Most of you know we lost Peggy’s Dad late last month. The most accurate description of Walter Laitas is that he was a good and decent man, committed to his family and his students (he was a history teacher and coach) and his community. He was 88, did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it up until the last couple of weeks of his life, and died at home with people he loved with him when he passed. He asked that I say something at his memorial service, and what follows is what I wrote…
He never talked about it much except to those who were really close to him, and then, until recent times, he only talked about it when those closest to him dragged it out of him. But it is safe to say that it’s pretty remarkable that Walt Laitas even made it through his childhood, let alone lived the full life of his 4 score and 8 years. In those days when Warren Harding was president before Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (I tell you this because Walter the history teacher would have told you this), and when Eastern European immigrants flooded Central Illinois to work the fields and the mines, life was very tough, tougher than most of us could imagine, and no one would have been surprised really when Walt reached adulthood had he been angry, narrow-minded, bitter, defensive and resentful. The very quiet, understated miracle at the beginning of this big, old boy’s life is that he lived through those nearly unspeakably difficult young years and was exactly none of those things.
When Walt was 14 years old, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a piece called The Crack Up, wrote this: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless, yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
Anyone who ever had him as a teacher knows that Walt was the poster-child for Fitzgerald’s notion of that kind of first-rate intelligence. When he wasn’t busy pranking his students and colleagues, Walt would often strut into his classroom arguing a fine point of history or government from a point of view diametrically opposed to the point of view he had presented just the day before. Walter could hold forth on almost anything from the stoic Seneca to Howard Stern, from the uniqueness of Lincoln to the muddled reality of the Middle East, and, when he was at his sharpest, he could argue the value or the danger of their ideas and approaches, pretty much reveling in advocating for whatever was the opposite of whatever you were advocating.
So after a childhood filled with enough tragedy to destroy the sturdiest of souls, through a stint in an orphanage and some time working the camps and in college, Walt did what so many committed young men did in those days and went off to war. When Sgt. Laitas came home from the war, he married his best girl, became an Illinois State Redbird football legend, finished school, looked around for a teaching gig where he could remain a Redbird (I made that part up!), came to Metamora, and went about the business of raising his family and directly and indirectly shaping this town’s young people for more than 40 years, of course as a teacher and coach, but even more as a good and determined and decent man. His first rate intelligence, able to function while holding two or three or ten opposing ideas in his head at the same time, paled in comparison to the good and determined and decent man that he was.
For whatever this is worth, I think that in the last analysis God doesn’t really care all that much how we talk about life, about how we shape our verbal expressions of the most meaningful and important stuff. I think Scripture and tradition suggest that God really does care about what we do with the lives we are given. So it is no little thing to remember and celebrate a good man and his good life that by all arguments could have been, maybe should have been, something other than that. And it is no little thing the marvel at the legion of good people who are the good people they are precisely because they had the good fortune to know him and be shaped by him. When it is all said and done, when the great debates of the age are matters for the history books, when the trauma of present movements and moments are little more than arcane data deep in a Google search, when the critical turning points in our lives are little more than turned pages, what really matters is whether or not we embrace and share the love God gives us to share with each other. And, of course in his own key, embrace and share that love he did.
You and I know that there are as many Walt stories out there as there are stars in the sky, and it will be a long time before those stories fade out of our memories. And whether the story is about his affection for birds, or leading an entire classroom of students – another teacher’s students – out of their classroom so that their teacher would enter a completely empty room, or about photographs strategically placed on classroom maps, or about Walt suggesting a more aggressive passing attack not to Coach Ryan but to Coach Ryan’s parents, or – I guess it’s safe to tell now – about how Walt secretly shot the raccoon that died the next day in the Peterson’s yard, what all the stories reflect is our genuine love for Walt, and our inability to really imagine a world without him. But the best Walt story of all is the one that continues to unfold in those legions of people whose lives he touched and shaped, in the lives of the Laitas girls and we tiny band of mildly overwhelmed brothers who tag along with them, the stories that unfold in the lives of Elisa and Jason and Keith and Sarah and Matt and Jenell and Scott and Kelsey and Katelyn and Michael and Teri, and in their little ones already and one day soon to be among us.
In his own way, and of course in his own key, Walt was a hero to those of us lucky to get close enough to him. A hero proved, as Katherine Bates wrote in America the Beautiful, in liberating strife, but more than that; a hero proved in a good, determined, and decent life that even death cannot take from us.
