By request, I am publishing David's bio.
Thomas David Herbert
28 April 1943 – 12 April 2011
INTRODUCTION
When my dad had about a week and a half left to live, he asked me to write his biography for the funeral. In a way, I knew it would be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Putting the words on paper would be saying a goodbye I have never wanted to say. In another way, though, I knew it would be easy, because it’s something I’ve been working on my whole life.
I’ve always watched my dad in amazement at how hard he could work and the variety of things he could do well.
Some of you will know the song, “A Country Boy Can Survive,” by Hank Williams Jr. It’s a kind of tribute to the self-sufficiency and know-how of country people—how they can build their own houses, fix their own cars, grow their own food, and so forth. I’ve always been proud of the fact that I could do two or three of the things mentioned in that song—some of the easier ones, like catching catfish.
Well, my dad could do all the things in the song, and more. He overhauled car engines, bailed hay, cut firewood, and shot and dressed deer. All you have to do is look across the valley at the house he and my mom have been building over the last 15 years, almost entirely with their own hands, to see what he was capable of.
Of course my dad could do much more than these practical kinds of things, and, of course, his life story started well before the last 44 years that I’ve been privileged to witness. To pay him full tribute, to give a full sense of how admirable, adventurous, caring and loving he was—to give some idea of how much we will miss him—we have to start that story from the beginning.
BIOGRAPHY
Dad was born Thomas David Herbert to Frank and Jimmie Herbert at home in Wheatland, Missouri, on the 28th of April, 1943. He was the third of Frank and Jimmie’s five children, falling in the middle between big brother Eddie and big sister Peggie, and younger brothers Gary and Jonathan. He was born to farm life and learned early what it meant to work hard and occasionally, make some serious mischief. He and his brothers enjoyed jumping out of a barn loft onto the hay below, but without always checking carefully to see what else was in the landing zone. Although David escaped serious injury, his brothers were less lucky, occasionally landing on sharp farm tools, including, one time, a pitchfork.
Dad’s early school life in Wheatland, Missouri was a little less eventful, or at least it was until the 5th grade. That’s when he met a pretty new girl who had just transferred from the one-room school house in nearby Avery. It was Nancy Trolinger. Dad wrote her the first of several poems that year. Who’s to say if there is such a thing as love at first sight in the 5th grade, but whatever Dave and Nancy felt for each other then, it grew into a life-long love. Mom says Dad could be ornery in those early years, but he eventually grew into a young gentleman. By high school, they were going steady. No wonder Dad won my mom’s heart. On Valentine’s Day of their junior year, he drove a tractor 24 miles over snowy roads to give her red roses and a box of chocolates.
Dad wasn’t always present for school as he grew older, because work on the farm took priority. During sowing and harvest seasons, the Herbert boys were dutifully working in the fields, having to catch up on their studies later. Despite this hardship, though, my dad excelled in school and earned good enough grades to attend the University of Missouri in 1961, majoring in Spanish. He probably saw a university degree as a ticket off the farm and an opportunity to explore what else the world had to offer. He also saw it as a great way to be with Nancy, who was studying at MU as well.
In 1963, David got his first chance to travel abroad, studying Spanish and Portuguese at the University of the Americas in Mexico City. He was there when President Kennedy was shot, and for the rest of his life he remembered the compassion with which his Mexican hosts broke the news to him.
1963 was a memorable year in more ways than one, a year full of anticipation. David and Nancy were deeply in love and, despite the fact they were still studying at MU, were ready to get married. They exchanged their vows at the Wheatland Baptist Church on January 5th, 1964. It was the start of a love and an adventure that would last the rest of his life.
My dad’s first job after college and marriage was teaching Spanish to 8th graders in Warsaw, Missouri, near where he and Nancy had grown up. By late October that year, he already had a second job—helping Nancy take care of new daughter, Leslie. This would be another love to last the rest of his life. It started with long drives around Warsaw in the family’s VW Beetle. Leslie wasn’t an easy sleeper then, but she was soothed by going for drives with Dad in the VW. Later in life, Dad drove Leslie on long trips out West, to summer jobs in Texas and Montana.
Teaching Spanish to 8th graders was a challenge for my dad, but not the kind he was looking for. In 1965 he joined the Army and, because of his college degree, headed straight to Officer Candidate School in Ft. Dix, New Jersey. The Army needed infantry officers for the war in Viet Nam, and that’s what my dad became. He followed up his initial training with assignments to infantry units at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri and Fort Benning, Georgia.
In 1966 Dad acquired a new silver Ford Mustang and a new son, me. The next year he led our family on our first real adventure together—moving to Alaska. We drove the Mustang up the Alcan Highway, and Dad reported for duty at the Army’s Arctic Warfare School, where he learned how to trek across glaciers and sleep out in minus 30 degree weather.
In its unique fashion, the Army, after training Dad for the Arctic, gave him his orders for the jungles of Viet Nam the next year. It was an expected development but one that my mom dreaded. He was a 1st lieutenant and would almost certainly lead men to war. We took another trip down the Alcan Highway before he shipped off, Leslie and I too young to understand that we were having one last family adventure before Dad set out on an uncertain, dangerous assignment.
It didn’t take long before Mom’s fears for Dad were realized. Just two months into his tour, he was wounded by mortar fire. After medical treatment, he was sent to a safer assignment away from the main fighting, learning Vietnamese and getting to know the local villagers. But eager to get back to his job as an infantry man, Dad sawed off the cast the doctors had put on him and went back to flying in and out of combat zones on Huey helicopters. Not all Dad’s troops believed in the mission, and none of them accepted its dangers stoically. Years after the war, Dad told me he sometimes had to order soldiers at gunpoint to get on the helicopters and go fight. He called these the hardest parts of the whole experience.
The most dangerous day for Dad came on December 7th, 1969. On that day, while Mom, Leslie and I slept in our small apartment a world away in Springfield, Missouri, Dad’s platoon was ambushed by a larger force of Viet Cong near the Mekong River. They shot and killed Dad’s radio operator, who was standing next to him, and quickly pinned down the rest of his platoon, killing and wounding several of Dad’s soldiers. Dad advanced under heavy fire to direct his platoon’s counter-fire from the front, treating the wounded along the way and encouraging his men to keep going. Eventually, he had to call in air support near his own position, which brought the fight to an end. The Army awarded Dad a Bronze Star with Valor Device for heroism in combat. Dad never talked about it; soldiers rarely do.
Back home safe from Viet Nam, Dad received short assignments to Ft Wood and Ft Benning (again), and then got orders in 1974 to go to Korea. There, Dad’s life—all of our lives—changed in a fantastic way, when we adopted Nicki and Maria from a small Catholic orphanage outside Taegu.
When the family returned to Missouri in 1976, Dad thrived on his opportunity to be a new father again, reading The Diggingest Dog and other favorite books to the girls at bedtime. He taught Nicki and Maria the right way to brush their teeth, which he called the “jiggle and jab” method and which they still remember. When Nicki and Maria were old enough to eat solid country food, Dad made family breakfasts of biscuits and gravy. Those breakfasts became a tradition.
In the late 70s, the Army started shedding the surplus of officers it had taken on during the Viet Nam war years. Dad was one of them. He left active duty in 1979, and moved the new, larger Herbert family back to his childhood home in Hickory County, Missouri. He and Mom bought 100 acres of farmland and an old country house in need of serious renovation. Whenever he wasn’t busy working on the house, Dad pursued an impressive variety of jobs I can only call eclectic subsistence farming: he raised pigs, cattle, and goats, planted a large vegetable garden, occasionally fished, drove walnuts to market that we kids collected, and cut cedar posts for cash. He kept up farming but eventually took a job as a social worker, in which he came to appreciate the plight of the working poor. Some of his colleagues scorned the people who came to the office to apply for state benefits, but not Dad. He knew many of the poor were working but just couldn’t make ends meet. Farm life is hard and depends quite a bit on luck, which can always go bad.
During those years, my mom, who had finished her degree in education, was doing two things: teaching elementary school and growing tired of the Missouri winters. A trip to sunny Las Vegas in December 1988 persuaded her that the family’s new direction ought to be southwesterly. Dad agreed, and in June the next year, he, Mom, Nicki and Maria moved to Phoenix. Neither one of them had a job when they packed up and left—this was going to be another adventure.
Mom was an excellent teacher, and it didn’t take her long to find a job at a Phoenix school. With her in the family driver’s seat for the first time, I watched my dad take on some new roles and show new sides of himself during the Phoenix years. First, he took a job as an America West flight attendant and claimed, rather improbably, I thought, to like the work. Now Dad never came off as macho, but let’s face it, as a soldier or farmer for the first 26 years of his adult life, he was a tough guy. He still did Army calisthenics most mornings and could jog upwards of 10 miles. Why did he become a flight attendant? Only later did I understand from Dad’s example that all work is honorable work if it provides for your loved ones and produces a useful service. Dad wanted a steady income that would pay for a house in a good school district for Nicki and Maria, and that’s what he got from America West. He worked there 13 years, so I guess he really did like the job.
Dad also changed overnight from an extensive do-it-yourselfer to a new home owner who claimed he didn’t want to do another day’s work on house upkeep. I really started to wonder who this new Dad was. The house he and Mom chose in Glendale was sparkling new, with a pool and jacuzzi, not the perpetual work-in-progress we were all used to in Missouri. Again, though, there was more to Dad’s changing ways than just whimsy.
He and Mom had always loved being together, but more often than not, they were engaged in the hard work of raising a family and carrying on the habits of self-sufficient country folk. In Phoenix, they started to have fun together, which meant dropping some of those old habits: they jogged together along the canal, they went to a local sports bar, had date nights, frequented a favorite pizza restaurant, hiked the Grand Canyon. When the girls were old enough, they took weekend getaways. What looked so unusual to me about my dad’s new leisurely side was really something very simple and compelling: a life-long couple was discovering how much in love they still were and that fun was an awfully important part of life.
Of course, Dad was still a devoted father. In fact, he seemed devoted in a whole new way. This was a third new interesting side of the man that came out in Phoenix. From our childhoods, Leslie and I knew a caring, loving father who made us laugh and left us lots of room for independence. Our decisions about what to do with our lives were more or less up to us after high school. With Nicki and Maria, however, Dad made some radical adjustments to this laissez faire approach. He was involved. The girls were in high school in those years, and dad actively coached them all the way through it. He talked to them about career interests, taught them the importance of a balanced checkbook, made them take hard math courses to keep their options open, checked up on their grades, encouraged extracurricular activities and prepped them for college entrance exams.
Dad’s Phoenix years might seem unremarkable to an outside observer. He was just a guy who moved his family west and changed some as a result—Americans have been doing that for 200 years. But to me, those years showed something much more remarkable: a man willing to re-think life and change fundamentally in his 40s—a time when many of us believe we’ve got everything figured out. Given his life experience up to that point, Dad certainly could have relaxed in the assurance that he had seen it all and could just put the family on cruise control. But he didn’t; he experimented bravely with parts of himself he likely hadn’t even known were there. I will always admire the courage and creativity he showed in those years. His example taught me that my loved ones deserve the absolute best I have to give them, even if it means stepping far outside my comfort zone or admitting there might be new ways to do things.
Dad was, of course, still Dad, though. He still fell asleep during TV movies and snored on the couch, still woke up noisily of a morning, splashing as he shaved and clanging pots and pans together as he washed them as if to announce it was time for all decent people to awake and get to work. In 1994, after he and Mom saw Nicki and Maria off to their adult lives, they found a way to bring together their new, more leisurely companionship and their old love of country life and hard work.
It was then that they moved here to Yarnell and bought the plot of land they came to call Badboulder. They set to work clearing the scrub oak from it, dodging rattlesnakes and planning the house they would build there someday.
That someday materialized slowly, as there was lots to do, and Mom and Dad took plenty of time off to travel and check in on the kids’ adventures. They hosted elaborate 4th of July parties, which took days of preparation and were very important to Dad. Mom and Dad were frequent visitors at Leslie’s house in Phoenix, and made a joyous trip to San Diego in 2009 to see her marry James on the beach. Dad loved taking Mom to the California Coast, and this was, of course one of their most memorable trips there.
A few years earlier, Dad had taken Mom all the way to Macedonia to see me marry my beautiful wife, Bibi. He even kept up his good humor while one of Bibi’s rambunctious uncles tried to steal Mom away for a night of dancing.
In 2006, Dad and Mom were in Denver for Nicki’s and Guy’s wedding. Typically for Dad, he took Nicki running the day before. It was a good way to relax before the big day, and a memory that Nicki will always carry with her.
After college, Maria found her way back to Phoenix, which meant she spent lots of time with Dad, along with Mom and Leslie. In fact, Maria had the great luck to live at Badboulder for much of the last year before she joined Dad’s beloved Army and became a medic. Maria will always treasure those months spent watching and helping Dad work on Badboulder and occasionally sharing a margarita and cigar on the deck watching the sunset.
Gradually, whenever Mom and Dad were not out sharing their kids’ new lives, they were joyfully building their own here in Yarnell. The dream of Badboulder eventually did take shape. In various ways, we all participated in it, drawing sketches, painting decorations, or doing other small jobs. Mom and Dad, however, did all the real work. In fact Dad worked harder on that house than I believed humanly possible for a 50- or 60-something. Several days I tried to keep up with him making and pouring concrete but had to quit by noon. He kept going till evening, when he would stop work to water plants and feed and pet his dogs. He loved his dogs.
It’s impossible to describe how the dream of Badboulder took shape; you have to see it for yourself. It seems too big and too expressive of so many hopes and memories for one man to have built it by himself. And of, course, Dad would never put it that way—he didn’t build it himself; it was fusion of his and Mom’s work and dreams. In a way, it brought together everything Dad learned in life and everything he passed on to us. People would often ask him how long it would take to finish the house, but Dad always avoided giving a direct answer. I think I know why. Working on the house, like the rest of his life in Yarnell with Mom, was a journey in which the destination mattered far less than the joyful things that happened along the way. And why rush to the end if you are enjoying the trip so much?
On one of my Dad’s last conscious days this spring, while he was bent over with pain and weakness, he heard the song, “These Are the Days,” by Van Morrison, playing on the TV. He knew it was one of Mom’s favorites. Smiling at Mom, he stood upright, took her in his arms and, asked her to dance. For Mom, that dance symbolized all the effort and sacrifice Dad had made since that 24-mile tractor ride 52 years ago to make Mom smile and pour out his love. Despite his pain, he was still enjoying their journey.
CONCLUSION
When my dad was studying Spanish in Mexico City in 1963, he read Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes. It was to become one of his favorite books. I still remember, as a young boy, seeing it on a family bookshelf and being impressed that anyone would make the effort to read such a long, heavy book, and in a foreign language at that.
In Don Quixote, Dad would have read something Cervantes said about summing up the value of a man’s life. “A man, in the end,” Cervantes said, “is the product of his own works.”
Now I don’t know how much store my dad put in that observation, or if he even made a note of it. But he certainly lived his life as if it were foremost in his mind. He loved purposeful work. You couldn’t say he was addicted to it, but he always put the utmost care, foresight and determination into what he did. There was obviously more to his work than what he was doing with his hands at any given time.
A few years ago Dad told my mom that their life together in Yarnell was the happiest time of his life. I’m sure he had lots of reasons for feeling that way, and I don’t pretend to know what all of them were. I do, however, know how they can be summed up.
If you look out across the valley at the big, green house he and my mom have been building together—better yet, if you get up close and see the hundreds of details that reflect a lifetime of shared joys and passions—you will see that the house is a living thing. It is a monument to the kind of deep marital love that can only be worked out and experienced over the course of decades of commitment and companionship.
Every detail in the house is the product of those good things marriage is supposed to teach us about loving others: when to compromise, how to blend one’s ideas with someone else’s till there is no telling them apart, how to keep faith and courage in trying times, how to have a proper disagreement. And how to grow as a result of all of it.
So my family is left with the question—what are we to make of Dad’s last, most ambitious work, and the one he enjoyed most? As I walked through the house two weeks ago, I was wracked with heartbreak by the knowledge that my dad would never do the same thing again, would never be there again with his tape measure and level and books about structural engineering. If a man truly is the product of his own works, wasn’t it a tragedy that my dad would have to leave this one undone? Doesn’t it leave all of us undone?
Well, my dad was not much for the tragic view of life. He’d been around the block enough times to know that no one ever gets to finish everything they start. Important things always get left undone. The best one can do is leave behind works of such value that your loved ones hold onto them and work on them as their own projects and experience that same joy they originally produced.
Of course I’m not talking about the house anymore. I’m talking about what it stands for—a love of family that came close to perfection in the life my father led. Loving one’s family well is a project that doesn’t come to an end—it gets passed along in continuity. I feel sure that’s the example my dad wanted to set.
I’ll close by noting one thing about my dad that I haven’t given enough emphasis yet. He loved making the people around him laugh, lightening their mood. He was occasionally the consummate clown, who enjoyed theatrically pouring margaritas into ridiculously large glasses and acting goofy for the kids’ entertainment. He cracked jokes right up until the last week of his life.
We pay our solemnities today, but Dad would not want anyone to leave here with a heavy heart. In fact he told me as much. It’s probably an impossible request—that we leave here in a light mood--but the story of my dad’s life shows that what seems impossible really is possible—you really can come home from a terrible war and be whole again, you really can build a house on a sloping field of boulders, and you really can say goodbye without letting go. There is so much left to hold on to.
