Robert Dale Walter (1942-2015)

A tribute to Uncle Bob

First, I’d like to thank Joy – whom I met for the first, blessed time just last night – and all of you present here today for lending me your pulpit to say a few things about Robert Dale Walter – my Uncle Bob.

My dad, Alfred Paul Walter, was Uncle Bob’s older brother by a year, and the closeness in their age was always matched by the loving closeness of their relationship. My dad married an Oregon country girl, Dorothy Turcott, whom he had met in the early 1960s in Stanberry, at Midwest Bible College, and I understand that Uncle Bob, after he left the army in the mid-60s, moved to Oregon in large part to be near his beloved older brother.  Uncle Bob soon married an Oregon girl himself and settled in the Albany area while Dad, a Church of God minister, moved to and through pastorates in several different states. But when we moved back to Oregon in 1972, the first people who came to visit us at the Portland parsonage were Uncle Bob and Aunt Sharon. That was the first time that I remember noticing the twinkle in my dad’s eye whenever he got to see his brother and re-tell some of their shared stories of living in the fabled boxcar on Maple Avenue in Perry, Ohio; of surviving high school together with the likes of Henry Cobblenicky, Tommy Stinchcombe, and Janice Babcock; of their caddying escapades at the local golf courses; and of all the haunts of northern Ohio that they had etched into memory together. As some of you know, my Dad never seemed – until pretty late in his adult life – to find one place to settle his family or himself, to develop a sense of home that could hold him fast. But when Uncle Bob came over to our house, none of that mattered, because Dad went home again when he was in his brother’s company. When Dad would ask Uncle Bob to go to the store with him to pick up the ginger ale and ice cream for our Saturday night floats, the invitation somehow carried all the weighty joy of all the years they had known and loved and found their best selves in each other’s company, and we all knew that was good.

As Uncle Bob’s church family here in St. Joseph, you know what I’m talking about. I got the chance to talk with several of you last night who probably only knew him for the last few years of his life, but you clearly had connected deeply with him as a stepfather, a grandfather, a great-grandfather, or even just a friend – and nothing could be less surprising to those of us who had the good fortune to know him for longer. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man better fitted to be a father or father-figure for the young and impressionable. Uncle Bob seemed to radiate love and joy as naturally as he drew breath, a man for whom waking up every day truly did feel like a heavenly gift. I was only about eight when my grandfather, Paul Walter, died, but I feel like I got to know many of the best things in him – the kind, gentle, generous-to-a-fault man whom my father and aunts and uncles have all described for me – by getting to know my Uncle Bob.

Anyone who knew my Uncle Bob even briefly has a few favorite stories to tell about this colorful character, so I’m just going to share a few of my favorites with you. Some of you may recall the Happy Days episode in which Fonzie is somehow talked into putting on roller skates and proceeds to severely jeopardize his coolness by struggling to keep his feet and composure? Well, the Fonz had nothing on Uncle Bob, who was once – and only once, to my knowledge – prevailed upon to strap four little metal wheels onto each of his feet and try to make his way around a strobe-lit skating rink in Salem, Oregon way back in the mid-70s. Uncle Bob’s legs were stiffer than the Tin Man’s as he tried desperately both to move and to stay upright, to exert some kind of control over what was going to happen to his poor, helplessly rigid and increasingly hunched-over body.  And when an insultingly sure-footed skate guard began to circle around him and inform Uncle Bob that he had to let go of the wall and move out among all the other happy, laughing rollers, my uncle – a wobbly, desperately crouching human fetal position by this point – looked like he would tear the whole building down with his bare hands if only he could get back to safety. Inch by agonizing inch, sure that he was going to plunge to his ruin at every moment, Uncle Bob crawled more than he skated back to the carpeted area, took off the offending wheels, and tried very hard to recollect his cool while sitting off by himself for the rest of the evening.  

 Then there was the time that Uncle Bob tempted gravity in a far more impressive – if truly terrifying – way. I was about seven or eight years old the first time we climbed Multnomah Falls in Oregon, and Uncle Bob was with us. It took us quite a while to reach the summit of the 627-foot falls, but when we did, Uncle Bob decided that that wasn’t enough for him. While the rest of us stayed in the railed-in area, looking down a bit cautiously toward the bridge and the parking area hundreds of feet below, Uncle Bob couldn’t resist sending a bold greeting to his wife, who had decided not to hike up with us. He climbed over the guard rail, stepped to the edge of the rock until his toes were almost peeping over the edge, took off his shirt, and began waving it with both hands to Aunt Sharon far below. As far away as we were, she knew immediately who it was, and we could all hear her scream, hundreds of feet up the mountain-side, to get his crazy self off the cliff before he fell. When he turned around, Uncle Bob was smiling – mission accomplished.

One more. The only person I knew growing up who might have been more afraid of needles than I was was Uncle Bob. If you ever want to see my mother laugh herself into teary helplessness, ask her to tell you about the time that Uncle Bob – in abject terror in a doctor’s office as he bent over exposed for an injection – passed out and sat right down in the doctor’s lap. My mother is a kind-hearted woman, but the only thing she loved more than trying to tell this story was to tell it in Uncle Bob’s presence so that she could watch this gentle, good-natured man whom we all loved try to stammer his way back into some semblance of dignity.

There are many more stories to tell, and many more traits in Uncle Bob to admire and emulate, but let me conclude with this – although it’s not going to be easy. Last night at the funeral home, I couldn’t help looking at Uncle Bob’s hands, clasped across his midriff, hands that had brought so much joy to so many of us throughout his life. These were the hands that had lifted Bobby and Amanda and me and so many others up as children and then had pulled us in again for warm hugs as adults. These were the hands that drew so many clear, warm-lined, colorful pictures that hang in our homes and in our hearts. These were the hands that taught me how not just to shuffle a deck of cards, but also to bend them up into a magical bridge that would collapse with rapid and gratifying articulation into a neat pile for dealing. These were the hands that had whittled me a rough, eloquently rustic set of chess pieces for a graduation present, thoughtfully finished chocolate brown and clear and packed compactly into a carpenter’s staple box. These were the hands that had reached so happily for second and third and fourth helpings of my mother’s chili, the same hands that would later have to tear off pieces of his flannel shirt for the most humbling of usages in the woods around our Eugene-area home when that same chili decided it was time to go back to Mother Earth and there weren’t any maple leaves handy. These were the hands that had written so many loving letters to Joy and had slipped a ring of late-life and much-deserved joy onto her finger and had accepted one back from hers. And these were the hands that held one of his specially-carved canes as he stood off at the edge of the gathering during the concluding graveside portion of my dad’s funeral, far more dignified than I could hope to be as we prepared to lay his beloved older brother’s body into the ground. Knowing how much they loved and meant to each other, I have never forgotten that tableau, of Uncle Bob – whose loss that day was as great as any of ours – managing both to honor his brother by feeling all of that loss but somehow, still, not letting it overwhelm him. Uncle Bob’s entire life’s journey – from northern Ohio roustabout and roughhouser to beloved father, husband, brother, uncle, friend and so many more roles – made this stiffest and most helpless of all roller-skaters perhaps the best human example of quiet dignity and grace that I have ever had the good fortune to know.

And perhaps that is why, for some time now, when I have thought of Uncle Bob, I have also thought of an old, beloved hymn, a hymn that helps us always remember what it means to be humbled into overwhelming love by God’s amazing grace. I’m just going to recite the refrain, not try to sing it at you:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saves a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now, I see.

 

I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Uncle Bob and I shared the same middle name, “Dale,” or that my parents had, of course, given it to me in honor of my uncle. But standing here today, I can only hope that my own nephew, Stephen Dale Walter, will someday feel even a fraction of the humbling gratitude – the undeserved honor – that I feel to bear the living legacy of such an amazingly gracious and loving uncle.

Thank you.

St. Joseph, Missouri

December 5, 2015