The Cupertino Courier

First Word

Let me hear all of you say 'uncle'

By Jon Hoornstra

Richard Wysong spent the last Thursday in August doing some very ordinary things. He mowed the lawn, chopped firewood and took care of some routine car maintenance.

As the sun settled down for the night, "Rick," as he was known to friends, ate dinner with his wife of 59 years, Lucille Scheidel Wysong. Their plan was to finish the day by taking in a night football game, the season opener with fireworks, on the nearby university campus.

It was an unremarkable day, except for Richard Wysong himself. He was a lawn-mowing, log-splitting octogenarian close to celebrating his 83rd birthday.

He could wear you out just by telling you what he'd done on a given day.

Before he retired in 1979, Wysong wore many hats: father, husband, university professor, member of Kiwanis, to name a few. He was widely traveled, an excellent photographer, and blessed with a powerful and resonant voice that could fill any lecture hall without the help of a microphone. His scholarship and kindness to others were treasured by his community and known to thousands of students who had taken notes at his lectures since the fall of 1940.

As planned, Richard and Lucille saw the football game from their usual place near the 40-yard line. When it ended, Lucille suggested a route home that would take them along the perimeter of some university housing to a vantage point from which the post-game fireworks could easily be seen. At 10:30 p.m. they had stopped at the side of the road to watch.

Ten minutes later Lucille quietly announced, "I think I've seen enough." That said, Prof. Wysong started the car and they continued the five-mile drive to their home on a high bank above the Chippewa River.

But fate intervened. The car drifted, first onto the shoulder of the road, then dangerously toward the center line. Lucille knew something was seriously wrong and she seized control of the car and somehow managed to bring it to a stop.

Richard's head had settled to her lap. Her high school classmate and husband since 1938 died that night, on that road, in that place.

All of this happened in Mt. Pleasant, Mich., near the campus of Central Michigan University, and I am telling you because Richard Lincoln Wysong was my uncle. I shall miss him dearly and his passing is an opportunity to give a little attention to uncles.

We don't attach much importance to uncles. They are filed away as a wasted resource in a nation of fractured families. In fact, we don't even tell jokes about uncles. We make jokes only about people we consider important, such as doctors and lawyers, clergy and parents. No one ever told me a joke about an uncle.

Perhaps uncles aren't as visible in our lives as they should be. But my Uncle Richard was different. Though we never lived in the same town, photo albums record that his periodic visits began in the 1940s. They never ended.

So I've been blessed with a lot of experience with uncles, and I can tell you that good uncles are like good books, with as many lessons as there are pages.

Uncle Richard added a page to the book of lessons with each visit. One of my favorite pages was "written" during a 1989 visit. It was a chance to talk with him about his studies at nearby Stanford University in 1946 and 1947, when he was a doctoral candidate.

With Michigan's sometimes bitter cold weather in mind, I asked him if he found it difficult to leave Stanford and California's mild climate.

"It wasn't difficult to go home," he replied, "although several of my friends didn't want me to leave." When I asked why, his eyes widened above a very wide smile. "They thought I could do better," he said.

Something interrupted us and we never returned to talk of Stanford. But a lesson was presented in that exchange, even though I didn't see it right away.

His unusually wide smile was a clue.

Richard Wysong was telling me that he had spent his entire adult life doing exactly what he wanted to do and that he had done it in the place where he wanted to do it.

The lesson to learn: one can't "do better" than that.

Jon Hoornstra is a Cupertino resident and a columnist for The Courier.

[ Back to Contents Page | Cupertino Courier Home Page | Archives ]