Eulogy for William Stocker, Jr.

William Stocker, III - January 11, 2009

By today’s standards my father’s formal education was not extensive, although above average for his generation.

Graduate of the selective Brooklyn Technical High School with subsequent college coursework under the GI bill.

He had a burning curiosity and lifelong love of learning, always being fascinated with books, articles and television programs that would expand his knowledge. As well as an appetite for travel to new places.

Growing up, he would always regale my friends and me with scientific explanations of the phenomena in our daily lives, as well as with historical and classical stories, facts and anecdotes.

Friends whose parents had advanced degrees would ask me about his education, considering the wealth of knowledge that he had.

I now realize that with his proclivity to writing along with his editing/publishing career his vocabulary was rather large, although as a child I just took that for normal.

I was constantly perplexed when classmates would fail to understand words that I had heard at home and just took for granted.

My father was mechanically gifted, and was able to easily grasp how machinery and mechanical gadgets worked.

After Brooklyn Tech he began applying this gift at Wright Aeronautical which was where he was when the America entered WWII.

His particular position in aircraft design and manufacture gave him an exemption from military service.

He, like so many of his generation, however, could not bear the feeling that he was not doing his part in serving his country, so he volunteered and served in the AAC in Europe, landing in France 11 days after D-Day, almost being involved in ground combat in the Bulge and following Patton’s Army into what later became East Germany.

This experience included seeing Buchenwald a few days after liberation.

He continued his service in the reserves for several more years.

His service was always a source of great pride, although with it came a powerful aversion to anyone else having to make similar sacrifices.

My father’s eagerness to learn made it possible for him to take a new direction in 1949 when he went to work for McGraw-Hill’s American Machinist magazine, a magazine about the machine tool industry.

This job involved learning on the job to be a professional writer, writing about subjects for which he already had some experience and proven aptitude.

My father’s accomplishments in his 39 year career at McGraw-Hill, with his concomitant service in the Numerical Control Society, were another source of pride.

He took great satisfaction in helping to expand industrial productivity in this country and others, creating the prosperity that was so elusive in his formative depression years.

In addition to doing his part in creating national and world prosperity, my father was happily surprised to he and his family were able to enjoy such prosperous life.

I remember at one dinner on the terrace of the MBYC on a delightful summer evening during his retirement, his commenting that he never would have thought in his youth that he would ever be able to enjoy such an evening other than as a very special occasion.

I know that setting his children on a course for prosperity and success, was perhaps even more important.

My father’s mechanical inclination and love of learning made him always interested in new technologies and gadgets.

He was an avid photographer, at any event, at least from the War years on he always had the latest camera, still or movie.

When we were going through the several large boxes of photos Thursday, we had some difficulty in that he was always the one behind the camera so a whole album might have one picture with him in it.

I remember in 1971, when I was 15, his returning from a trade show with something called an electronic calculator.

It cost hundreds of dollars, then and all it could do was add, subtract, multiply and divide.

At the time it was mind-boggling.

I only realized after his passing that he still had in a corner of his room his CB radio circa 1975.

In 1983 he bought his first personal computer, an Apple IIe.

Until sometime after I had my own PC on my desk at work, which was about 1993, he was the more computer savvy of the two of us.

In later years he constantly used his computer and the internet. He amazing for his age although at this point my extensive day-to-day work use made watching him on the computer frustrating by some things that he just did not get, like his insistence on reading his spam.

Emailing friends and acquaintances became his lifeline in his later years. He had his own Facebook page, which is still up with an announcement of his passing.

Most important to my father was his insistence on always doing right without excuses or shortcuts, his generosity, his family and preserving heritage and memory.

Throughout his life he would repeat stories of the specific life histories of our relatives and and ancestors. He was very satisfied last year when, thorough the combined use of some documents in his collection and various internet searches he was able to locate and exchange emails with the granddaughter of his cousin and then was able to send her the original of the discharge papers of Clarence Page (her great-grandfather, his uncle) who was killed in France in the First World War.

When my sister moved back here and began having French speaking Au Pair, My father took it upon himself as a matter of personal, family and national honor to make sure that the purposes of the program were fulfilled by giving the au pair an experience of New York by sending them to shows and taking them on tours.

Euripides wrote, "When good men die, their goodness does not perish."