Eulogy for My Father
Eulogy for My Father
Robert Nelson Shigley, June 25, 1924 - May 27, 2010
Mentone Community Church
Mentone, Alabama
May 30, 2010
Daddy was born a few hundreds yards from here in a farm house built around a pioneer log cabin.
It was a time before paved roads or electricity came to the mountain.
His grandmother Melissa's family, the Keiths, were among the first settlers on this mountain after the cruel expulsion of the Cherokee.
His grandfather, Frank Shigley, came here from Michigan at 18, in 1883, after a barn fire injured his lungs, was one of the first Wesleyan Methodists in Alabama, was a founder of this church, and gave the land for Moon Lake School. The home where Frank and Melissa Shigley finished raising 12 children is the Mentone Community Center.
Dad’s father, Ernest Shigley, Sr., was a country school teacher and skilled carpenter who was called to the Wesleyan Methodist ministry at age 30, the year Dad, the fifth child, was born. He was pastor of this church, built or renovated 32 churches, and was president of the Gulf States Conference of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. At 84, in the last year of his life, he built the current parsonage at this church.
That’s the heritage that helped to form him.
All his life Daddy told stories of growing up at Mentone during the Depression.
- Raising and preserving by traditional methods their food on the family farm.
- Providing food and shelter (in the barn) to Dust Bowl refugees who came through.
- Wearing patched hand-me-downs from Ernest, Harold and Leonard.
- Hauling syrup cane on a mule wagon to the sorghum mill and corn to the grist mill and as a teenager working for a dollar a day in a saw mill.
- The year the family couldn’t afford for all 5 kids to go to school, so he and Leonard stayed home and rode the bull all over the mountain.
- His older sister Brownie entertained him by making up stories of fantastic journeys in a magic Model T. (She has been in the Father's house 59 years, and is still missed by all who knew her.)
- Playing baseball in pastures with pine knots for balls and hickory sticks for bats.
- His beautiful Aunt Margaret making a coconut cake for his 4th birthday.
- The excitement when electricity and radio first came to Mentone.
- Going to school at Moon Lake, and enjoying long unsupervised recesses when the kids would run next door to his grandparents’ house, where his grandmother would give them treats of teacakes she kept in a bleached fertilizer bag, sweet potatoes, or biscuits filled with honey.
- Life centered on the church, preaching Sundays rotating between 3 churches, revival meetings, all day singings and dinner on the grounds, and boys walking their best girl home from Sunday night services down dark country roads.
- After finishing their chores on hot summer days, boys went skinny dipping in Little River, and Dad once got covered completely with poison ivy. Another time he and his buddies were in the river when Miss Martha Berry, founder of Berry College, came by in a boat with her entourage. The boys stayed submerged til Miss Berry’s boat had passed.
- All his life he bore a scar on his foot from an incident while chopping kindling barefoot at age 7.
Like several of the Shigley cousins, Daddy went to the Wesleyan Methodist boarding high school at Central, SC, the campus that is now Southern Wesleyan University. (A cousin is here from Central today.) Never one to miss a chance to buck authority, the adolescent rebel found in Central’s strict rules a target rich environment.
In his senior year he dropped out of high school to join the Army against his parents’ wishes. An indifferent student, he was surprised when he knocked the top out of the aptitude test. He entered the Army Air Corps and flew 36 combat missions against Nazi Germany as a B-17 waist gunner based in Foggia, Italy.
Like many veterans he was reticent about his war experiences until old age. Sometimes in recent years I wasn’t sure where fact left off and embellishment began, but I took it all at face value. He told me:
- of harrowing flights through flak-filled skies, seeing other planes in his group shot down;
- of climbing out over an open bomb bay to ratchet loose a load of bombs that was stuck;
- of an emergency landing in Yugoslavia, and being escorted past the German troops to the Adriatic coast where a fishing boat got his crew back to Italy;
- of an incident while on sentry duty, shooting a saboteur who had infiltrated the unfenced airfield;
- at the end of the war, being confronted by the first German jet fighters that were too fast to shoot at, and being saved by the Tuskegee Airmen flying escort in P-51s.
In WWII, everyone got cigarettes rations and bomber crews got whiskey rations after every mission. Rations became addictions and his nemesis, but he sheltered me from it growing up.
After the war and college, Daddy found his way back to Mentone. For a while he was principal at Moon Lake School. He and his brother Leonard built the house I grew up in, Daddy buying a load of materials every payday til it was finished.
When Menlo had both a high school and a red light, he went there to teach and served six years as principal. My parents took the Class of ‘57 to Washington. Some of them are here today. (Show of hands.) I tagged along as a 5 year old mascot.
At Menlo, he helped dirt poor students - children of loggers and sharecroppers – find a way to get into college. One boy from the mountain lived in a cabin with no electricity, and had to study by the dome light of the log truck. Daddy got him into Emory. Delivering him there was my first visit to the Emory campus. I have heard from a number of his former students who say that he changed their lives, even saved their lives.
To maintain order he didn’t always have to speak. The snap of his fingers could be heard all the way down the hall with unmistakable clarity. And when needed, his paddle with holes drilled in it was an effective “board of education.”
Last summer I accompanied Dad to Menlo for a class reunion at a town celebration in the park. He was delighted when former students came up to greet him, some with great-grandchildren in tow.
Growing up at Mentone, and at Menlo School, I worshipped my father with all my heart. He was my hero.
He could be quite a joker. When I proposed to a girl on the playground in second grade, most adults who heard the story just thought it was cute. He saw it as a teachable moment. A few days later in mock seriousness Dad told me her family was building a house next to theirs for the very young couple. I could see my life pass before my eyes. Married at 7, a father at 8! Where was this going? He lectured me about trifling with a girl’s heart.
Two years after Menlo lost its high school in consolidation, we moved away from Mentone. Life would never be the same.
Daddy completed his doctorate at Alabama, and his career took off, as you can read in today’s Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Those of us who loved my father, and who bear him to his rest today, knew a man who was surely not without faults, but who always cared deeply about the less fortunate, whether they were children of sharecroppers at Menlo, special needs children across Georgia, or Indian and Eskimo children in Alaska. I believe that loving spirit came out of his raising here at Mentone, in his family, in this community, and in this church.
But it sometimes seemed that the further he went from Mentone, the further he drifted from his Wesleyan raising.
Toward the end of life, however, he began to gravitate back. In the words of a country song, the roots of his raising ran deep. He came home for visits and talked of moving back here, but realized most of his friends here were gone.
In recent months, as he lingered on the front porch of eternity, Daddy told me many times, “I made a lot of mistakes in my life.” There was confession and repentance. After he entered nursing care this spring, I retrieved his car and when I turned on the ignition, a Blackwood Brothers gospel music CD worthy of any Holy Ghost revival blared out. He cherished visits from our pastors and the hospice chaplain.
Ten days ago, in his last lucid interval, we had our last dinner together at an outdoor restaurant table in the soft light of a May evening. Before I returned from a business trip last weekend, he had slipped into a sleep from which he did not emerge.
Thursday afternoon his soul went home.
The dreams that led him on the journey of a lifetime began here at Mentone, and now we bring back home his earthly remains.
In the final months of his life, Dad’s mind was clouded by illness. That cloud has now lifted. He is himself again - more himself than at any time on this earth.
And as the last flight took him beyond the sunset, and as heaven's morning broke, I like to think that flights of angels sang him to his rest and that all the trumpets sounded on the other side.
See you later, Daddy.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery . . .
In September 1995, I explained the Internet ("It was developed for national defense and used to be called the Arpanet"), email and web sites to a couple of hundred lawyers at a seminar at St. Simons Island. Since this was before anyone had Power Point or LED projectors, I used transparencies on an overhead projector to show folks what I was talking about. None of them had ever been online.
I explained that at that time there were about 40 law firms in the United States that had web sites, and most of those were clustered around Silicon Valley in California. Surely no one would ever pick a lawyer on the basis of a web site, but just for laughs I might give it a shot. Everyone laughed.
The following spring, in 1996, I set up a crude web site, knowing nothing about search engines or how to optimize them. After a while I bought some software in a box at CompUSA and began designing my web sites myself in order to have flexibility and control. For about four years I had the field of personal injury law web marketing in Georgia pretty much to myself.
Of course, I began to get invitations to speak to bar groups and tell how to do it. Flattered to be invited, I complied.
Unfortunately for me, there were often young lawyers who had never tried a case sitting in the back of the room, taking careful notes. A few weeks later I would see new web sites popping up in which those kids sometimes practically cloned my web site.
A few years ago I decided to outsource the technical work of maintaining a web site so I could focus on content. At that point I launched what I think was the first lawyer blog in Georgia.
Sure enough, within a year other lawyers and law firms in Georgia started their own blogs. Now it seems almost every lawyer with a checkbook has a slick looking web site and blog.
I am constantly amused at how much some of the web site development companies charge lawyers who know nothing about this stuff. It's highway robbery. I should have started a web site development company back in '96.
What's next? I'm not talking.
My daughter is passionate about running. While she may never make the Olympics, she is fully committed in college cross country. She runs marathons and half marathons every chance she gets, just for fun. Last year she incorporated this into a piece of art that we are having framed to hang either at home or in my office:
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter if you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better be running.
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Neurofibromatosis Research Conference in Florida
I pointed out that the time from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day was 3 years, 8 months and 6 days. If World War II could be fought and won in that time period, what are the obstacles to coming up with some workable tumor growth suppression agent in that time period? What are the obstacles to delivering a universal genetic disease screening tool, to assure early diagnosis and appropriate referral, within that time period? How can we overcome those obstacles? Remember that the perfect is often the enemy of the good, and this generation of kids with NF need reasonably good solutions now, not just the hope of perfect solutions when it's too late to help them.
The same point about time and urgency can apply in many areas of life and work. Think about it. If WWII could be won in 3 years, 8 months and 6 days, what is our excuse of letting so many endeavors drag out as long as they do?
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My daughter
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Don't blame God when people break the rules
Saturday morning, at the request of a patient's family who urgently want to provide for his care needs, I visited an intensive care unit at Grady Memorial Hospital to attempt to interview a man who became a quadriplegic in a recent traffic collision. Laying paralyzed in a bed, breathing through a tube, he was too sedated to respond to a sibling's attempts to wake him. We may have to have a family member appointed by the probate court to handle his affairs. The previous afternoon, I had met with a father whose beautiful 16-year-old daughter went out on a date, the boy who was driving wrapped his car around a telephone pole, she had a bad head injury, and died a few weeks later in the hospital. I don't know if the evidence will ultimately be sufficient for me to do any good for these folks, but I will explore all reasonable options.
The seemingly random cruelty of fate is tangible at such times. When I was in my teens, a popular TV show included each week the "flying fickle finger of fate award." It was presented as comedy then, but too often it is part of tragedy. It seems that nearly everyone I represent has been presented this unwelcome "award."
Sometimes well-meaning people try to say that it was "the Lord's will" or "the Lord took her" when a person was killed or catastrophically injured. As a long-time adult Sunday School teacher, I think that is warped theology. It's wrong to blame God when people break rules and cause tragedies. Hurricanes and tsunamis are acts of God. Truck wrecks are acts of men and of corporations, and they should be held accountable for the harm they cause.
Sometimes we can obtain justice for victims and their families. Other times all we can do is provide the comfort that someone who is knowledgeable cared enough to try. A trial lawyer is called to be more that just a gladiator. We need to remember that highest source of law and of professionalism is a rule of unselfish love, of sincere concern for the highest good for the other person. While we are not grief counselors or psychologists, we need to be able to help folks get through the ordeal of their loss.
Sometimes a lump of coal can become a diamond
So often in my law practice, representing ordinary people who have suffered tragic losses due to someone else's carelessness, I have to contend with the arrogance of defense lawyers and corporate functionaries who view humble working people as most of us would view gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. As a "redneck lawyer" come to town, I have a somewhat different view of the worth and potential of ordinary folks.
Therefore, I take great delight in sharing this video of a lumpy Welsh cell phone salesman with bad teeth surprising the judges and the crowd in a British version of "American Idol." (Thanks to my friend Jim Long for bringing it to my attention.)
Sometimes a cell phone salesman can come out of nowhere to sing opera that moves the audience to tears.
Sometimes a backwoods hick lawyer like Abe Lincoln can lead a nation through its time of greatest peril and become an enduring icon of democracy.
Sometimes an humble housewife on the brink of poverty, like Susanna Wesley, can raise children who move the hearts of millions and whose followers lead earthshaking movements of social reform.
Sometimes a lump of coal can become a diamond.
And the arrogance of snobs and plutocrats, of any time and place, doesn't change that.
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On the Internet, but deeply rooted in a web of relationships
When you find a lawyer on the Internet, there may be an inclination to think of him or her as some sort of free floating, rootless organism, taking all nutrition from cyberspace. This week, however, I have had several reminders of how intertwined professional relationships can be.
First came an inquiry about a potential trucking wrongful death case from a lawyer in my hometown who I have known since we entered ninth grade together in 1965, and for whom I have the greatest personal and professional esteem.
The next day came a call from a lawyer in Louisiana, who got my name from a prominent New Orleans attorney, originally from a tiny town in south Georgia, who I met at Georgia's Governor's Honors Program in Macon in 1968. In conversation about the caller's largely Cajun hometown, it turns out we had both gone out some with the same girl from that town, who was in his high school class, when we were teenagers.
The same day came a call from a lawyer in a small town near the Florida line, whose law partner was in the office next to me at an Atlanta law firm starting in 1981, to talk about a potential case.
Then I went downtown to a meeting of the State Bar Disciplinary Rules and Procedures Committee. Looking around the table, I realized that I had known each participant in a wide variety of contexts for periods ranging from ten to twenty-five years.
These days, about half of my legal work comes from new contacts who find me through the Internet and the "newcomer" referral sources that are common in modern metro Atlanta, and about half come through a traditional network of relationships spanning decades and even generations that weave through Georgia and across the South. It's a fascinating mixture to which only a talented novelist could do justice.
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New York judge notes shortage of ASL interpreters for the deaf in court
A federal court case in Rochester under the Americans with Disabilities Act a few years ago helped bring about a Deaf Equal Access Fund, in cooperation with the local bar association and an interpreting service, to enable the deaf community to have full access to services of the legal community. That is worth studying as a model for what might be done in Georgia, though I doubt any community in Georgia approaches the concentration of D/deaf population that you find in Rochester.
Because of my daughter (who lost her hearing at 18 due to NF2, got an Auditory Brainstem Implant at House Ear Institute, and spent this summer taking ASL at Gallaudet University), I have begun to learn ASL. This fall I will be taking ASL classes with my wife two nights a week, subject of course to trial, deposition and work related travel schedules. Though my ASL skills are still at the unskilled beginner level, and may never become fluent, my daughter has raised my consciousness about the challenges facing the D/deaf and hard of hearing. At least I know how to sign, "old dogs can't learn new tricks."
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Eagle Scout
Yesterday a sturdy young man of eighteen, who at the end of this month will fly off to begin college studies -- and college football -- in California, stood in front of a church sanctuary and received his Eagle Scout award. At the conclusion of the ceremony the often monosyllabic teenager stood alone with his feet firmly planted and talked for about five minutes, graciously and articulately thanking the adult leaders of the troop who had "put up with" him along the way. Last he thanked "Dad, who told me to keep going when I didn't want to do this any more; he told me when I finished I would be glad I did, and I am glad." Then he came down and gave me a big hug.
There are moments in life you just want to hang on to. This was one.
Here is the Eagle Scout Charge that was administered to my son yesterday afternoon:
I have the honor to give you the Eagle Scout charge on the occasion of your elevation to the highest rank in Scouting.
The Boy Scouts of all nations constitute one of the most wholesome and significant movements in the world's history and you have been counted worthy of this high rank in the Boy Scouts of America.
All who know you rejoice in your achievement. Your position, as you well know, is one of honor and responsibility. You are a marked man. As an Eagle Scout you have assumed a solemn obligation to do your duty to God, to country, to your fellow Scouts and to mankind in general. This is a great undertaking.
As you live up to your obligations you bring honor to yourself and to your brother Scouts. Your responsibility goes beyond your fellow Scouts to your country and your god. America has many good things to give you and your children after you; but these things depend for the most part on the quality of her citizens.
Our country has had a great past. You are here to make the future greater. I charge you to undertake your citizenship with a solemn dedication. Be a leader, but, lead only towards the best. Lift up every task you do and every office you hold to the high level of service to god and to your fellow man. So live and serve that these who know you, will be inspired to the finest living. We have too many who use their strength and their brains to exploit others and to gain selfish ends. I charge you to be among those who dedicate their skills and ability to the common good. Build America on the solid foundations of clean living, honest work, unselfish citizenship and reverence for god and, whatever others say or may do, you leave behind you a record of which every Scout may be justly proud.
On behalf of the Court of Honor of the Atlanta Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, with the high hope that you will always represent the finest of character and citizenship, we welcome you into the brotherhood of Eagle Scouts and congratulate you, your parents and your Scout leaders.
Pass it on, son.
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