Roger

 

It was over two years ago when I wrote a similar essay about Barbara.  I think most of us thought that Roger would precede her in death, especially with his decline secondary to spinal stenosis.  When Barbara got sick, she failed fairly rapidly, with Roger there was a longer falling off that followed an  exponential curve of some kind - - at first his step downs were shallow with long intervals in between, but these increased in frequency and degree of deterioration with time.  So, in his last few weeks things seemed to be going more poorly more often.  We had planned to get a hospital bed for him the day he died. Still, I know I was (pleasantly) surprised that he hung on as long as he did; I didn’t expect him to last out 2019, the year Barbara left us.  In his last years I made a point of seeing him more frequently, by his last year it was almost weekly; often Cindy and I would have dinner with him, Andy and Gail. Initially we would go out to dinner, later this was restricted to Northmoor, and still later with Covid and his increasing loss of mobility these were take-out meals held at home.  The epidemic did not interrupt how often we saw him; we were careful to stay masked as much as possible.  In any case, Roger seemed to have trouble realizing or remembering that a pandemic was occurring outside the confines of 1261, an indication of his slow mental decline.  Because of his loss of mental and physical acuity he became increasingly dependent on us and his caregivers, especially after Andy took his car keys away - - Roger was pissed off about that for months, even though he lacked the mobility to get into the car anyway.

Not surprisingly, I have fewer memories of Roger compared to Barbara, since we did not share many interests.  When I was a youngster, he travelled frequently with AG Becker until the early 1970s, and by the time Harris Associates was founded, I was out of the house. He always caught an early train into Chicago, and a late one back, so we did not see much of him during the week.  Often when he got home he would either have a tennis game or jog 1-2 miles around the subdivision south of us - -he was an early believer of aerobics.  Rarely, I would join him on the jogs (Owen was always the big runner).  Because of this in my recollection he often had dinner separately from the rest of us - - I am sure it was more peaceful!  In the summer he would often just have a big salad, which he ate directly out of a large salad bowl. On the other hand, I also recollect him carving up a roast or a chicken from his spot at the end of the table, and our family passing around the aluminum serving dishes filled with vegetables.

He could be playful. I remember rarely chasing him through the house with the other boys (Vanessa must have been a baby).  He also occasionally played catch with us in the backyard in the spring and summer.  He would throw pop-ups and ground balls so I could practice baseball fielding - - there really weren’t any other spring and summer sports for a young American boy in the 60s.  He always complained that it hurt his shoulder (as I’ve gotten older I understand this woe).  In the summer Howard and the other Kenoshans would sometimes come out for a barbeque, and he and Roger would be the basemen for big games of running bases between the two massive oak trees in the yard. We also would go to Kenosha where he and Howard seemed to have an abundance of Frisbees.  When we joined Northmoor he was always at the tennis courts, we could never get him to come into the pool with us.

Roger had become re-interested in tennis when I was little, and he would often hit balls with us on different courts – some public courts, then Northmoor, and eventually also Fink Park.  However, he would get tired or bored by this eventually, his competitive streak would push through (he won several tournaments in the ‘B’ division at Northmoor), and he would start to hit balls that were not returnable by a 10 year old.  It’s not for no reason that only Andy ended up playing tennis, and Andy didn’t take it up until he was in his thirties when Roger was already pretty old.  For many years we had a ping-pong table in the ‘New Room’, and Roger’s desire to win was also seen here.  He knew how to put a lot of spin on the ball!

I don’t know if he was ever that interested in any of his kids following him into a career in finance.  There was always a lot of competition swirling about in our family (note that all of the siblings went into radically different professions, and none of them in finance); I think none of us ever felt that we would measure up.  I know when I asked him about it as a young teen, he took a book on investing by Benjamin Graham off of his bookshelf in his study for me to read, but Roger himself didn’t especially encourage me. He never spoke much about investing to us while we were growing up - - I really had no idea what he did at work all day (I’m still not so sure, although I know he was an occasional secret cigarette smoker there). Likewise, he was pretty close-mouthed about his philanthropic endeavors until we were much older.  Through him, I did volunteer at Thresholds one night a week one summer after my first year in medical school (I quickly decided psychiatry was not for me). He was most interested in underserved populations – mental illness, prison recidivism - - that often ‘fell through the cracks’ within the philanthropic donor class compared to educational or artistic institutions.  There aren’t very many structures or scholarships with his name on them.

Roger enjoyed classical music of all sorts; he and Barbara were regulars at the symphony, the opera, and Ravinia.  He had a fancy stereo system in the library, and he often listened to vinyl records.  The radio station in the dining room was permanently set to WFMT (as was his car radio), which he would listen to in the early morning as he ate his breakfast (prepared by Ellsworth).  He was not fond of rock music, although he surprised me once at home after I had been listening to a bootleg copy of the Grateful Dead’s  American Beauty.  He wanted to know who the band was.  Perhaps the music reminded him of Burl Ives, whose albums they had bought for their kids’ sake. Neither he nor Barbara were big television watchers or movie goers, although this increased as the years went by.  Televised tennis matches and the Bears were the most watched shows, but they did like Masterpiece Theater, other Chicago sports teams if they were winning, and in his final years, Homeland.

Roger was a firm believer in the value of education, not surprising considering that he was the recipient of an excellent one himself. He was disappointed that none of his grandchildren graduated from Exeter, and that none of them matriculated at Yale; he strongly believed, even in the face of plenty of countervailing evidence, that graduating from prominent schools was an imprimatur of value. Perhaps this was a reflection of his work environment, where I have the impression that an Ivy League education is a big door opener into the ‘Boys Club’.  However, although he valued Yale as his alma mater, it was not his choice to go there (he had wanted to go to Harvard; the Navy sent him to Yale), nor was he happy with his forced degree in Naval Engineering.  He did eventually get to Harvard’s business school , where he was a proud alum of a particularly successful class.

Although Roger didn’t have the same intense love of reading that Barbara had, he was intellectually curious, and spent many hours reading a variety of periodicals (both finance and otherwise), as well as a selection of non-fiction, often, but not always, history or biography.  Whatever he may have learned from this he usually kept pretty close; it could be difficult to engage him on historical or current events (although given his political views, he might not have wanted to get into arguments with his liberal children).  On the other hand, he was a big tease, and sometimes it was difficult to tell how benign the needling was.  He certainly enjoyed making comments about his children’s purchases of watches and cars, as well as other possibly touchy subjects.

He liked to travel, and I have memories of many ski trips (and many jigsaw puzzles) with him over the years, first in Wisconsin and Michigan, then Colorado with extended family, and later Utah with the Rempels.  He and I visited some east coast colleges together in the summer before my senior year at PEA.  I traveled with him and Barbara on two separate trips, one in southern England and one in southern France.  We had two family trips to Italy, and other trips to Peru, Costa Rica, and many to Mexico and Florida.  He took Jeff and me to Disneyland, California in 1968, and Vanessa and me to Disneyworld, Florida in 1974. He was uninterested in nature trips (Barbara often went on her own or with the Wares), but he was amenable about cultural side trips to museums, cathedrals, etc.  He and Barbara collected a lot of art and artifacts from their travels all over the world. More important were trips that had access to either skiing or tennis, and of course, a lot of family around him. 

Roger appreciated going to high end restaurants, although I don’t think he would take a side trip just for that purpose.  Andy and I had some memorable birthday dinners with him and Barbara, most notably Alinea, when he was suffering from a head cold, and couldn’t taste any of the food. We also ate at many fine restaurants in New York City during yearly investment excursions, our reward for sitting through hours of stultifying investment talk, although Roger could usually be roused to ask some penetrating questions.  As much as Roger liked eating, he was hopeless in a kitchen; he could prepare cold cereal , use a coffee maker, and heat up canned soup. Barbara used to joke that he couldn’t boil an egg.  I recall one summer at an AG Becker picnic, he was asked to chop onions.  He cut up a few, and then asked how he was supposed to get all the dry brown bits off the pieces.  That was the last time he was asked to showcase his lack of culinary arts, but it shows his mastery of passive resistance when necessary.