Willie August Hoffmann (1931-2020)

 

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Brian Walter · Willie August Hoffmann (1931 - 2020)

Well, what are you doin’, kid?

For the last several decades, that was how Willie August Hoffmann, my dear Uncle Willie, would greet me, always putting a little extra emphasis on that last word, “kid.” It was a routine that I would always look forward to renewing when I called from St. Louis to catch up with him and dear Aunt Nora Lee. Uncle Willie and I had developed our joking conversation rituals way back in the 1980s when I was a student at Reed College in Portland and my weekend ritual was to high-tail it down to the Hoffmann home on Oak Hill Road to bask in Uncle Willie’s and Aunt Nora Lee’s improbably generous hospitality. If you’ve spent much time around Willie and Nora Lee Hoffmann, then you know they are creatures of well-honed routines, and being called “kid” was a small price to pay for the privilege of becoming part of those routines that they maintained so faithfully. Some years ago now — around the time I turned 50, I think — I asked Uncle Willie how old I’d have to get before he’d quit calling me “kid.” I knew the answer before I even asked the question, of course: he shot right back that I’d always be a kid to him. I could hear him grinning over the phone.

It would be literally impossible to overstate how important Uncle Willie and Aunt Nora Lee have been not only in my life, but in my family’s life, and (no doubt) in more lives than any of us really know. I’ve heard plenty of people proclaim — mostly unconvincingly — that they were ‘self-made men’ who ‘pulled themselves up by their bootstraps,’ but from everything I’ve heard and seen, those terms were not an exaggeration when applied to Uncle Willie. Supposedly, once upon a time, a confused college student claimed that Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built with his own hands; well, Uncle Willie wasn’t born in the bountiful nostalgia museum at 10100 Oak Hill Road, but from what I understand, he did design and build it, and it’s hard to imagine a more perfect match between a building and its inhabitants. You’ve heard it before, but it couldn’t be more true in this case: Uncle Willie and Aunt Nora Lee didn’t just build a house — they built themselves a home.

L to R: Darrel Dixon, Mom, Aunt Nora Lee, Uncle Willie, Aunt Emma, and Uncle Dale

Most of the time Uncle Willie and I were around each other was in their home, but it didn’t really matter where we were — at a wedding or a funeral or any other function — because the routine was pretty much always the same: I was always trying to find a way to rib him and bring out that grin, and he would rib me (grinning) right back. One of our favorite sets of rituals, one that ran for decades, was all about my favorite football team, the Denver Broncos. Uncle Willie didn’t really care about sports, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste time watching them, but he sometimes got a kick out of watching me watch football as I paced around the living room and through the dining room and the kitchen during the commercials in close games, stress-eating my way through enormous jars of red licorice that Aunt Nora Lee would fill up before I arrived for the weekend. For some inexplicable reason, Uncle Willie always mispronounced John Elway’s name as “Killroy,” and he never seemed to find much use for the Broncos paraphernalia I would get for him. The Bronco hat that I thoughtfully gave him one year ended up on the highest, most inaccessible antler of the deer rack where he hung his hats down in the basement, and it always seemed to be collecting a surprising amount of dust. Then there was the skateboard festooned with Broncos stickers that I sent him as a gift one summer when I was making them for a small company back in Boulder, Colorado; somehow, that ended up in a nook of the Old West room upstairs with the Broncos stickers turned to the wall so they couldn’t easily be seen. And it's still a mystery to me why Uncle Willie preferred not to use that tall, clear Broncos mug that I’d gotten him to serve as a spiffy new supper milk chalice; in fact, there’s a picture of us with me kindly offering him a generous portion of his favorite beverage in this mug as he runs away grinning out of the frame.

Bronco fans 😁

But perhaps the most important example of our Broncos rituals came after I’d moved off to St. Louis in the late 1980s. That’s when I started to write him and Aunt Nora Lee a series of letters about the Butterknife Lumberjack, a larger-than-life hero who did Paul Bunyan one better by taking out whole forests with nothing but his namesake butterknife; more importantly, my fictional titan of the timbers wore a bright orange jersey with Killroy Elway’s number 7 blazoning out from beneath his flannel shirt, which he would remove after his lumberjacking exploits to take the gridiron and trounce the Seattle Seaflunkies and their hapless fans. I got a little carried away with some of these stories, but apparently, Uncle Willie and Aunt Nora Lee got quite a kick out of them, remembering those weekends when I had lived and died and snarfed down Red Vines by the Fred Meyer barrelful with my football team’s fortunes on Sunday afternoons in their home.

The truth is that the real inspiration for the Butterknife Lumberjack was Uncle Willie himself. If John Wayne had ever decided to make a movie about a real American hero, he could have done no better, as far as I was concerned, than just to play Uncle Willie. Hardworking, honest, imposingly strong, but also gentle, loving, and good-natured, not to mention a person who absolutely loved to laugh — Uncle Willie was all of these. I trust I will never forget the Hoffmann Halloween party back in the mid-70s where we found our tractor-driver host gleefully dressed up as a pirate, sporting an eye-patch and a red handkerchief tied back rakishly over his crewcut, a get-up he completed with a colorful fake parrot on his shoulder and a rustic crutch to prop himself up on the peg leg he’d fashioned out of a plunger, Long Willie Silver of the Willamette Valley farmlands. I don't remember him saying "Arrggh, matey," but I sure do remember his grin. If life was good to Uncle Willie, he was every bit as good to it. Over the decades, my students have often heard me tell legends about my beloved farmer uncle out in Oregon, the one who lived in a house filled with Americana, who didn’t speak much but laughed a lot, who was so strong he once picked up the back end of a Honda four-wheeler with me still on it to line it up properly in the carport when I had backed it in at a bad angle. Maybe they didn't believe them, but they were all true.

Of course, there were still more favorite memories of Uncle Willie that I never shared with my students. Of the joy and love he would beam with in the presence of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Of the way he would stand in front of the stove after stoking it with some of the wood he’d cut, proclaiming, “Good ol’ wood heat.” Of watching the evening news and every now and then passing conclusive judgement on the latest outrages, “Them dumb idiots” (because, you know, it wasn’t bad enough to just be an idiot — you were a ‘dumb idiot’ in Uncle Willie’s book). Of watching him polish off another tall glass of milk (just not in a Broncos mug) after dessert and heave a contented sigh. Of seeing that electric grin light up when the owners of his favorite restaurants would come out with another tall glass of milk for their favorite customer, because it never took long for the people who worked in the restaurants he loved to end up loving him back. Of watching him get out the binoculars to admire the deer down the hill on the edge of his fields or turning in his chair to appreciate the humming birds that he and Aunt Nora Lee were always so pleased to attract with the world’s largest private collection of humming bird feeders. Of walking the rows with him in his fields as he explained how they used to grow orchard grass, but now it’s just grapes.

Let me mention just one more of these favorite memories, though this one is of a very different type. In early April of 1997, at what was certainly, at the time, the most difficult ritual I’d ever been a part of, Uncle Willie waited until he could catch me alone for a moment in the Millersburg cemetery where my dad — after a long, painful ordeal of his own — was soon to be buried. Looking down at his feet, Uncle Willie spoke in a low, private voice, “At least he’s out of pain now.” Yes, and as sad as I was that day, and as sad as we who loved Willie August Hoffmann are this day, there’s probably still no consolation that could be more eloquent or sustaining in our loss than the one that he so thoughtfully offered to me all those years ago.

L to R: An old farmer, an old preacher, and a future old professor

A funny thing about rituals — they can become thoughtless, hollow, even stale, over time. But in large part thanks to Uncle Willie, I’ve learned that they don’t have to be. In fact, getting to know him, you realized that the real trick in life is simply to spend as much of it as possible with those beloved people who will keep our routines and rituals from becoming thoughtless or empty, the beloved people for whom life is always a series of joys, a journey of unending and inexhaustibly intriguing possibilities, a standing invitation both to give and to accept love in the form of shared laughter. I am far luckier than I deserve to have just such a person in my life-partner, Brenda, just as I was far luckier than I ever deserved to find such a person in Uncle Willie.

So let me close by sharing with you, finally, my half of the greeting ritual that I began this little tribute with, the greeting ritual that Uncle Willie and I shared for so long, a retort that I tried to use not just to needle him back but also, more importantly, to convey a bit of the love and gratitude that I felt for this person -- that I will always feel for this person -- who had provided so many opportunities for joy throughout my life.

Well, how ya doin’, ya ole farmer?

Thank you, dear Uncle Willie. Rest in peace and love.

A Sunday morning at the Oak Hill manse, ca. 1987