Eulogy for Dad
Kenneth Wayne Grubaugh was born on Aug. 10, 1927 in Van Wert
County, Ohio, the sixth and youngest child, and the fourth son, of William
Porter Grubaugh and Ada McClelland Grubaugh.
He attended schools in that rural, Depression-era community,
graduating from Union High in the spring of 1945. He enlisted in the U.S. Army,
and he was almost certainly going to be part of a U.S. invasion force of Japan,
but he turned 18 just a day after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki,
and the war ended a week later. So when he was mustered in to the Army, he
ended up serving 18 months stateside.
He got out of the Army and went to college at Bowling Green
State University in Ohio on the GI Bill, and then he transferred to Georgia
Tech, where he completed a degree in architectural engineering and participated
in ROTC. He later completed a master’s degree in industrial engineering at
Stanford University.
He accepted a commission as an officer in the U.S. Air Force,
eventually serving for 29 years and advancing to the rank of colonel. He was
trained as a jet pilot, he was stationed in post-war Japan, he flew combat and
reconnaissance missions in Korea and Vietnam, he was a graduate of the elite Air
Force Experimental Flight Test School at Edwards AFB in Southern California and
served as a test pilot, he was a candidate for the Mercury space program, and
he was a leader in Air Force contracts and procurement. He was the recipient of
various military commendations and awards, including most notably the Legion of
Merit, the Bronze Star, several Distinguished Flying Crosses recognizing
his 168 combat missions in Korea and Vietnam, and Air Medals. He was stationed
at various locations in the U.S. and abroad, with his final assignment being as
the Director of Procurement at McClellan AFB, Sacramento.
After retiring from the Air Force and moving to Davis in
1978, he worked as the purchasing agent for Yolo County for three years, and as
the general services administrator for the city of Davis for two years. After
fully taking up retirement, he served as a volunteer for many years with the UC
Davis Friends of the Arboretum, and he was a volunteer set designer and builder
with Winters Community Theatre.
He met Lou Ellen Gatlin, a beautiful young journalist at the
Arizona Republic newspaper, in 1955 in Phoenix, and they married in January 1956.
They were married for 59 years and had four children, all of whom are here
today – Karl, our late son and brother Kyle, next to whom he will be buried, Ann
and Jim – and five grandchildren – Lauren, Connor and Garrett Grubaugh, and Kerry
and Kyle Baker.
Those are the quick, unvarnished biographical details of my
father’s life, but if you knew my dad, you know he was so much more than can be
conveyed with a rapid recitation of the highlights of his life.
If you knew Ken Grubaugh, you know that he loved people, and
he loved laughter, and he loved telling and listening to the stories that knit
people and laughter together. I would be terribly remiss if I didn’t take a few
moments this afternoon to share some of the stories that we’ve laughed and
cried re-telling in the last few days. But I want to start by bringing up
someone else to tell a couple of stories.
We asked Chuck Walker to share a few of his memories of my
dad. Chuck’s older brother, John Walker, is married to my oldest cousin, Mary
Altier, and almost 20 years ago, when Chuck was moving out to Davis to take a
history professorship at UCD, Mary called my dad and asked if he would be
willing to pick up Chuck’s dog at the airport and take care of him for a couple
of days while Chuck was driving his family out from Chicago. That started a two-decades-long
relationship in which Chuck became, to my dad, like another son.
Chuck …
Thank you Chuck. There are so many stories to tell, so many
sweet memories.
My mom realized Ken Grubaugh was quite a find when they met
in the summer of 1955. Dad was stationed in New Mexico, but along with several
other AF pilots, he was visiting Phoenix for two weeks of training at Luke AFB.
Some of my mom’s girlfriends knew some of the Air Force guys, and they put
together a group dinner that ended up being a kind of giant blind date for both
my mom and my dad and some of the others. Mom and dad were paired with others
that night, but they were introduced, and before the night was over, my dad had
asked my mom to dinner for the following night. After that first date, my mom
told her mother: “I don’t know if he’s coming back, but if he does, and if he
asks me to marry him, I will.” My grandmother was appalled – “You don’t even
KNOW him!” But mom knew a good man when she saw him, and after six months and a
dozen or so more dates, they were married in January 1956.
Dad and his brothers Glover, Boyd and Beryl all served as
Air Force pilots, and their combat missions stretched across WWII and two regional wars in Asia, from Sicily to
France to China to Korea to Vietnam. He was proud of his military career, but we’ve
been talking this week about how he never told anything but funny war stories.
A few weeks ago, for example, he told Connor about being in the back of a truck
with a bunch of other U.S. pilots in Saigon, inching across the city in
horrific traffic, when a rider on a motorbike decided to slide past the traffic
by going up on the sidewalk. What the motorbike driver didn’t know, however,
was there was a very large, uncovered manhole. Dad said the motorbike was zipping
right past the Air Force truck and all of a sudden … he just disappeared. The U.S. pilots all stood and
cheered.
My dad was very good at the balancing act of fatherhood. I’ve
heard it said that some fathers are like quarterbacks – they have to be in
charge. And some fathers are like running backs – they want the focus and the
glory and the spotlight to be on them. Ken Grubaugh was a lineman. He opened up
holes for his family and for his friends, helping them see and exercise their
opportunities, to play out their passions, and then he smiled and cheered as
they ran to daylight. My mom told me this week that dad managed to somehow skip
out on his own military retirement ceremony, because he just wasn’t comfortable
with the spotlight focused on him. He was all about others, not himself.
I was a competitive swimmer in high school and college. I
remember being at one of my first-ever winter swim meets, and we ran into one
of his colleagues from work as we were leaving. My dad asked for my second-place
medal, and he showed it off to his friend and his friend’s young daughter. Then
he handed it back to me, and he patted me on the back. I was just a rookie
swimmer in a tiny little swim meet, but I was just so encouraged by his pride
in my small accomplishment. Like a football lineman, he opened up holes for us,
and then he applauded when we went running through.
But my dad was certainly no pushover. A couple of years
later, some of Kyle’s friends were TPing our house. (For those who don’t know,
TPing a house involves throwing many, many rolls of toilet paper – dozens,
maybe more than 100 – up into the trees and across all the bushes of someone’s
yard. It’s an expression of endearment and friendship, really, but someone has
to clean it up.) So these friends of Kyle’s are TPing our house at like 1 in
the morning, I think for the third or fourth time in the previous few months,
and my dad hears something outside that wakes him up. So he throws on some
sweat pants and a T-shirt and bathrobe, quietly walks out to the front door and
then BOOM, blows out the front door in hot pursuit of the perps. Kids are
scattering all over the neighborhood, jumping into cars and peeling off. But
one kid – Nelson Licky – was either too slow or too stunned to get his car
started and rolling in time, and my dad came running up alongside and grabbed
his antenna and stared him down. Nelson, wide-eyed, started to accelerate, my
dad held on – and the antenna snapped off in his hand. For good measure, he
whapped the roof of Nelson’s car a couple of times with the broken antenna as the
vehicle finally went careening down the street. And then, the next school day,
my dad had Kyle deliver Nelson a little wrapped package. In it? The broken
antenna, complete with a bow and a little card – to Nelson, with love, from the
Grubaughs.
My dad was exceptionally smart. Last Monday night, he was
talking to himself in the middle of the night, and my mom woke up.
“Nary a one,” he said. “Nary a one … nary a … nary.”
Ken, my mom asked, what are you saying?
“I’m doing the crossword puzzle,” he said. In his head, he
was doing the crossword puzzle.
My son Connor, who came home from Scotland to be here today,
remembers how my dad taught him and his brother Garrett to play solitaire,
cribbage and chess, and how he just had a brilliantly analytical and
quick-thinking mind for those kinds of games. The version of solitaire my dad taught
is so difficult to win – the odds are so astronomical – that Connor says he’s
never actually won. I don’t know if my dad ever won, either. But for my dad,
that was part of the reason for playing in the first place. He taught my boys
how to play cribbage, and he loved the quick analysis and mathematical
calculations the game requires. Again, Connor said he never beat my dad – but
that also wasn’t the point. It was about the joy my dad experienced teaching
his grandsons a simple game that allowed them to spend time together.
Years ago, he coached my cousin Melissa through a college
algebra class. When Melissa got stuck on a particularly tough problem, she
asked my dad to help her work through it. My dad pulled out an old college math
textbook, figured out how to tackle the problem, and then Melissa went to
class. When the professor asked her to show her solution on the board, he looked
at it and insisted on knowing how she did it the way she did it. Melissa
admitted she’d gotten my dad’s help. The solution, the professor said, was done
using a technique he’d never seen before, and could Melissa please ask my dad
if she could borrow that book so he could see how it was done?
Dad was also pretty financially astute. I think all of us
have leaned on him over the years for tax advice, investment advice, and the
like. He was also pretty financially conservative and frugal. ... OK, he was very
frugal. He was incredibly generous, but he was very frugal. Jim jokes that he’d
never buy anything other than the cheapest $1 flashlight, which of course
lasted about a week, so Jim finally bought him a nice $25 maglight, which he
used for many years – although he still had a bunch of cheap plastic flashlights
sitting in a drawer. When Neal Baker, Ann’s husband, first started dating Ann,
my dad sat him down to play chess and handed him an Old Milwaukee beer, which
is, let’s just say, not the finest quality beer in the world, and then he
explained to Neal that all beer’s the same, so you’re just wasting your money
if you buy the expensive stuff.
When we lived in Mountain View, and dad was going to
Stanford, we had a gopher problem. Dad tried smoking them out, he tried flooding
them out, everything he could think of … and nothing worked. Then one day, when
my Aunt Jan was coming to our house, she saw my dad on the roof, taking out
gophers one at a time … with a .22 caliber rifle. Hey, why pay an exterminator
if you don’t have to …
And we won’t mention the BB gun he might have used in
violation of Davis city ordinances to chase away squirrels from his backyard.
Dad really was a master craftsman, an artisan. He was an
architectural engineer – he designed and
supervised the building of his house in Davis – and he loved to tinker. My
sister Annie mentioned one time that a friend of hers had made a play stove for
someone else’s daughter, and that was something Kerry might like. Next thing
you know, at Christmas, there it was, a painstakingly painted, beautifully
hand-made wooden toy kitchen stove. Dad made a small wooden playhouse for my
kids that’s still standing in our yard. We all got beautiful oak casserole dish
holders for Christmas one year that my dad crafted out of scrap lumber. He did
all kinds of projects over at Chuck’s house.
Dad just loved bringing joy and encouragement to others.
Garrett and Kerry both said one of their favorite memories of my dad was
Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. We’d open presents – and my dad always
made sure we had a plastic trash bag handy to immediately discard the torn
wrapping paper … he was an engineer, after all – but then mom and dad would
briefly disappear to another room, only to return bearing plastic bags filled
with more special gifts for the kids and grandkids. What Garrett remembers most
of all is my dad calling out, “Here comes SantaGramps! Here comes SantaGramps!”
Lauren remembers staying overnight a few times at Grandma
and Grandpa’s house when she was little, or when Grandma and Grandpa stayed
overnight at our house. The grandkids would get up in the morning to English
muffins and scrambled eggs, and then Grandma and Grandpa would ask for “help”
from the grandkids on the crossword puzzle. My dad and mom both made all my
kids feel like they were so smart, that their help was so invaluable. He was all
about supporting and encouraging others.
As we’ve been looking through pictures this week, we were
struck by how many featured my dad and young children – his children, his grandchildren,
Chuck’s kids, many others. My brother Jim said dad’s gentleness with children
was one of the things he most remembers about him, how he got down on their
level and connected with them. In one photo, my dad is asleep on his stomach on
the floor, and Jim, who was maybe 2 years old at the time, is straddled across
my dad’s back – and also sound asleep. Fast forward to Jim’s graduation from
San Diego State, and there’s a picture of Jim on his motorcycle, zipping out to
an outer parking lot – with my dad sitting behind him, hanging on with one
hand, a big thumbs up to my mother with the other.
My mom reminded me, over the last year, that my dad wasn’t
afraid of dying, that he had made peace with the possibility of an
instantaneous death when he was a 25-year-old fighter pilot. Fighter pilots are
all supposed to be fatalistic stoics – that’s the stereotype. When you strap
yourself into the seat of a fighter jet, with bullets and rockets potentially
coming at you, there are a million things that can go wrong, many of which are completely
out of your control. But my father was not a fatalist, and he was certainly no
stoic. Instead, he was quietly faithful. You do everything you can to prepare
for all possible eventualities, you put your faith in your equipment and your
crew and your training, and then the stuff you can’t control, you leave up to
God.
He used to love to sing the old hymns when we went to church
as a family. All of us remember, as kids, his talent for singing harmony. He
wasn’t at all preachy about his faith. It was very private. But it was real.
You do your part, and then you let God do his.
Another stereotype about military men is that they make demanding
and dictatorial taskmasters. “When I say jump, you say how high,” with a finger
waving in your face … but that was the antithesis of my father. My wife said
one of her favorite things about my dad is how he would always tell her, at the
end of one of our visits, “You’re doing great – just keep doing what you’re
doing.”
When Lauren and Connor went to college, they both started
getting letters with a short, encouraging note from my dad, a small check for
some extra spending money, and then some New Yorker magazine cartoons that my
dad would cut out and add some pithy commentary. In one he sent to Connor, a
couple of Visigoths are about to storm a castle, and one has turned to the
other and says, “I’m just in this for the retirement plan.” My dad had added a
title to the cartoon: “Poli Sci 101”
Even last Monday afternoon, after he’d taken a serious turn
for the worse and was just a day away from dying, when he saw my wife Tanya come
into his bedroom, he said, “Oh, you were supposed to be in your office today …
how is your new office? Tell me about it.” Tanya was scheduled to see her first
clients in her new counseling office in Gold River that afternoon, and here’s
my dad, critically ill and dying, asking HER about HER office. “It’s so beautiful!” she told him.
“It’s so pretty and so calming. In fact, Karl says it so nice, even he wants to
come over and talk to me.”
“Well,” dad said, “tell him to bring his checkbook!”
We all just roared with laughter. And while I didn’t see it,
because the room was a bit dark, I can guarantee he said it with a classic
little Ken Grubaugh twinkle in his eye. He was a day away from dying, but he
was still focused first on others, and on how they were doing, and then he couldn’t
help but offer a quick, funny little quip that got us all laughing and thinking
about something other than his current predicament, if only for a moment.
I loved that about my dad. He loved people, he loved
laughter, and he loved knitting them together.
More than 30 years ago, my dad gave a moving tribute and eulogy for my cousin Paul Altier at a ceremony
here in Davis. He asked the rhetorical question: How do you measure a man’s
life?
I think my dad reflected on that question – how do you
measure a man’s life? – over the course of this last year. Like all of us, I
think he wanted to know he was leaving a legacy, that he would be remembered.
So let me close by quoting from his obituary, which he helped to write before
he died:
“He is loved and honored by his family and will be
remembered for his steadfast love and loyalty, for his outstanding example as a
loving husband, father and grandfather, and for his pride, support and regard
for all his family, near and far.”
That was the measure of his life, and that’s why we will
never forget him.
* * *
Kenneth Wayne Grubaugh.
Beloved son and brother.
Beloved husband.
Beloved father and grandfather.
Beloved brother-in-law, father-in-law and uncle.
Beloved friend.
He lived a good life. He was a good man.
Goodbye Dad. We love you.
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