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My father's death seemed regulated by the policy that governed all aspects of his life. He wanted never to be a nuisance, a pain, a bore, or to take center stage. Throughout my life he was a presence, mostly unspoken, always supportive, usually smiling, unjustifiably proud of his sons, always listening. He did the automobile driving while my mother chattered on and on. He rocked in his chair and read whodunnits and Westerns. He rarely got telephone calls unless they were from my mother or his. If he had a life where he worked, we never heard much about it. If Kevin or I called home from college or elsewhere far from home, he picked up the extension but Mom did 98% of the talking.

His death came shortly after a cruise he and Mom had taken to New Zealand, Australia, and the South Sea islands that lay between those destinations and the California port of debarkation. From the pictures I saw of the cruise, he was his usually happy self. Always a great, self-taught ballroom dancer, he was a hit with all the ladies aboard. If he was feeling the onset of the cancer that was to take his life, he never let on during that riotous vacation trip.

Dad was schooled at a time when penmanship was considered a valuable skill, and he was certainly a good student in that discipline. We never knew whether he excelled or plodded in the academic disciplines. He didn't talk about it. The books he kept in his jobs as an accountant - he would have said bookkeeper - were things of scribal beauty. His handwriting even in casual notes (I can remember only a few letters that he wrote-that duty falling to my mother) were calligraphic art works, as were a number of the pieces of writing inscribed by high school friends in his copies of the Caerulean, Long Beach Polytechnic High School's yearbook of the 1916-1919 era.

On the rare occasions when a formal RSVP to an invitation was required, Dad would get out his pen with the fancy tip for producing Spencerian script and set to work. After much cursing of his failing nerves and a lot of crumpled paper, he would settle on a version that was so perfect that people thought it had been purchased from some shop that dealt in calligraphy.

After his death we found odd squiggles and smears in his otherwise perfectly inscribed check register that suggested that he had been having some mini-strokes. He certainly was convinced that his voyage to the hospital was going to be one-way rather than round-trip. Before departure he cut off the chin whiskers he had

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