And when someone bounces a child on their knee and sings “Yankee
Doodle,” it’s Huvie’s voice I’ll hear.
Farewell Huvie, you were such a good man.
Read Kurt's Behind Noblesville Posts
Buy Kurt's Book, NOBLESVILLE
Read Kurt's Behind Noblesville Posts
Buy Kurt's Book, NOBLESVILLE
