Talk:William Sterling Blattman (1914-1989)

Maybe not directly appropriate for the page Selected journal entries from Bill's son:

4/16/89

Dad had a heart attack this week and was taken into the hospital. When mom, Kathy, and LeeAnn were hanging over him while he slept, he told the doctor, "Look at the vultures waiting with their adding machines to cut me up." What a salty old codger he is. He's sore and slow, but will be out in a week or so.

4/16/89

Dad died today at 5:00 of a second heart attack. He had his family; LeeAnn, Kathy, mom and Gail around him. He was able to say his goodbyes, telling the girls he was proud of them, that all his kids had "guts." Mom said he asked about me and if I was coming but when told that I couldn't get there soon he gave up the battle and died. That makes me feel terrible but there was noting I could do. His parting words to mom were, "When you got to go, you got to go! See you later babe."

4/18/89

When they lived on Willow Street in Taylor, Dad was accounted by neighbor, 'A J', as the "Smartest man I ever knew." He was widely read and he easily separated the important points of information from the useless. Technical manuals, literature of all sorts, history, and current events were some of his interests. Once when we were riding along a highway in a pickup he seemingly out of the blue began reciting ballads that he had memorized in his childhood. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was one of his favorites. I was impressed that after more than 30 years he still had words with the rhythms of the language in his mind. His study of word and Latin roots would lead him to sort out the origins and derivations of names of places as he traveled the roads as a surveyor. He taught me methods of study when I was in school and was keen on playing chess with me, even letting me win occasionally. My challenge was to legitimately win. When I did so a little too often he lost interest in teaching me. He devoured the newspaper. This gave him insight into human nature and events. Often, I felt he trusted few people because of this insight. Once, I remember Judy complaining, "Ugh, there's a hair in my food." He began to recite from his newspaper readings the maximum allowable amounts of rat droppings per ton of wheat, and the amount of urine allowed per gallon of milk. I can still picture Judy turning her food over lightly with her fork and peering closely to check for what ever unmentionables hidden inside.

When as a youngster I went hunting with dad I walked behind him, struggling to keep up. I followed his every step. Once while following some deer tracks on the Kaibab Plateau, he sharply reprimanded me to go around the bush if my legs were too short to cross over it as he had. According to him, I had scared away all the deer for miles. As we walked on that and many other outings he carefully instructed me at each step with the names and characteristics of each plant, animal, and rock, and then he'd quiz me on them. For example, I learned that Stork's Bill [Erodium cicutarium] is one of the earliest plants in the spring and consequently a useful sheep fodder. On the other hand, I still can't remember if it is the Jeffery Pine or the Ponderosa Pine that has the prickly cones. Standing aside a beaver pond, he would point to the insects, the pattern of the ripples on the water's surface and then conjecture from the beaver's channels visible on the bottom mud where we might cast to catch a 'brookie'. Biology was easy for me because of his teaching.

Often he would describe events of his childhood: of riding on the running boards of an old Buick, guns in hand, chasing after a pack of whippets and gray hounds that in turn were chasing after coyotes; of having so many black goats in the herds of sheep to estimate if all the animals were there, Of lying on his back with a .22 shooting hawks as they circled in the sky above the ranch, Of making a wooden box for keepsakes when he went away to boarding school (I sit on that the hand planed board of the lid of that box every morning to put on my shoes. It has the letters S B, cut from tin, nailed on the top of the lid and shows the craftsmanship of Sterling as a young boy.) Of using a 32 VDC wind generator mounted to the top of the ranch house to power a handmade radio at night in hopes of picking up some signal across the New Mexico prairies.

He had rebuilt several car motors. One I remember was an old Willy's station wagon. He drove it to work and used it as our fishing vehicle. Driving up through the canyon of the Paria River to some hidden lakes he had discovered or heard about from his surveying buddies, I would take the rear seat while he and his friend "Bernie" talked. I got awful sick on the dust that seeped through the worn doors and windows of that old Willys. We stopped to look at an outcropping of mica and to marvel at the mesa called "Molly's Nipple" for obvious reasons. We stopped once along the Paria's puddles to let the engine cool enough to add some water and I played with big tadpoles in the shallow water.

When I got my first car, it wasn't home for more than a few hours before I had the engine out on the garage floor and began to take it apart. I guess I'd seen him do it and thought it was something that I could do as well. It wasn't until my sons did the same thing that I realized what a patient man dad really was. The only time during this period of auto craze that I remember him becoming upset with me was when he came home from work to find that I had 7 cars strewn around our suburban track home.

Dad was a good fisherman, mostly using a fly rod, but never so worried (about convention) to not use it to fling a worm below the overhanging brush along a small stream to try to draw out a trout on a warm afternoon. Once while up in the Escalante Mountains near Beaver, Utah, he had me sneak out onto an overhang and drop a big night crawler onto a huge brook trout that was visible in the clear shallow water. The fish was so big it snapped my old telescoping steel rod in half. Dad began whooping and hollering, grabbing the bare line that was about to break, and helping me lift the fish onto the bank before it got away. We told that story over and over through the years, laughing every time.

He liked to fish for conversation too. When things got dull or the conditions were right, like going fishing just before a storm, he'd dangle a provocative line or some outlandish remark in front of you to try and get a rise. He didn't necessarily believe the line he was spinning, the whole idea was to engage a stimulating conversation. When he got a sufficient response, he'd set the hook with another supportive statement and then play you on the line until he tired of the conversation. Then he'd remove the barb and let you swim away, tire, a little hurt, but a little wiser for the encounter.

His humor was usually dry and sometimes pointedly sharp. Lowering his glasses with his bushy eyebrows, he'd scowl and chase the squealing grandchildren from his shop. They'd sneak back and peer around the corner, giggling as he pretended to ignore them, and then the chase began again. He loved singing silly and sometimes ribald lyrics like, "Ain't no town, Ain't no city, just a little old place called Ditty Wah Ditty," or "She's go freckles on her but I love her," just to get a howl from Ethel. My sisters were careful not to let him answer the phone for fear of what he might say to one of their boy friends. "Joe's mule barn, Joe ain't here." I always figured that his humor must have been spawned in the depression era because it seemed so poor. He put a picture from National Geographic of a half naked African tribeswoman in the middle of the family slides. When he showed slides he'd let it linger on the screen until Ethel would shout "BILL!!" before moving on. Grandson Matt remembers him holding up a piece of woodwork he was finishing for someone and saying, "Good enough for who it's for." He held his humor to the end, telling Ethel as he was passing away, "When you gotta go, you gotta go."

6/14/89

Cleaning up Dad's workshop after loading his tools into my pickup had a certain finality to it. It felt as though I was disassembling his life and then raking out the sawdust to cover the traces of his being there. I was surprised at the uncharacteristic disarray of some of his tools among carefully stacked piles of wood. I inspected scraps of paper he had used for jotting down notes. Like his workshop, his writing was curiously at once both neat and messy. Smooth curves and exactly drawn numbers gave way to squiggles and then little more than a wiggly line to represent some words. Every chisel and cutting edge was carefully sharpened. Cabinet drawers were carefully packed and then left open to fill with dust. It all suited him in an unpretentious way. The shop had dirt floors and yet he used drafting tools to measure and mark wood.

• Written by James Elliot Blattman