Eulogies for Carl S. Dudley, 76
Nathan Dudley offered this remembrance at the memorial service for his father, Carl S. Dudley.
Move! Move! Move!
My name is Nathan Dudley and I am lucky enough to be Carl and Shirley Dudley’s oldest son. I am also the principal of the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a SMALL public high school in Brooklyn, NY, which is not a coincidence, given my dad’s work in small churches.
This may be difficult for me, so please bear with me if I have my moments.
You have all known my father in many different ways, we are honored that you are all here today to memorialize him, especially given how far some of you have traveled, from East Coast and West. We deeply thank you. It is also special to me that our preacher today is Rev. Paul Smith who was in our house almost 50 years ago when my mom went to the hospital to have me. Thank you Paul for being here.
There is a saying that for better or worse we all become our parents. Well, like my Dad, I hate driving in traffic, and I have had a bit of temper, and while I may not do the “attitude adjustment” like my dad did most days at 5pm, I have had my moments.
But today I want to remember my father’s legacy using several stories, and there are thousands to choose from. (you all have some too, I know, or you wouldn’t be here). The first is about my father’s drive, his determination. In this respect my father was a product of both of his parents. His mother, Margaret, could never get the car into reverse, with one of those stick shifts that wouldn’t shift, and so that is how she lived her life: she just always went forward, and his father, Harold, (although I never met him, as he died when my dad was 22) was from all accounts I have ever heard, an extremely determined man.
My father, like his own parents, built much of his busy schedule around his children’s sports events, and he almost never missed one. Now, with five kids that is saying something (there are some perks to being a professor, I suppose.) When I was 17, I was struggling as a wrestler in high school. My father had wrestled in high school and made the state finals in Maryland. In my dad’s opinion I wasn’t putting my wrestling moves together fast enough. So, in typical Carl fashion, he decided to come to practice with me. So, for several weeks, after his work at McCormick Seminary, he came to my school, changed out of his work clothes into sweats, and after my practice would roll around with me. We would practice over and over “sit out, roll, switch, stand up,” “sit out, roll, switch, stand up.”
I remember him not letting me stop. “MOVE!, MOVE!, MOVE!” he would call as I went through the moves with him leaning on me. Remember I was 17, he was 44. And he was in control. And we did it, and we did it. And we did it again.
And I learned how to move.
My junior year my record was 10 and 22, and my senior year I was 22 and 9. I had never seen my father so proud as when I won the finals in a 32 team Tournament in Rockford over Christmas, using a series of moves that we had worked on together.
“MOVE!, MOVE!, MOVE!” It was a metaphor for his life. You knew him. You know it's true. This is a man who did a lot of his own self-therapy while he was running his 5 miles a day for 45 years. (“Who’s up for a run?” was his mantra) This is a man who wrote or edited 17 books (well, it is actually 16 since he published the same book twice, and he’d want us to be accurate here) (all of which are available on Amazon, by the way, although my dad did say once they give him enough royalties to buy a large pizza). How did he do it? He wrote all those books by waking up at 5:30 everyday and writing for two hours before he made us breakfast. This is a man who would ask us all what was for breakfast when we were halfway through dinner. This is man who had among his favorite phrases “What is your plan?” or “What’s next?” Is it a surprise that he taught a Sunday school class on the Protestant Work Ethic?
I think in retrospect that my father, Carl Dudley, has to be the healthiest obsessive compulsive person in history. All of his driven compulsions were unbelievably positive: running, writing, his work, creating and maintaining relationships (which he really worked at), his family that was a passion, his grandkids, even food.
Ok, with food, he didn’t start out all that healthy. How many of you remember all of his food phases, when he would go through year long periods of buying ice cream (I mean 8 half gallons at a time), or donuts (how many munchkins can you eat?), and then much healthier fascinations came along: making yogurt (I was not a fan of that home-made yogurt, but he made it, and lots of it) or all kinds of bread, or pies? Or by now the world famous “egg in a hat” fried egg in toast, which has been taken to Colombia by my sister in law Juliana’s father to his restaurants.
The thing about my father is that he had the energy, the capacity, to have all these fascinations, these obsessions, and do them well. Of course my mom helped center him, as much as she could, and I admire her particularly because she was the only one ever to really get him to slow down, and he found a lot of his strength from her.
You see he was consistent in his drive, both professionally and personally. But there are other parts to the story, the parts of the story that inform his drive, and create the moral context for his determination. He told me the stories many times and later wrote about them as part of series of letters to his grandchildren, which he wrote mostly after he got sick.
He wrote that when he was young he would yawn in church and his father didn’t like it, and tried to find ways to get him to stop. Finally his father gave him a 50 cents allowance and deducted 5 cents for every yawn, so there were Sundays where my dad yawned so much he went home owing money. Carl writes:
Every Sunday I watched my money slipped away, one yawn at a time, and I often departed already in debt. Those were not just lost nickels, but lost ice cream and candy bars. Then I invented a counter strategy: I began to take notes in church. I wrote myself notes on the sermon, the music, the prayers, the ushers, the women’s hats, baldheads, on anything that crossed my mind. Since then in my professional life I have written 16 books on the dynamics of church life, selling thousands of copies. And it all started when I began taking notes to stop yawning, to save my allowance for ice cream and chocolate bars.
So my dad turned poison into medicine, and it informed his life. The drive was there, he just had to channel it.
And his non-violent direct action? Where is that from? At 14 he was hunting with his father and a group of men and he killed a deer. He wrote:
to be a “man” in the woods, I had to slit the warm throat of the deer I had killed, and bring my hunting knife down the center of the carcass so the hot guts could spill out, and then pack the cold snow inside to keep the meat from spoiling. It happens every day in meat packinghouses, but not by me with anything I had personally killed. The fallen deer was about my size, and heavier than I was; I shuttered and I did it. I lived up to male expectations, but I have never killed anything since then. I became a pacifist that day on the mountain.
I love that he became a man and a pacifist at the same moment. That is why he was a conscientious objector in 1954, a time when nobody did it. That is how he worked with Dr. King.
But beyond the non-violence there is the community. One more story from Carl:
Once when I was about 11 or 12 (more than a boy but not yet an adult), my father brought one of his core craftsmen, a carpenter who was African American, to do some special jobs around our home. Dad called him “Smithy,” but as I passed by he introduced me to “Mr. Smith.” The workman extended his hand, but at my age I was not accustomed to shaking hands, and I was obviously awkward and embarrassed. Afterward my father severely reprimanded me saying, “Son, you always shake hands with a man.” Years later I realized that a Black carpenter in a mostly white workforce was rare if not unique in Baltimore in the 1940s, but then my father hated labor unions, so this may have been his way of getting even. Anyway, I never forgot it.“
"You always shake hands with a man.” That is the way he lived his whole life. Shaking hands with communities from Manhattanville, Buffalo, St.Louis, Chicago, Oak Park, all his neighbors, Small Churches all over America, other religious traditions, and here to Hartford.
My father’s incredible drive was grounded in his faith that God was a god of Justice, and a God that through him could shake people’s hands and work with them to organize communities to make this world a better place, for everyone. That is why he got out of the hospital to drive people to the polls for Obama last November. And he was happy doing it. These are the values he lived by, and that is what he gave us as children, and this is why we are the family we are.
In his last year my father spoke to me several times about feeling his parents close to him, how they were talking to him, and how he was looking forward to seeing them. He is with them now, on the other side.
And his legacy lives with all of us, because his drive, his determination to make this world better reached so many people, so many of you.
And now it’s up to us. “Get on with your life,” he said to me last week, quoting what his mother said to him, right before her death.
As Carl said, quite often, “What’s your plan?”
“What’s next?”
Thank you Dad.
And as you always, said, “Happy Times.”
Rebecca Dudley offered this remembrance at the memorial service for her father, Carl S. Dudley.
How to fight back 101: An introductory course from Carl Dudley
There is a course that is not in the Hartford Seminary syllabus, or the McCormick Seminary catalogue. Nonetheless, it was a course that my father taught his whole life. Let’s call it, ‘How to fight back 101.’
My father was a bit of a master in this subject. So much so that his final night will perhaps not surprise you. He found himself on Tuesday night falling into what he called a ‘twilight zone,’ and summoned every ounce of will, as he described it, to come back into consciousness with us. At some point in the rich and lovely evening that followed-- where he slipped in and out of sleep as we shared a few jokes and wine, vintage music and phone calls to his children who were not present--he mentioned that hospice might be something to look into. The next morning he passed away. Sometime later it occurred to us that Carl had died, come back, said goodbye, and died again. It also occurred to us that he was such a fighter that he didn’t even mention hospice until he had died the first time.
So, by God’s grace, Carl was pretty good on this subject of how to fight back. But for the rest of us, I would like to share some of the headings of what might be covered in the introductory course.
1) The first heading for fighters is that should be no peace for the sake of it. Here is an example. After the divisive results of the Presidential Election of 2000, Carl was visiting us in England and taking tea with my English relatives. Trying to make polite conversation, where you understand, religion and politics are not the usual acceptable topics, one of my English relatives asked in a concerned voice, ‘Do you think that the United States will ever heal from this election?’ “Not if I can help it,’ Carl said.
2) Second lesson: If there should be no peace for the sake of it, there should be no fighting for the sake of it either. In health or in illness, he was ready for a fight if it might achieve a larger purpose. He wasn’t interested in being known as a fighter for the sake of it. A better Hartford West End, that was worth a fight. Time at home with his family and friends and in good conversation, that was worth a fight.
3) Third lesson. Think big. Let me give you another example. Last May when he thought he had weeks or months to live, out of the blue came a question from my father: ‘Becky, What do you know about the Milennium Development Goals?’
‘Oh, do you mean the United Nations goals to halve the proportion of people in global poverty, to increase female literacy rates, among other things?… What about them?’
‘Well, Becky I want to start a campaign with faith leaders in Connecticut to sign up to those.’
Picture an older guy, in a Green Obama baseball hat, ringing the Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church of CT from the Intensive Care Ward last August. I have thought often about that campaign, and wondered why he did it. Illness has a way of shrinking your world to your hospital room and your body. This was his way of fighting back, to make his world bigger than either of these things. Health in the hospital room, for my father, was inseparable from health of the community in it widest sense.
4) That brings me to a fourth lesson: Maintain a mighty heart. Health for Carl was all about maintaining that mighty heart, though risky, compassionate acts of love for a big world. I often thought in the final year of my father’s life, that here was a guy whose heart functioned better at 25% than it functions for most of us at 100%.
Well, maybe that one has to be a whole different course, for another semester, but maintaining a mighty heart for him seemed to involve being grateful. And being curious. Consider, for example, the question that many of us came to know for the last number of years, including the very last night of his illness:
‘Well…..what’s happening in your world?’
No peace for the sake of it. Fights for things worth fighting for. Think Big. Maintain a mighty heart.
5) The fifth lesson: Don’t be boring…
Hospital nights come with shouting and procedures and noise, and little rest, as some of you know. One morning about a week ago, I arrived at his hospital bed and asked him, how his night was.
It hadn’t been good. With difficulty he answered: ‘Like—being— behind—the—bar—at a Mexican brothel. ’ Before my mother and I could ask the next question, he was asleep again.
My mother always said that my father only made one promise to her fifty four years ago: ‘That life would not be dull;’ and he kept it. I know that he was always amazed at his good fortune that she signed on to the adventure with him.
How to fight back 101. When we asked the hard questions about medical procedures and their trade offs in hospitalizations, pain or distress, here was Carl’s whole course, in summary: ‘I am not fighting for the sake of it,’ he said. ‘I am fighting to have a good life, every day. I want to die having lived victorious, a well lived life. ‘
….well you got it, Dad. On reflection, I think we might have to revise the syllabus and put the last bit in the advanced course.
Ok Pops. Goodbye for now. Meet you further up the road.
