John Irvin Oliver, Sr.

About the time I started college (early 1970s), "Papa" (which we pronounced "paw-paw" [it was my older sister's idea]) came to live with my parents. We had many conversations, as, to him, my life was "just beginning," and his was, well, "I probably won't be here 10 years from now."

He was a "Yellow Dog Democrat." He and my Dad's father, a staunch Republican since the Depression, would calmly disagree with one another about the different U.S. Presidents and political parties. When the conversation was over and they were quizzed in separate rooms, each would shake his head and make the identical remark: "It is hard to understand how such an educated man can have opinions like that."

Listening to their debates made me think of the words of the famous physicist Neils Bohr: "They agreed much more than they realized." This was a time when Texas Democrats were very conservative, and the national party was not.

Papa would quiz me about my own education and opinions. He did not lecture, but he thought it scandalous that I could not recite all 254 Texas counties and their county seats. He did concede, with a merry twinkle in his eye, that I had a lot more Presidents to learn than when he was in school. He had no appreciation whatsoever of cartoons on television, and was amazed that I actually believed that the Apollo Missions to the moon were real.

He always referred to Oklahoma as "Indian Territory." When I realized that he was almost 24 years old when Oklahoma became a State, history began to "come alive" for me. He said that he participated in the last of the open-range cattle drives, but their extent had already been limited by barbed wire and a new railroad line into Texas.

He loved professional baseball, and spent many nights listening to the Houston Astros games on his static-filled transistor radio, as the local TV stations often could not carry the games. He particularly enjoyed it when the knuckleballer Joe Neikro pitched, whose career in Houston peaked the Spring before Papa died. He would tell me about Neikro's performance at breakfast the next day ... I never could get him to understand that his last name was not "Negro," though.

Prematurely gray (my mother never saw him with his auburn curly hair) and with the delicate skin of a redhead, he was very sensitive about his age. Even into his 90s, he referred to the much-younger retirees walking for exercise in the neighborhood as "those old men." He refused to use a cane for his own ventures by foot (and scoffed at my mother for giving him a really neat-looking one for Christmas) until a large, friendly dog knocked him down. After one of "those old men" told him that the golf club he carried was his "dog stick," Papa so designated his cane, and finally began to carry it. Mom was shocked when, at about 94, he began telling people his age. We guessed that he had finally decided that that extreme was a badge of honor. He refused to wear glasses after his cataract surgery, and instead wore a hard contact lens in one eye. He could put it in himself, but had me remove it with a tiny suction cup every evening that I was home from school (much to Mom's relief, who never fully appreciated his modesty.) In private, he would wear reading glasses.

He was a man of staunch principles. He never, ever cursed whenever women or children might be within earshot, but used the milder "got-dog" to suffice in those situations when "s---" might otherwise have been his first choice. I only heard that latter expletive after I started dental school, and then usually only when I would tell him that I really did believe men had walked on the moon.

He liked to talk about how much life I had ahead of me. I once asked him what it was like knowing that he "probably won't be here 10 years from now." He said that he wasn't afraid of death and what it might be like ... it was "just that I am so much more familiar with this place."

David Oliver Rathke (2008)