A Meaningful Part - The Life Story of Clarence Stolt - Foreword (revised)

 

“Let it be said,

When I am dead,

He was a meaningful part of the whole.”

                                        A quote (source unknown) found in Clarence’s journal – 1966

 

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

My father was fifty-nine-years-old when he died from hypernephroma, or renal cell carcinoma, widely regarded as the most common type of kidney cancer. I remember how that age seemed so ‘old’ to me back in 1976 when he quietly passed away. I was just a teenager then, still emerging from protected childhood but hardly a fully appreciative adult either. Now I’ve seen plenty of my own years go by and I have crossed over the fifty-year mark (and then some) myself, and somewhere in all that my attitude towards fifty-nine went from old to mature to prime of life. Now it hardly seems fair that his life was cut short the way it was. Of course, this is one of the more slippery tricks time plays on us all. And just as easily as time slips by, so too does the stories and details of a person’s life. They fade and fade until finally they disappear altogether.

Perhaps the biggest regret I have about my father’s life, and death, is that I never had the chance to sit down and talk with him man to man about his experiences: the anecdotes, the lessons learned, the hopes, fears and disappointments he must have carried to the very end as he faced up to his own mortality.  What more might I have learned about him from such a conversation? Maybe more selfishly, what might I have learned about my own life? It is in those fleeting, daydream sort of moments that I find myself wanting to be re-introduced to the man who once loomed so large over a young boy’s world.

I remember him fondly, if vaguely, and can rely on memory enough to say with confidence that he was a good man and upstanding father. No dark mysteries there. But still, what of the many facts and circumstances that once made up so much of that life? Naturally, if not sadly, many of those bits and pieces are now gone forever; lost to history, as they say. (Not that he didn’t leave any written record behind. Surviving journals and family narratives were an invaluable source for much of what follows.)

It was for these reasons I decided to dig a little deeper into the past – his and mine – to record and preserve what I could. This before any more details of the man fade away. I owe him that.

I’ll start with one distinct memory I do have: I can still hear him in the basement of our home at night, clattering away on his trusty old Remington typewriter, the keys firing off in spurts so rapidly it sounded like a tiny motor going through its paces down there. I didn’t know then what he was writing or who he was writing to, but when he was on a roll it was almost comforting to listen to it. And so it is with that enduring sound in mind that I now start tapping on my computer keyboard what I have come to know to be the life story of my father, Clarence Stolt.

 

 

 

 

Kent Francis Stolt

April, 2012