My father passed away from liver cancer at about 10 PM last Friday. Here is the text of the eulogy I prepared for his memorial service. I deviated from the prepared text slightly in a few places, but this is pretty close. Perhaps some of the friends and family who were not at the service may wish to be able to read these words.
Memorial Remarks for Harvey Honsinger
Delivered by Paul Honsinger at Lake Charles, Louisiana on April 1, 2012
Good afternoon. Thank you, all of you, for coming here today.
Summing up the life of a man in a few minutes, particularly when that man is your own father, and even more when that man is someone as multifaceted as Harvey Honsinger, is not easy. It is like trying to tell a relative what the Grand Canyon is like by talking to him about it over your cell phone, or describing a beautiful symphony by just humming a few bars. Nothing I say will do justice to the man. So, please bear with me while I try as best I can to hum a just few bars of the symphony that was Harvey Honsinger. If the way I do it sounds a little strange to you, I’m a lawyer. I can’t help it. Consider it a handicap.
The hymn just sung, “The Church in the Wildwood,” was one of his favorite hymns, and it says a lot about him. It’s about a simple country church remembered from childhood. He loved it because, even though he was highly intelligent, well-educated, and widely read, he was, in many, many ways a simple, old fashioned man, marked by simple, old fashioned virtues. He loved, was faithful to, and cherished very deeply his wife and family. He was a caring and involved father to my sister Kathlene and me, and was very devoted to his grandson, Austin, and granddaughter, Sarah. He worked hard. He paid his bills and saved his money. He had strong faith. He was scrupulously honest and honorable in his dealings with everyone. He was unfailingly courteous. He said “please” and “thank you” and even called seventeen year old waitresses “ma’am.”
He was, in every way, a gentleman. I hear everywhere that chivalry is dead and that gentlemen are out of style, but that never stopped Harvey Honsinger from being that way.
You can’t talk about Harvey Honsinger without talking about his fifty-three year marriage to the love of his life, my mother, Judy Honsinger. They met on a blind date in 1958. He was working at Channel 10 in Lafayette and had noticed her when she had visited the station with a boyfriend that she was breaking up with. On the day of the visit, Harvey looked scruffy and Judy was NOT impressed. He, though, had been very taken with her from the beginning. The ex boyfriend called my mother on behalf of dad and said something about going out, meaning going out with my father. She misunderstood him, thinking that the soon to be ex was asking her out himself, and she said that she would go out with anyone but the boyfriend. So, he said that he had a friend named Harvey who thought she was nice looking and wanted to go out with her. Well, mom had kind of painted herself into a corner and even though she wasn’t really hot on the idea about going out with this Harvey guy, she reluctantly said yes.
But, aha, Judy had a plan. Yes, she was going to go to a movie with this Harvey guy, but her younger sister, Norma, was going to go to the same movie and sit in the back. If he so much as held her hand, she was going to go home with Norma and that would be that.
My father, however, had a different—and better--plan. At the appointed hour, he showed up at Judy’s door in Lafayette, immaculately groomed, surrounded by the aroma of cologne, wearing a suit and tie, complete with a French cuff dress shirt and silver cufflinks.
Judy still has the tie.
Harvey asked her to go dancing with him. In Abbeville. Judy, who was a bit weak in the knees at this point, forgot completely about her sister Norma back at the movie theater, and floated out the door with him. To his dying day, Harvey remembered exactly how Judy looked and what she wore that night. It was a blue taffeta dress.
She still has the dress.
When my mother described that night to me, she sounded as though she felt she was flying. Maybe she was. In fifty three years of marriage, the air might have occasionally been turbulent, but the plane never landed.
Harvey and Judy were deeply and passionately in love from that night until death parted them. He treated her with unfailing and consistent gentleness, honor, respect, and love every day of his life, and he never stopped telling my sister and myself how lucky he was to be married to such a beautiful and patient woman. He cherished and adored her every day, and there was love and adoration in his eyes for her until the very, very last moment. She was his beloved, his treasure, his heart of hearts.
He was a big man, always larger than life in the minds and hearts of so many who knew him. He was big, not just in physical dimensions, but in every other way. He had a loud, warm, boisterous laugh, a strong, commanding presence, a resolute will, firm opinions, and a big, booming voice. Stage performers they talk about an actor “filling up his space.” Harvey Honsinger filled a lot of space. His departure leaves a huge, cavernous void. The passing of his voice and his of his laughter leaves an eerie stillness.
Speaking of his laughter, it would be a great injustice to talk about my father without talking about his sense of humor. In particular, he had a fine sense of how to bamboozle the credulous. When my sister bought her first car, a Mazda with a transverse drive train—you know, the kind where the drive shaft goes from left to right instead of from front to back--she proudly lifted the hood to show him the engine. He immediately pointed out to her how the engine was aligned and he told her “little girl, they put your engine in sideways.”
My bright, accomplished, beautiful sister was the apple of his eye, but she occasionally can be a tiny bit gullible and so, she was a frequent target for this kind of humor. One time when she was about ten, he had been fishing, and he put a little croaker, a fish that makes a distinctive noise, in his shirt pocket, and said to her, “Kathlene, listen to my heart.” She put her head right by the fish, which went “bwaaaap.” She nearly passed out.
In case you think that he was anything but soft hearted about his little girl, you should know one amazing thing that he did out of his feeling for her. When Kathlene was about five, America finally woke up to the fact that cigarette smoking caused cancer. Dad was a smoker. I don’t mean he smoked cigarettes, I mean he was a smoker—nicotine had its claws deep, deep into him. One day, she came to him crying inconsolably. When she could finally talk, she said something like, “I don’t know what I would do if my daddy died of cancer.”
That day, he flushed every cigarette he owned down the toilet and quit cold turkey. Forever. On the first try. This was before nicotine patches. Before nicotine gum. Before pills to help with the cravings. He did it with nothing but Tootsie Pops and iron determination. For his little girl.
Back to his sense of humor, he loved duck hunting, and often hunted with his brother and Mark Baker, an outstanding gentleman who is in all but name the adopted son of dad’s brother Brian. Dad and Mark often disagreed over which of them had killed a particular duck. Dad told Mark that he had solved that problem by buying for Mark special shotgun shells: according to Harvey, the pellets were coated with a high-tech concentrated dye that would color green the blood of any duck hit with them. So, if the blood was not green, then Mark had not hit the duck. Obviously, there was no such thing as the special marker shotgun shells.
For years, if there was a question about who had killed the duck, they would cut into it and Dad would say, “no green, Mark, it must be my duck.”
When we were little, one time after it had been raining a lot, there were lots of mushrooms popping up in the yards of our neighborhood in Oak Park. Mom noticed the neighborhood kids peering carefully and minutely under every single mushroom. When she wondered aloud to Dad what they were doing, he told her that he had told the kids that the mushrooms were fairy umbrellas and they were all trying to find the fairies.
My father is probably best known here in Lake Charles for the 20 years he worked at KPLC. He had many professional accomplishments there, but I like to remember him as Santa Claus. Every year around Christmas, in the afternoons the station had a Santa Claus show where, sandwiched between the regular programming, they would feature Santa with local children. Dad got the part because, well, he looked the part.
Anyway, Harvey’s Santa was jolly and warm, but with a stern side. Sure, he asked the children what they wanted for Christmas, and had a merry HO HO HO but he didn’t just take their word on whether they had been naughty or nice. Oh, no. Instead, he asked them if they helped their parents with chores around the house, what those chores were, and whether they did them right away or whether they had to be asked again and again. He asked whether they did their homework and if they were kind to their younger brothers and sisters. Whether they fed their pets. Whether they were respectful to their teachers. Santa was tough. And he had an agenda.
For years he directed a program called the Lee Janot show. As many of you remember, Lee Janot was a local personality who had a powerful ego and who considered herself very much the star of local television. Well, she may have been the star, but Harvey Honsinger was the Director, charged under FCC regulations and station policy with full and absolute responsibility for everything that went out over the air during his shift. It was inevitable that they would butt heads.
It was a live show and the program had to be planned in a fair degree of detail. Lee was a free-wheeling soul, and liked to do things out of order or to improvise, which was not acceptable to my father. Finally, he put his chips on the table and told her he was in charge and she would have to stick to the script. Lee raised. “What are you going to do, Harvey,” she said, “cut me off and show a test pattern.”
“No,” he replied, upping the ante, “I’ll cut you off and for the rest of the time slot I’ll run Deputy Dog cartoons.” (Y’all remember Deputy Dog, right?).
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Just try me.”
Well, one day, thinking she was calling his bluff, she went way way off the script. Bam. Harvey punched the button killing the show. Whack. He punched the button to start the film running and Zoom, out over the air waves went Deputy Dog.
From that point on, they had a friendly, respectful relationship. If you remember the show, you may remember Lee asking frequently, “Harvey, is it OK if we do whatever?” “Harvey, can we do this, that, or the other thing?” She knew to ask, because if she didn’t there was a Deputy Dog cartoon set to roll on a moment’s notice.
[Addendum: Since the service, I have been reliably informed that the correct spelling of this particular cartoon is actually "Deputy Dawg" not "Deputy Dog." Of course, where I grew up, the difference in spelling was NOT audible.]
After KPLC he had a second career as a Probation and Parole agent, later supervisor, later District Manager/Administrator for one fifth of the entire state. It was a major change but he didn’t seem to have any trouble. When the man who was doing the hiring at Probation and Parole called one of my dad’s references, a man who used to work with him at the TV Station, the supervisor asked this man whether he thought my father could do the job. He replied, “did Harvey say he could do it?” The caller told him yes. “Well, if Harvey Honsinger said he could do it, you can bet your last dollar that he can do it.” He was very happy in his second career as a law enforcement officer and was very, very proud to carry the badge.
And, after his retirement in 2002, he devoted much of his time to writing. Finally, in October of last year, he was published. Firehair: A Novel of the West by Harvey Honsinger is available for sale worldwide. In his last days, he delivered another manuscript, which will be published and available in a few months. As his editor, I can tell you that he was a gifted storyteller, he had an ear for dialogue, and a marvelous ability to bring to life the way people lived their daily lives in a bygone era. He was an extraordinarily talented novelist.
He wrote those books on the same computer that I used to write these remarks. He loved what the computer allowed him to do, but had many frustrating hours trying to get it to do his will. It was a love/hate relationship, and somewhere in the stratosphere over Moss Bluff, there still is a cloud of ozone and thunder from his battles with the evil forces that lurked inside that machine. He is getting the last laugh now.
There is so much more that could be said about him and so much more that deserves to be said. But, he left specific, written instructions that the remarks at his service be brief. I am very concerned that if I go on too long, he will find a way to make me go away and put Deputy Dog in my place. So, I think it appropriate to leave you with this.
He was a good man. He loved his wife, his family, and his country. He strove every day of his life to do the right thing, and to do injury to no one. And, when he learned that the end was coming, he faced it with absolute courage and determination. He made his final arrangements, saw that his beloved Judy was provided for, and went gently, quietly, and without complaint.
God has now unchained Harvey’s spirit from the weight of his earthly body. Tomorrow, he will be laid in the soil of his beloved Texas, at the site of the church built by his family and where they worshipped for more than a hundred years, just yards from the house in which he grew up, and surrounded by the departed family members he has lately missed so much.
That place is a “spot of his childhood.” And, I think that maybe he had that somewhere in mind when he picked the “Church in the Wildwood” hymn to be sung today, because here is the end of the last verse:
“When day fades away into night,
I would fain from this spot of my childhood
Wing my way to the mansions of light.”
Harvey Honsinger has found his way to the mansions of light. We are left with the emptiness created by his all-too-swift departure. Yet, we who loved him and are left behind are sustained by glowing memories of his love, his humor, his almost bone-crushing bear hugs, his warm smile, and above all, his laughter.
