How My Father, Robert, Listened ...

(found on Facebook)

One of the things my father was great at was "really hearing" me (and most others). Not only was he great at listening and understanding, but his understanding went beyond how most people understand: he "got" the meaning, the emotion behind the words, the yearnings and personal philosophy behind those words, the words as they were meant, and even sometimes the past experiences that made me say those words. I have never met anyone in my entire life who came close to him in this way.

I attribute this remarkable and unusual ability to his childhood: he often talked to grown-ups who cared about how he thought, what he thought about, his ruminations and his interests, and they asked a lot of questions. And then when he went to Farm and Wilderness Camps in the summer (a camp run by "lovey-dovey" Quakers), he learned to be non-judgmental, or at the very least, to keep asking questions and looking behind the scenes to get answers that would reveal a pretty good approximation of the truth, i.e. "as close as it gets". 

Who does that these days, an age of "a hurry to judgment", quick fixes, band aids, putting people in roles and hierarchies and if and when they resist, bully them until they submit to it, and self absorption to the point where it seems that most people only care what they themselves think, rather than caring about the truth (the truth has to involve what others think and experience if it is to be "the truth"). 

It means the world we live in is a world of "untruths", of made up or exaggerated stories and explanations.

That is the world I have been shocked by since 2013 when my father died (more explanation HERE and HERE). That world was largely "his world", past and present, or many of the people who surrounded him. He protected me from it when he was alive, thus the "full force" did not hit me until he died. Many, many nights I have cried over what he lived through (because I had to come face to face with those same people). He deserved so much better. It became obvious very fast to me that too many people around him did not listen to him, or really hear him, or even really care all that much about him. I saw it in more vague terms (more as an outsider), and then when it was thrust on me after he died, it became overbearingly obvious to me as if I was continuing his lesson of it. 

But he had also left me instructions in dealing with them: "don't be docile." 

In these people's lives he merely provided "a role" in their lives, and in that role, he was greatly taken advantage of (even professionally: his architecture for a house on the coast, for instance), selling his things, you name it. Some people did understand him, and I thank people like Moonlight Davis, Paola DiStephano, Richard Hooke, Ken Webb, the Traschens, and some of his older students who really sought him out and understood his true nature. 

So, here was my father, the great listener and empath, out to love, out to gently understand, out to create peace and beauty in the world, surrounded by people who never cared about him, who never listened to him or cared to understand what he was about, only to defend what they were doing in relation to him (which was not about doing right by others by a long shot). These were people with snap judgments, interested in "what he could give" them and their creature comforts, rather than what they could contribute to his life and to his memory. How awful! 

Serving as his daughter in his steed and as his trustee did not garner better behavior. I was treated much the same as he was. His compromises and being bullied to submit to their demands did not help me in my fight "not to be docile". I occasionally melted into docility and hopelessness (what I call "The Cinderella role" they wanted me to play), but I also heard his voice in my head enough to get police involved and begin a campaign of exposing, something he would never do. As with him, they used what ever power and control they could gain from the situation for them, in the utmost way they could use it. In living through what he lived through, I understood the all-night high-anxiety walks through the town that lasted off and on for years, the inability to sleep, getting up at the crack of dawn to keep the mental wheels from spinning and the desire to fix un-fixable things from driving him crazy, the long walks by himself to clear the air, the need for exercise and finding beauty in the natural world (i.e. the world without people in it, the world he photographed), the drawing inward towards projects, the sad voice over the telephone, the panic over whether he was going to be able to hang on to what he built, the call to help when he was being strong-armed and threatened, the confusion over being smeared (confusion because what could they possibly gain?). 

There were the town meetings where he was ever-polite, and knowledgeable, and explained things in patient detail, but where others with less knowledge shouted over him. And there was even the sadness he had over seeing a woman whom he regarded as family never acknowledge or appreciate the work he had done for her (even selling it to get something else she wanted more, and using the hard work he had done for her to gain personal profit). 

In fact, too much of what he accomplished in his life was either sold, given away, claimed as theirs, destroyed or taken for granted. This will probably always bother me. So to keep it in perspective, it is my duty to show what he accomplished so that it doesn't just get forgotten or end up in someone's next garage sale or attic or distant unsure memory.

I also understand that he was hurt much more over what these people did to him than I could ever be, thus my tears over understanding the extent of what he lived through. Why the emotional brutality, when he also was a soldier in World War II where he lost his entire unit? Why couldn't you all be kind to someone like that? Why couldn't you appreciate it instead of using it for your own self gain?

I was never close to them in the way he was, where they could rattle my resolve to the core or effect my life to the extent that they effected his life. Who he had in his life would certainly effect me, but I have a happy marriage and I was able to pinpoint ways he and I were doing things that weren't working, and "go into the new" -- i.e. less brutal lessons. 

But, the "going into the new" was something I felt I did for both of us, as a path to answer our joint problems and issues, especially when I was around empaths. I was able to accomplish a lot in the way of both work and understanding for both of us with empaths in my life. Our paths were very, very similar before then, even down to education, making things, music, teaching, and criss-crossed a lot, until 2001, or so, when I met my future husband, and began the very slow journey of discovering what both my father and I were missing and needed to know (i.e. in order to get beyond "being effected", beyond being Cinderellas in someone else's play, and at "the truth"). 

My mistake was that the way my father behaved, in terms of really listening, really making it his first duty to understand from a compassionate point of view, to get all of the facts, to realize the emotions, normalized the experience for me at an early age. I thought I'd find a lot of people in the world, just like my father, who would hear me and care. Nope. If anything, I experienced too much of the opposite: people telling me what I experienced, what I felt, what my intentions were (to dominate me) without asking once for accuracy, talking over me, demanding from me what they wanted and expecting me to take orders at all times, or just being asses in trying to get their own way all of the time, every time. In other words, the opposite from the way my father treated me. 

But, he was also often treated this way too with the exception of his childhood. So he understood my dilemma.

The kind of people I wished he had quizzed were some of the domestic violence counselors I have met over the years. Then he would have been able to understand so much more, even down to why people want to make war or fight for civil rights. Then he would have been able to not only point me in the direction of not being docile, but he would have understood every step needed in the process on how to do it and what it takes.

And this is when I hope that "the spirit" of our dead loved ones truly linger, to see it all through, the blunders we make, and the successes we realize. 

With love

P.S. This is to say that true empaths really listen.

P.P.S. This is also to say that empaths also need to be awesome lie detectors and bullshit detectors. 

lessons about bullying

This is a photo I took of my father at age 15 (I was taking care of him at the time).
I took this picture to never forget what he had been called to go through.
The original wasn't blue, but that is all I changed about it.
It is clear to me now that he was going through severe PTSD at the time.

(written by Lise Winne, Robert's daughter)

There were some issues that my father struggled with all of his life. Some of the conversations went on for days, as though he was trying to crack the code. One of those issues had to do with "bullying."

I would describe my father as ill-prepared for that darker part of human nature. He didn't grow up with controlling parents and he had a loving, respectful relationship with his sister which rarely broke out in fights.

He sometimes acted up as a child, which, as I understood it, happened most often when he was put to bed. Like a lot of children, he still hadn't finished playing or talking and would somehow manage to do both in a dark room with the lights out. His parents would come into the room and say in a reasonable calm voice, "Now you're getting awfully obstreperous in here; it's time to go to sleep, Bobby." They would keep saying it, through the evening if they had to, but they never punished him or made him do a "time out" (isolation for a period of time). He was certainly never physically disciplined by them and hated the thought of them being disappointed in him, so for the most part, he worked very hard to gain their approval. They exhibited a very gentle style of parenting and gave him a lot more independence than a lot of parents in those days. So there was no bullying in the home.

His parents were a very loyal couple. My grandmother in her sixties and seventies, was still good looking and young for her years, and became a "desirable catch" among older men in her senior living home. Her husband had passed away a decade earlier. She would tell these elderly gentlemen that she was already married. To her, marriage was forever, and if she went off with someone else, it would mean she was unfaithful. She took "until death you do part" to mean her death, even as she outlived her husband by twenty years. Even so, it was clear that she deeply loved and adored Mr. Winne Sr., that he was the apple of her eye, that no one could replace him, and she would always keep her marriage vows in honor of him.

My father's grandparents lived only blocks from his home and he would often stop to chat with them on his way home from school. They treated him with the same kind of respect that his parents treated him with.

His town neighborhood consisted of families very much like his own. Everyone had unlocked doors, and children could go into a house and announce their presence. My father would let the neighbor know he had entered a neighbor house by yelling, "It's me, Bobby! I'm downstairs in your livingroom!" and the woman of the house would greet him and ask him a bunch of questions, and even give him a snack if he wanted one. He learned how to talk to many adults, and I think this is why he always had a very respectful manner of speaking and an unusually keen way of listening and absorbing what was said. My sense is that neighbors were a resource for all children, and if a child couldn't get a skill from his parents, he simply went to another house to learn the skill.

The other children in the neighborhood were brought up in the same style as my father, respectful of adults, in homes with loving faithful parents who took their vows seriously, so there was no bullying to be found in his neighborhood.

He went to school in a town renowned for its teachers' college. The teachers were non distracted spinsters who were fabulous at their professions, but also very strict. As my father told it, "There was no nonsense in my school. You toed the line or else!" There were many young student teachers as well, but they were under the watch of these heavy-handed nun-like matrons of education. So there was no bullying there.

The camp that he went to every summer was run by a couple of lovey-dovey Quakers who believed in talking things out in a systematic, non-confrontational way. He became heavily influenced by them and sought the same ideals they did. So he didn't experience bullying there either.

For all intents and purposes, he was a sheltered child in the way that he never saw unpleasant human interactions, much the way the Buddha never saw old age or death until he left home.

I would describe my relationship with my father very much like the relationship he had with his parents: I was never physically disciplined by him, he had a calm way of parenting and I didn't want to disappoint him. I was probably a good deal more misbehaving than he was as a child (I did have a lot more anger than he did, but it had nothing to do with him at all). I did experience quite a bit of bullying as a child, but never quite understood why I was a target (what child does?). A few incidents had to do with bigotry and sexism (I was naturally non-prejudiced) and in school, my clothes were sometimes an issue (out-dated clothes make one a target). But beyond that I never understood what makes a person a target. Even when given reasons, the reasons always seemed irrational.

So, both my father and I were ill-equipped to know how to deal with bullying, why people wanted to bully, how they got that way, what was the grand purpose, and so on. We couldn't even muster up the thoughts "because of the bully wanting to dominate, for power and control" in those days. I can tell you that it was the single-most troubling issue of his life. It became the most troubling issue of my life too. The times in his life where he was hurt deeply, had to do with this subject. The pain festered in his heart for years, even decades. It took direct assault on his self esteem, his sense of security (in a world where a brutal war had already done quite a bit of damage in terms of PTSD). I didn't know what to do to ease his misery, to pluck it out of his mind or heart, or understand it myself. All I could do was commiserate. I would just try to find distractions, suggest walks, look at art together, talk about projects. In the end, it would sometimes amount to a long conversation about morality.

In my own life, as a child, I either put up with bullying by counting days I would be at summer camp (safety) or I would isolate to my room with a guitar, art supplies or by writing. In adulthood, I dealt with it by running away from it and the people who perpetrated it.

So when this subject was continually brought up by my father, I would listen for long periods of time, shrug my shoulders and say, "I guess some people are just bad and don't care." In other words, I didn't think to study it. All I knew was that I didn't want bullying in his life, or in my life.

The last few years of his life, I began to resent his insistence on returning to this subject. I don't know why I had such little tolerance for it other than it disturbed me that he hadn't found a way to work it through his system all the years, but I see now, that it was an unresolved, not-understood issue in his mind, all the way up to and through his death. In a way he was looking to me to absolve him of this terrible burden. "Oh, but Dood, I love you. You're the apple of my eye," I'd say, hoping that would ease his pain.

I think it is so clear to me now why being bullied was such a festering wound: no tools, so ill prepared, the arrows went right to his heart and he didn't know how to block it, other arrows went to his head and he didn't know how to block it there either. There was very little understanding of why people indulge in this activity when it is so unpleasant and hurtful to other people (I don't think he ever felt a lack of conscience, so he couldn't understand why other people weren't haunted by their actions).

I don't think lessons ever stop because a person dies. I was with him when he died, so in a way, I felt that the lesson simply jumped over to me and continued within my life. And oh boy, did it ever!

The one thing that I did differently was to try to understand it at every angle through research and talking to thousands of people (yes, thousands). Every time I would discover something, I'd say, "Are you listening Dood? Did you just hear what I heard? It has absolutely nothing to do with you."

I have had many vivid dreams of my father on this journey with me. Even though he has passed away, I feel it is a discovery for both of us and I'm working so hard to uncover what it all means in his honor. This is one of the reasons I am making illustrations on the subject, why I wrote this blog post on family scapegoating and why I ended up writing an entire blog on the subject. I could make art in his honor 'til kingdom come (and my art and studio are very much linked to my father), but resolving the bullying issue, even if it never gets resolved with the bullies themselves (and becomes only a contribution to society) is what I seem to be living for, for both of us.

My father, as soon as he was an adult, became part of the force of pushing back one of the most notorious bullies and sociopath narcissists of all time: Adolf Hitler in World War II. He lost his entire unit and almost lost his life. Going from a serene polite childhood surrounded by honest people of integrity to an all-out assault kind of war with inadequate equipment (no winter coats or boots, very few reinforcements, sleeping on the ground in winter), had to be incredibly traumatizing for him. I can't under-estimate the trauma that it caused.    

In civic and personal life, bullies were even more perplexing, i.e., "why does this have to go on in peace-time as well?"

Bullies can't see you for who you really are (the divine self, agape love); they only see you in terms of what they can or cannot control. You live or die in their hearts based on that. They see you only as an extension of their wants and needs and you can be demoted and discarded at any time for not feeding it. They have an intuitive sense of your vulnerabilities (where they can play on your shame and self esteem, and even where you'll get sucked in by pronouncements of love) but beyond that, they can't see a thing. They are pure manipulators, always trying to get a talon into you or punish you if you get too far out, always trying to get you to think about them, even if they have to use fear to do it.

War is probably not much different: a soldier's divine self is probably rarely considered and, at any rate, much like the uniform where one soldier looks like another, not about a person (their individuality), but only about their fitness, their resources, their abilities and how they can be manipulated and controlled to bring about an outcome. My father described the war as "deeply impersonal" (his quotes). In other words, who knows who you're firing at between the trees: saints? an only son? a father of a sick boy and a deceased mother? What horror!

So he never wanted to be put in a position like that again and was determined to live in peace ... except: bullies found him! And rattled him to his core!

The thing is, my father died in peace, with a clear conscience. You have to have incredible courage to go through the dying experience. He died with unresolved issues, but no regrets. Both he and I have had near death experiences (that is, before he died). We knew that near death experiences could make regrets loom huge over your consciousness and practically take over. In fact, regrets can be like demons (yes, you hallucinate, and no, you don't have control over them -- the regrets are in your face all of the time, totally terrifying, haunting). Many therapists say that this is when people who have been sleeping through life with their egos on begin to wake up. If you have near-death experiences, you begin to want to clear your conscience sooner before the BIG D. When you are in the throes of experiencing pain, you do not want to cause pain to others, and the memories of the pain can linger, meaning that you won't hurt people long after the experience either.

People always have a chance to wake up at any time and do the right thing, but for some reason, bullies usually run away from doing the right thing. They leave behind the good people. Honest people don't think about their egos; they think about intimacy. Life always challenges us: we can either take on more regrets or lessen the regrets we already have.  

father's day rememberances

circa 1930

My father (Bobby) wedged between his great aunt (L) and his grandmother (R)

and his sister (R)

Lise Winne (daughter of Robert F. Winne) writing the post today:

One of the things my father could boast of was an idyllic family life and an idyllic childhood. Even he would say it was "idyllic". I loved to hear his stories of his childhood, which he would recount in great detail. 

It was apparent that the members of his family had huge hearts, which he inherited and used on his two wives, sister, inlaws, elders, children and grandchildren. I hope the compassion, integrity and undying love he had for members of his family lives on in his grandchildren.

His neighborhood in a small upstate NY town seemed to be made up of similar kinds of people.

One of his stories that I keep thinking about went something like this:

In his neighborhood, most women stayed at home. They took care of the housework, looked after children, even neighbor children, shopped for groceries and medicines, and doted over their husbands. As women got into their mid-forties, it wasn't uncommon to find the lady of the house in bed at her time of the month (note: female surgeries were the exception and not the rule then, so a lot of women in their forties and fifties would often be found in bed). Neighborhood women helped other women not feeling well by bringing medicines and comfort, occasionally cooking, and also helping with children and shopping. 

If a woman got through the life transition without a hitch, this is when she might get a job, or at the very least, volunteer in the community, or volunteer to look after the grandchildren.

If a woman wanted to work (and not be relegated to home and hearth), she stayed unmarried. A popular profession for working women in his town was school teacher. My father recounts school teachers as being excellent at what they did, and furthermore, "no nonsense" (as he used to like to say, wagging his finger), but also very warm (like a mother would be). He said that because they weren't distracted by a husband and children, they were absolutely and fully devoted to their professions in ways that he didn't see from teachers in the 1960s and beyond. 

Indeed, the great aunt pictured above, was the school teacher in the family. She helped her sister with babysitting my father and his sister. He saw a lot of these two women as he was growing up.

For his lunch breaks from school, he went to his maternal grandmother's (pictured here). She lived in a large Victorian house. She would serve him up lunch, and then she would sit with him at the piano bench where he would do his half hour practice (he started practicing piano at age four). Sitting with him every day gave him an audience, confidence and the motivation to keep playing and to get better at his technique (in order to impress her). If he played well, she would clap. Many parents these days leave their children alone with instruments, expecting them to have the discipline to keep going, but to me it is obvious that this older generation had the right idea.  

On his way home from school, he often stopped into his paternal grandmother's house for some afternoon conversation and biscuits, and fruit when it was in season. 

It was an unusually polite society, where your elders listened to you, and you always listened to them. Respect was a two-way street. One on one conversations were the rule and not the exception. Children very rarely competed for attention or shouted over each other because there was plenty of adult attention to go around. Child rearing was a community effort. Life was largely about conversation. Conversation meant listening intently, politely and thoughtfully and offering up your best response. It was about reflecting. It was about allowing space within the conversation to get a full understanding about what was being said. This is one reason why my father was a master at self reflection and composure, and was often looked upon as wise by those around him; it was part of his everyday world as a child. 

Life was considerably slower then, as there was time for reverence for your community and neighbors. 

In his neighborhood, no one had locked doors. Neighbors looked at children of the neighborhood as a community responsibility where every woman shared in the task.

My father said he could go into any house in the neighborhood and announce his presence: "Hi, Mrs. ________________, it's Bobby! I'm down in your kitchen!" And the Mrs. would go into the kitchen and say, "Bobby! What a nice surprise! Oh, I'd like to hear how your piano playing is coming!" ... or something of that sort ... "Sit down and I'll fetch some cookies!" It was like that in just about every household. 

I think this is why my father retained his politeness throughout his entire life. He never swore (except when he didn't saw a board straight in his woodshop) and he always made an effort to be respectful. Being able to listen intently, to have an unusual amount of self reflection, to be considerate and moral in his responses, paved the way for an exceptionally close father-daughter relationship. 

Since I have been out in the world, I have realized how special that closeness was, and how incredibly unusual. My only hope is that this will inspire another father to be close to his daughter, by being respectful and a good listener, and offering up the most thoughtful and caring responses. It changed this daughter's life. Maybe it will change yours.

More childhood pictures:

Bobby as a toddler with his grandmother

 circa 1928

Bobby with his handsome father at Georgian Bay

introduction, a synopsis

Robert F. Winne at 4 months old with his mother, Miriam Cook Winne

My father, Robert F. Winne, was born on December 27, 1924 in Brockport, NY in a corner bedroom at his grandparents house. His grandparents were Alfred Clark Thompson (the president of Brockport College, or Brockport Normal School as it was called then) and Lina Cook Thompson. His parents were Robert F. Winne Senior and Miriam Thompson Winne.

My understanding is that he was adored by his parents and grandparents. He often described his upbringing and the lifestyle he was born into as idyllic, compassionate and loving, and it is my opinion that in many ways he tried to get that back again in some way for the rest of his life. A loving family, friendly neighbors who always had their doors open for visits from other neighbors (both children and adults) and pulling together as a community when times were tough were compelling and enriching for a boy. It was this call to neighbors and people in need that would inform his personality as a peace-loving, compassionate and gentle soul with traditional family values.

I saw a little of the world he grew up in when I was a little girl before the modern age of being inside automobiles, garages and houses were the prevalent trends of our nation and isolated families from each other. We would travel to Brockport to have Thanksgiving dinner with my grandmother, Miriam, and I got to experience the neighborhood first hand. I can attest to the fact that the neighbors were very friendly to each other as I thought all of them to be my grandmother's best friends. They also kept a good eye on her when her husband passed away, always asking how she was when she stepped out of the house.

I remember her yard and grounds as being particularly lovely in Spring with winding paths through islands of pachysandra and lilly of the valley that had within their borders dwarf flowering trees, azaleas, rhododendrons and other ornamental shrubs. My father would try to recreate some semblance of those gardens in the last house he lived in.

During summers of The Great Depression his parents sent him off to live on a gorgeous farm on one of the Finger Lakes in upstate NY with the Williams family. The Williams farmed the old fashioned way, non-mechanized with a team of horses. My father loved to tell us stories of his summers there and draw out maps of where everything was located inside and outside the house. Even though he had to spend his days working (which he didn't mind as it was a learning experience with patient gentle folk), he was eternally grateful to his parents for giving him the opportunity to be with this family on their farm. I always carried around visions in my head during my own childhood of his evenings with lanterns on the porch overlooking the sun setting on the lake with popcorn that they harvested on their own land and ate in the evenings.

Indeed, I would have been happy in the same world my father inhabited as I have always been attracted to small quaint towns with Victorian houses, loving supportive families, tight helpful communities and farms (and spend quite a bit of time as an adult in my own garden or at pick-your-own farms, my favorite of them on old Winne land).

The summers were spent with extended family on an island in Georgian Bay (pictures to follow).

When he was 14 years old, Ken Webb came to the town of Brockport to present a summer camp he had built in Plymouth Union, Vermont, a combination farm and wilderness camp set on a long lake surrounded by the Green Mountains in Vermont (and indeed, it was called Farm and Wilderness Camp). My father and his parents (as well as some other families from the town) were there for the presentation, which included pictures of the beautiful surroundings. My father and his friend, Chuck Meinhold were swept off their feet, as it were, and attended the first year the camp ran. It was a rough and rugged experience at first as there were few buildings in place at that time except for an old farmhouse and some half built cabins in the woods. Over many years the camp slowly got built by campers, staff and a few experts who decided to join the cause. Thus began my father's life-long relationship with the camp that ended only until he was in his sixties (though never ending in terms of the very good, deep personal bonds he had forged with people there).

The camps were very much in tune with his values of friendliness and community, but new values started to emerge too, especially as its founder decided to run the first non-discriminatory camp in the nation despite that half the camper-ship pulled out in the process (indeed, it was a question of morals and values, which my father always found compelling). He adopted these values as his own and would become a Quaker just like the founder once he had left his parents home. Indeed he told me many times that Ken Webb was one of the most influential persons in his life, only second to his parents and grandparents. From Ken Webb, he learned the teachings of Ghandi and began a lifelong interest in peaceful protest in political change.

He always remarked at how good his school and teachers were. In those days teachers were spinsters. Indeed, if you didn't want to get married, the choices were slim. But you could be a teacher. It commanded respect and you were still around children all day (albeit other people's children). Because spinsters didn't have many distractions, most of them put all of their energy into teaching. Brockport College being so near may have also played a part as in those days it was a teaching college (and not the university that it is today). As a result of his excellent education, he excelled at many subjects, with math and art being his best (math and art is where I excelled too -- a chip off the old block).

Childhood for boys meant wearing knickers. I forget the age where he said he shed the knickers for long pants. I think it may have been puberty.

One life long interest that my father had was in music. He started playing the piano at age 4. He lunched with his Thompson grandparents every day, and after his meal he had to sit at the piano for a half an hour or more and practice while his grandmother sat next to him. He told me that he learned to read music before he learned to read the written word. What was a chore when he first began, later became something he looked forward to as his skills grew. Later on, he also dabbled in guitar and saxophone (unfortunately the saxophone was destroyed in a cabin fire at Farm and Wilderness and his parents never had enough money to replace it). The piano was where he was most skilled and he played it up until a couple of years ago before he got sick. In fact he became such an advanced student, when he was looking around at colleges he was accepted into Eastman School of Music, but decided that architecture was a more sensible career (less poverty) and attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on the GI bill instead.

Which brings me to the next phase of his life: the war, or more specifically World War II.

My understanding is that he was admitted into the Army Core of Engineers, but was put into the infantry. He was inducted in 1943 and served in the 75th Infantry Division, 289th Infantry Regiment. Out of his unit of 40 men, he was the only one not killed or wounded. He carried a Browning Automatic Rifle as point man for the unit. His 19th birthday was spent in full combat during the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes in Belgium.

He talked little of the war until he was an old man. When I approached him about the subject from his 30s into his 60s, he would get a sad look on his face and shake his head "no"; i.e. he didn't want to talk about it. The first times he was able to talk about it, his voice got shaky and he would only recount a single memory and then say, "Don't we have better things to think about?" He would much rather talk about the Williams farm or even hardships he saw during the Great Depression than relive that war.

I have his letters from that time, a cassette tape with his interview about the war and my own memories to share, so many of the later posts will focus on these instead of overwhelming this introduction with the particulars of his experiences in combat.

Immediately after the war my father worked to supervise frontline POW German officers. He said that it was during this time that he realized how impersonal war was. "A lot of these German officers were really decent guys. They were forced to go to war just like I was. I realized that the enemy in any war isn't the boogey men they are made out to be; indeed, people you are shooting at could be saints or your finest friends outside of combat. War wasn't something I wanted to partake in again; there is too much immorality seeing as how most countries make laws against murder. The result was that after many talks with Ken Webb about all of my personal struggles with the ethics of war, I became a Quaker."

Bob Webb, Ken Webb's son, noted how much my father changed after the war. "Here we were these happy go-lucky kids jumping off of rafts and laughing it up and then after the war, Bob was a changed man and you could tell he was struggling with a lot internally."

Indeed my father told me that after the war, he got invited to some parties in his hometown to celebrate the end of the war. He was not in a celebratory mood, even if he was relieved. "The problem was I was depressed and they probably misinterpreted it as not being friendly. I lost my entire unit, my officer was killed and landed right on top of me, I saw some horrible things, concentration camps, letting revenge and arrogance get the better of some of the men in my unit. And I wasn't feeling joyous. And I couldn't seem to force a feeling of joy. I never really told them what was wrong with me because men just didn't talk about feelings in those days," he said to me once. His idyllic childhood where manners, open doors, polite and friendly discourse were commonly being displayed, had been abruptly shattered by memories of war battles and the realizations that people could be awful towards each other.

My father battled with depression all of his life and it always centered on how people treated each other. It was as though the war informed him of the worst of human nature and even when he saw it in much more subtle forms in pedestrian life, it could effect him deeply. He couldn't understand why people didn't care as much about their integrity as he did about his and it would stun him when people were brazenly hurtful.

A predilection to depression was also probably due in part to his sensitive artistic nature. As we both discovered later in life, artistic minds are a little different than the minds of the general population: we are much more prone to post traumatic stress disorder in terms of intensity and duration.

As for his college years, he often spoke of them as being different than one might normally expect because there were so many older students in their early twenties attending under the GI bill along with men who were just leaving home for the first time (note: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute only admitted men in the 1940s). The result was working very hard and partying less than student populations do nowadays.

On the weekends he worked as an usher at Troy Music Hall (it was his way of being able to hear lots of classical music concerts at a time when his money had to be going towards his education).

Following graduation he worked as an architect under a new name (Frank Winne) for a couple of firms in Houston, Texas and Boston, Massachusetts, spending long days sitting at the drawing board and evenings pursuing cultural activities like classical concerts and fine art exhibits. In Boston he also became part of a professional modern dance troupe who also hired amateurs like my father for their performances. Sitting all day at his job made him decide that he would rather be a teacher of Architecture, so he returned to Troy, NY and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) to teach and to get his masters. He retired from RPI in 1988.

He also had teaching appointments at Pennsylvania State University, Barnard College and Columbia University.

As for marriage, he was in his late twenties when his parents put pressure on him to find a wife, get married and start having a family. When he was at Farm and Wilderness Camps he thought this might be the place to look first, as a woman there might be more likely to have many of the same values he aspired to. And indeed, that is where he met my mother (at the Timberlake Lower Lodge to be exact, a building he was later hired to dismantle, redesign and rebuild just after they were divorced 17 years later -- life has some ironies!). They were married when she was 20 and he was 30.

I don't feel at liberty to discuss their marriage as my mother is still alive, but suffice it to say that it was unhappy for both of them.

There are a couple of things that I can reveal, perhaps. It did seem to me that he was crazy about her (she was beautiful and smart). They also had enough similar interests to keep their marriage going for quite a long time (my opinion).

But it also seemed to me that while they were married he didn't feel free (to reveal his feelings, to talk about what was going on inside him, to take much initiative) with the result that his actions in regards to her were completely baffling and mysterious to me. Indeed he was often silent and tense and ran away from conflict by delving deeper into projects.

After the marriage was over, a huge outpouring of emotion, thoughts, revelations, explanations, heart and soul ensued. Our relationship changed forever: I became his confidante throughout the rest of his life. I looked at him differently from then on too. He became much, much more dimensional to me. And he was no longer "the silent father" of my youth as conversation flowed easily between us on a daily (or almost daily) basis. I can assure my readers that there was nothing inappropriate between us, but I often wondered how suitable it was to be the person he revealed his innermost thoughts, feelings, secrets in addition to getting advice (centered around what he could have done better in any given situation) as I was so inexperienced in life and it was the first time in my life where anyone ever revealed so much about themselves to me. Being the confidante was life long, or at least up to the time of his dementia when he couldn't get his facts straight and would dwell on things endlessly from the past as though they had happened yesterday. The result is that I became defensive and protective of my father most of my life and it extended into every aspect of his life from politics, causes he was involved with, to issues around his job (the job issue, in fact, happened when I was attending RPI as a freshman around the time architecture students were in revolt, a situation in which roughly half the students and half the faculty were in direct conflict with the other half of the students and faculty ... I will go into more detail about this in other postings). I felt then, as I do now, that he researched and researched and back-checked and thought things out so thoroughly (and could always admit to any mistakes he had made along the way, a rarity as I found out in the rest of the general population), that it was easy to be his advocate in almost all situations.

In all other ways, he was the ideal father. I was closer to him than anyone else in my entire life until recent years (when a family of my own became compelling).

We had so many experiences together: taking modern dance classes together, going to many, many art museums and art exhibits together, haunting old neighborhoods with stunning Victorian houses (which he loved to take pictures of and envision living in during another era), meeting at Farm and Wilderness or in Williamstown, concerts (ranging from classical to jazz to folk), going to many alternative movies together, craft fairs, going to visit various communes and communities, traveling and camping out in his van, and attending various spiritual centers. I attended uncountable numbers of his professional lectures and slide shows. We attended city hall meetings together when he was trying to save particular buildings from demolition (the city had the idea to rid itself of the old architecture in order to make room for more modern architecture, a folly, as my father would see it -- more on this in other posts). We went to popular dances together as well as being a spectator for modern dancing troupes and the New York City Ballet (we saw a lot of them during the rein of Balanchine who my father respected because he was a visionary, someone who took ballet into another dimension and stretched it almost to its ultimate, though he still preferred Modern Dance, particularly the direction of the Jose Limon Dance Company). We both took life drawing workshops with Larry Kagan. We went to Cape Cod together (or I met him there) during summers, when he first started going with his second wife, then as a bachelor and then with his third wife and grandchildren in tow (the bachelor years being the most memorable). We made lots of artful photos in his darkroom together (some projects dragged on for weeks or even months). I also sat in on my father's yoga classes which he taught on Sundays at RPI when I was a teenager and my twenties (a meditation session was featured after his classes and I often stayed with him through those sessions as well). We both studied Eastern religion together, particularly Hinduism (of which yoga was part) and the Tibetan tradition (through the teachings of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche in particular: via the book The Myth of Freedom). I will talk about our study of Eastern religion in a longer post: it was a riveting subject for him because it espoused many of the same kinds of Quaker ideals, but there was more concentration on working on oneself to achieve the peace and purity of mind and action though enlightenment and ego-less involvement in the physical world. He even studied with a psychic for awhile (a little known fact that he didn't want anyone to know about when he was alive because he didn't want to be thought of as "a kook" as he put it -- one session was with the renowned psychic and artist, Marina Petro). In the earliest years he took both of his children to Troy Music Hall classical concerts where we would sit in the balcony while he drew the conductor or musicians before him on the stage.

He was always interested in my art and insisted on seeing all of it. He attended almost all of my exhibits and even came to most of my craft fairs. He read almost all of my poetry and fiction, at least up until he contracted dementia, and even a long dense novel I had written in my twenties.

He was non-judgmental of my projects and understood that art projects are experiments which don't always come out as planned. He had a particular interest in my preliminary drawings (the seeds of my inspirations) and I had an interest in changing some of my designs so that they would appeal to the color blind (as he was color blind). He always displayed an intense interest in everything I did (in other words, it was never a superficial interest: he always seemed to want to know the inner workings of my mind, intentions and emotions).

It was a profoundly deep relationship which I suspect most daughters do not have with their fathers.

As a child, he would be the last one I talked to before going off to sleep. I would tell him of my innermost fears and hopes and he would pause for awhile and then offer his most thoughtful advice.

He never disciplined me by hitting, slapping, shouting or through intimidation, ultimatums or threats. All he had to do was shake his head and softly say, "I'm very disappointed in you", and that was enough to make me cry my eyes out and want to straighten myself out (for him). A person of high integrity can do that. Most people cannot (as I've found, criticism often comes from hypocrisy, and not integrity).

However, he didn't have that kind of magic with everyone. I have witnessed throughout my life, particularly in political situations, where he was made a laughing stock, ridiculed, interrupted, shouted over, bullied, strong-armed, demeaned, not taken seriously and criticized without provocation or warrant. It was heartbreaking to watch a profoundly deep, sensitive and thoughtful man who chose his words very carefully, who treated everyone like a gentleman (with respect and dignity) and was an expert in his field being trashed and treated that way. He had enough inner resolve not to give into the temptations of stooping to his adversaries' level, but I could tell that sometimes the temptations were just under the surface and that he was struggling with them. Often he would pursue a train of thought or oration against these great odds if only to talk to the people who were on the side-lines or possessed a softer stance (who might hear him). He wasn't going to be a doormat, but he wasn't going to be silenced either even if the odds were not in his favor. I saw that it takes great character to be this way. Martin Luther King once brilliantly said, "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." And: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter." (quotes © here, the type of quotes my father tended to remember when he was in situations that were adversarial).

As for our nuclear family, I would describe it as odd. There is a photo of the four of us where my brother is sitting on my mother's lap and I'm sitting on my father's lap on the stoop just outside the front door. "That's the classic photo," my father said on a number of occasions.

The family was, in most ways, "split" down the middle as though my mother and brother were one team and my father and I were the other team. When they divorced, I lived with my father and my brother lived with our mother. Indeed it continued through most of my adult life where my brother and mother spent vacations and holidays on the west coast together and my father and I spent a lot of time and significant holidays together on the east coast. Then in the last years as my father developed a slow-progress dementia it switched so that my mother and I were spending family time together and my father was seeing a lot of my brother.

And indeed, my father enjoyed his time with my brother sightseeing, spending time getting to know a Russian community, having grandchildren and great grandchildren on his knee, being fed and pampered with exotic meals by a master cook (my brother's wife) and going on British-run cruises in Europe where he could take pictures and see famous buildings and art first-hand.

It is my opinion that my brother and father were/are polar opposites (though they had some interests in common).

In saying this, I'm revealing that I think my father and I had the most in common. It is one reason I am undertaking the writing of his biography, because I think I may have understood him enough in all his aspects so that readers can know him as well as I knew him. He was worth knowing and the way he thought about things was uncommon even if he was living a common life without fanfare or acknowledgement beyond his teaching and building projects.

How we were alike spread into many areas:

We were both teachers with masters degrees in art. Mine was in the fine arts; his was in architecture. But in a way, our approach to projects and working within our fields were/are similar: like architects, I use rulers constantly; I plan compositions with a lot of preliminaries (usually); my drawings are very detailed; I often use borders or architectural elements to frame a visual story. I believe if we switched professions, his fine art compositions would look like mine and my architectural drawings would look like his.

We were also both musicians (me professionally, he a near-professional, at least in his abilities). We both wrote musical pieces and liked an innovative approach to playing tried-and-true musical compositions. Our musical tastes were both in the classical and folk arenas (though I enjoyed rock for awhile too and admit this wasn't something he enjoyed outside of later Beatles albums, Jethro Tull, Emerson Lake and Palmer and other innovative groups that weren't too loud or boisterous).

We both spent our twenties heavily involved in dance (he in modern dance, me in ballet).

Indeed, we both had such similar habits and interests across the board. For instance, we both read a lot and tended to xerox if we found something we might want to reference later. We both lived in towns in a neighborhood and in a Victorian house. We both liked pattern in our decor. We both gardened. We both kept a lot of reference materials around for our respective arts. We both suffered from the same physical ailments. We both liked long walks and hikes. We were both photographers. We both had darkrooms (in the day) and spent a lot of time developing our own pictures. We were both builders (me with sculpture, he with woodworking). We both explored similar fields of study (art, music, culture). We both thought things out very carefully and studied things in depth (in terms of details, planning, repercussions) sometimes to the point of immobility. We were both sometimes overwhelmed by the time commitments of some projects and would stop midway (and often at the same point in terms of hours invested). We were both relatively quiet reserved people who would generally lend our thoughts if we were asked and people took an interest in us. Neither one of us is/was overly demonstrative. We both could get bogged down in depression if we weren't careful. We were both into causes and sometimes the objects of bullies and users. It wasn't until he died and I explored his studio that it became obvious to me that we were so much more alike than I ever realized when he was alive. Indeed, it was like looking into a mirror. I believe he realized the depth of our connection before I did as he always said to me every time we saw each other for visits, "Ol', Lees, you're a chip off the old block." I'll be writing about what I found in his studio in further posts.

In later years he traveled with his wife and had a pleasant community of neighbors and friends.

He also was spending more time with my brother (at the prodding of my stepmother who liked the big open spaces where my brother lived) and I was spending more time with my mother. My father did feel a bit threatened by my relationship with my mother. They were divorced, as I've said before, and he had shared so much of his inner self with me that he felt very vulnerable to betrayal. With his dementia, he could be totally obsessed with my mother and could go crazy with worry that I might be talked into going against him and would sometimes cry on the phone about it. As much as I reassured him (and even focused on the good and positive things she said), he never felt at ease. The time I spent with her was growing to be a lot more than the time I spent with him, especially in these last years, not because I didn't love him or because there was anything wrong between us, but because it was a time when my own nuclear family was taking on importance and precedence and I needed outlying family to travel to us to be part of raising a musician who often played in symphonies and recitals on the weekends and sharing in our life within our own household (and there were reasons why this was sometimes problematic unless I traveled to get him). Plus, I really wanted to explore the relationship with my mother since she and I had previously been so distant emotionally in prior years (indeed, I believe we never really knew each other and there was a lot to know, including love and experiences to give and receive).

But my father was always the apple of my eye and always will be. It was the last significant thing I told him before he died. I know that I will never know anyone like him again. There are a lot of gentle souls out there, I'm sure. But someone that shares all of the spiritual, emotional and artistic spheres with me in tandem with his purity and integrity? Never. I have never met anyone even remotely like him. The realization that this was all disappearing from the world and from my own life was beyond a pain I'd ever known. It seemed to me that the world needed a peaceful generous heart like my father (much as the world needs a peaceful nation like Tibet within its sphere). It was the kind of pain that could kill a person (or so I thought).

But somehow I gathered enough strength and resolve (plus there was another "family health emergency" which needed my attention that it could distract me from my own feelings of loss for awhile). Then last January, I put my energies into care-taking my father (with my brother and my father's wife). It was much like taking care of a young child (except going in reverse from toddler to infant) and I knew that eventually that just as his parents and grandparents welcomed him with love into the world, his children and grandchildren would be bidding him a loving farewell from the world: a full circle.

I started this blog as a way to gather material for a full book (for family) and to organize highlights of his life and of his writings, photos and thoughts. The project seemed overwhelming at first and also was emotionally taxing as I was still in deep grief. But in writing it in this way, as an on-line blog as the preliminary to a book, I can also get feedback (just in case my facts aren't right or there are grumbles about what I focus on). I hope the stranger to this blog will find something of interest too, particularly the historical pieces I will share.