My father, Larry Field, died on Friday. He had a phenomenal run—he left us two months short of his 98th birthday and six months before what would have been his and my Mom’s 70th wedding anniversary. (Not long ago I caught him intently watching a television documentary about centenarians. Dad was always goal oriented.)

Dad was born and raised in Leavenworth, Washington. Perched in a gorgeous setting just east of the summit of the Cascade Mountains, Leavenworth is now one of the state’s biggest tourist attractions, having been made over in the 1960s as an ersatz Bavarian village. When Dad was born, Leavenworth was a raw boom town with more whorehouses than automobiles. Then the sawmill closed and the railroad terminus was moved to nearby Wenatchee, and Leavenworth slid into the national depression just as the bottom dropped out of its own local economy. Despite the dire times, Dad remembered the Leavenworth of his childhood as a place where everyone knew each other and where everybody helped keep each other afloat via a collectively improvised system of bartering. Dad and his four siblings all worked hard as kids—odd jobs, paper routes, fighting fires in the summer, and picking apples in the fall—but in the winter there was also skiing, igloo making, and ski jumping (Dad won the high-school ski jumping championship one year) and in the summer Dad and his friends savored the freedom to swim the Icicle River to their pirate camp on Blackbird Island and to take off for four or five days at a time to hike unchaperoned up into the spectacular Enchantments with knapsacks, a cast-iron skillet, a sack of potatoes, and some fishing rods.

As a boy Dad caught the eye of the local librarian (the Leavenworth library was a single room in the basement of the high school), who changed his life by introducing him to the magic of the printed page. In his telling, he was captivated initially by the Wizard of Oz series and over the years ploughed his way through the library’s entire modest collection. Whatever the initial impetus, Dad was a voracious reader his entire life.

Music was also a big presence in Dad’s life early on. A traveling hustler right out of “The Music Man” showed up in Leavenworth and convinced the town’s parents to start a band for the youngsters. Fifty kids showed up for the first day of practice. Dad was given a snare drum and his older brother Jack had a trumpet put in his hands. Dad was barely into his teens when he started playing local grange-hall dance gigs with local stars like Snoose Henderson, who was justly celebrated throughout the Wenatchee Valley for his “laughing sax” technique. Dad and all his siblings attended Washington State College. Swing music was the rage then, and Dad and Uncle Jack played in dance bands all through their college days. The Jimmie Lunceford band was a particular favorite of Dad’s, and he told me that seeing that band play a show in Spokane in the ‘30s was an all-time musical thrill for him.

Dad was drafted in ’42 and spent three years in the Army during World War II. He landed on Omaha beach on June 9, 1944—three days after the initial landing—and served in the Inspector General’s office throughout the European campaign. Dad and the Army weren’t a particularly good fit, but for a small-town boy who had never been outside Washington (Dad didn’t manage to make the 120-mile trip to the big city of Seattle until he graduated from high school--he treated himself to a $2.00 flight over vast metropolis in an open-cockpit biplane), his wartime experience in Europe was a life changing one.

After the war Dad attended a summer writing course at Stanford and parlayed that into a staff writer job at KOMO radio in Seattle. My parents met on a blind date. They had a big argument about music—Mom was passionate about classical music and opera, whereas Dad was all about Count Basie and Frank Sinatra—but things got smoothed out and a year later they married. Not long afterwards they sold their few possessions and traveled around Europe on a very sketchy motorcycle before spending a year in Paris.
After the return to Seattle Dad briefly found work with an advertising agency before becoming a floor director at KIRO television. Dad later joined the Northwest’s largest advertising agency, Cole and Weber, eventually becoming a vice president there after winning many national awards for his commercials for clients like Boeing, Weyerhauser, and Pacific Northwest Bell.

Dad had been neglected by his own absentee father as a child, but he refused to continue that cycle and was a committed family man who always made time for us despite his challenging job. We had a lot of fun with him growing up. He took us camping and backpacking and introduced us to skiing. (Dad grew up on skis and didn’t put them down until he was 85. I was on a quad chairlift once at Crystal Mountain with Dad and a couple of young punks. One of them leaned over and asked Dad “How long have you been skiing, old timer?” Dad paused. “Seventy-eight years,” he answered, and the kid was quiet for the rest of the ride. Dad had regular dreams about skiing until he died.) He was there for every teacher conference, PTA meeting, and band concert.

Dad liked to keep up to date with technology. In the late ‘70s he bought one of the first PCs—Radio Shack’s TRS-80—and after he retired he spent a lot of time pursuing digital photography and using his computer to write short memoirs of his days in Leavenworth and in the Army. A few years ago he decided that he wanted to buy a tablet computer, so I took him to Best Buy to look them over. He kept apologizing for asking so many “stupid questions” until I finally posed one to him: “Dad, how many other 93-year-olds do you see in here shopping for tablets?”

My folks went from a small apartment in Seattle to a nice home in the suburbs north of Seattle to a ten-acre place on a stream in the country to a retirement home in Issaquah, Washington. My sister Laurie lives in Vancouver, Washington, and after I moved just across the river to Portland a few months ago, we found a great new home for them at a retirement home in Vancouver, and they moved in in May. Right away Dad’s health began to decline dramatically. At first we thought this was due to his advanced age and disorientation after the move, but after working with doctors for a couple of weeks we learned that Dad had terminal cancer. (He had already beaten colon cancer and prostate cancer decades earlier.)

Dad was always very methodical, and as he grew weaker and began having periods of delirium, he fought hard to stay oriented. He wanted to be able to see a clock at all times. He had me go through his emails with him. He wrote lots of lists and we had many briefings about his finances. The days were structured around Mariners or Seahawks games. In the last couple of weeks, Dad was in an extended dream state. Not all of that seemed particularly pleasant—he was back in the Army for much of it—but there were some beautiful moments. One night when my brother Keith was with him, Dad was back in Paris and happily speaking French with the locals. My sister and my mother witnessed a scene in which a huge, beatific smile came across Dad’s face, his eyes opened wide and he exclaimed “Wow. It’s blue.”

I have learned so much over the past two months. I learned from Dad how to face death right in the face with the intelligence, patience, grace and humor that was always his way with everything. I learned from my mother, my brother Keith and my sister Laurie Field Sturgeon that our family could draw together even more closely as we worked together to make sure that Dad got his wish to die at home in his sleep. I learned from the hospice program that there are phenomenal people in this country that reject the notion that health care is a Darwinian struggle and instead make it their job to leverage government assistance to enable people to die in comfort and with dignity in a familiar place surrounded by their loved ones.

Of all the many pieces of great fortune that have come my way, one the most profound was having Larry Field as my father. Dad was a whip smart, very kind person of unflagging patience who respected everyone. He was shaped by his small-town upbringing but was determined to experience the wider world. He worked very hard and the results were always of high quality. He was a natural and loving father and husband who focused on the big things. And he effortlessly cracked jokes until the very end.