No sidewalk playground now to meet my friends, They’ve put a roadblock at the rainbow’s end.
We’re driving faster now than Orville flew, We leave our mark on every single thing we do. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust It’s the way the West was won. Amos and Andy and nickel candy Have fallen to the gun. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust It’ll never be the same. But, we’re all forgiving, We’re only living, To leave the way we came.
—From the song “Ashes to Ashes” by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter
These lyrics sung by The 5th Dimension in 1973 made their way into my life again after my father passed away. The playground at the Cayuga Heights School in Ithaca is still there. A few of my friends have passed away, but most of the ones I grew up with are still around. Spread out all over the country. Of those who have died, Pops left the biggest hole in my life. He put me through some of the worst times in my life, but he taught me a great deal. I wish he were still around to see what I learned from him being applied. He left his mark on everything he did. And he left his mark on me.
In October 1993 doctors determined Pops needed prostate surgery. The pin strokes he had suffered combined with a weak mitral valve as a result of his bout with rheumatic fever as a child, placed him at high risk for the surgery in Ithaca. Our family chartered a private plane staffed by a nurse to fly him from Ithaca to the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, while we followed in another plane.
After he had been carefully situated in a room overlooking the Hudson River, he seemed to be at peace and commented on how beautiful the river was. Leaving him with a private nurse and thinking everything was OK, the family went out to dinner. Before we left his room, I wish I had said words similar to the ones the son says to his father in Ethan Canin’s “The Year of Getting to Know Us”: “I told my father not to worry, that love is what matters and that in the end…he can look back and say without blinking that he did all right by me, his son, and that I loved him.” But I hadn’t, and when we arrived back at our hotel rooms, we got the bad news. After all of my father’s work-filled days that ran late into the night, as Dean Koontz wrote in his book By the Light of the Moon, “in the story of his life, death put its comma, and he was gone.”
Pops died on a Monday night, October 25, 1993. He was eighty-three years old, and the cause was reported to be cardiac arrest.
When he died, Park Communications owned seven TV stations, 21 radio stations and 144 newspaper publications in 24 states. He had 2,650 employees, including 35 at his Ithaca headquarters.