Robin's Speech at the Gathering
Each of us here today has had some kind of relationship with Tom Tate. I would like to offer the collective views of my father from the perspective of his children and grandchildren.
Our father was an extraordinary man. He was a principled, gentle man of intelligence and dignity. He was also a man of many talents, abilities, and interests.
At his core, there seemed to be a strong sense of curiosity. People who knew him almost always describe him as a studious man—quiet, learned, reflective, thoughtful. He believed there was nothing in the world that couldn’t be learned by consulting a library. If you wanted to know how to ride a horse, start with the library. If you wanted to know how to build a printing press, you could probably find it in the library. Being a great lover of the written word, he often read to us at the dinner table, and as children, we called him our “walking encyclopedia”. But he didn’t let us take advantage of that. Though we got daily lectures on everything from cloud formation to modern advances in technology, most of our questions were answered with “look it up in the dictionary.” He didn’t believe in spoon feeding anybody, knowing that in order to grow we had to exercise our own mental muscles.
In fact, our father had a strong sense of personal responsibility. He felt that you could learn how to do anything you wanted to do if you wanted it badly enough. When we complained, we were often admonished us with “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” He was the quintessential “self-made man” and admired people who, when down on their luck, were able to pick themselves up by the bootstraps. In his view, struggles and challenges were simply obstacles to be overcome; there was no expectation of defeat.
Our father was all about creating things … he could never understand people who wanted to be destroy rather than construct. His creative outlets took many forms throughout his life: he was an artist, a writer, a cartoonist, a woodworker, a gardener, and a ceramicist. He was constantly creating. Taking after his own father, he was also very inventive and resourceful and he loved technology. I remember as a small girl all the excitement about the brand new Texas Instrument calculator he brought home one day, and later, how he was one of the first in line for the early home computers (which he affectionately called confusers).
As most of you certainly know, Tom was also an adventurer and world traveler. After his military service, he was a commercial airline pilot. When he flew for Japan Air Lines, he took the family along with him to that country for a year. He was a natural-born cultural anthropologist. Wherever we went, his curiosity and love of new experiences took us to where the real people went. Instead of staying in Tokyo, for example, he took us to live in a traditional Japanese house in a small village where no one spoke English. This way, we had the opportunity to get to know how ordinary citizens lived and worked and to learn their ways.
My father also was a lover of nature. He was an outdoorsman – a fisherman and sometime hunter, and he liked to be near the earth. He drew great pleasure from working the land and making things grow—at one point purchasing 30 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin valley in California, raising a variety of crops. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the back of the tractor, jumping off to harvest potatoes in the freshly turned earth. No matter where we went, he found an outlet for his passion to make things grow. He constructed a magnificent backyard greenhouse in Phoenix; he raised hundreds of orchid plants in Fountain Hills; he nurtured beautiful roses and prolific orange
trees in Mesa.
It is difficult to assign a single occupation to my father. His many interests and abilities led him to be engaged in a variety of pursuits, and the line between activities associated with gainful employment and hobbies was often blurred. Certainly he was a flight engineer and pilot. He was also an artist and photographer, a farmer, a minister, and a musician. He was an extraordinary mechanic, a plumber, a printer, and even a prospector at one point. He was truly a jack of all trades and master of each one.
Music and song were always a big part of my father’s life. He was partial to ragtime and jazz, but also loved groups like the Three Tenors, and being a trumpet player, was especially fond of the Canadian Brass. He and my mother met through their experiences singing and playing music in church.In fact, although he was not fond of most organized religion, no one can deny that Tom Tate was a deeply spiritual man. He told me many times that one of the most profound experiences of his life were the tent revivals when he was a young man, in the aftermath of the Great Depression. He served as a minister in our church for many years and as a sort of spiritual ambassador to places as far away as Hong Kong, Nigeria, and Japan. In the early 70s he moved our family to Israel for several years.
In honor of these experiences, we would now like to sing one of his favorite songs, a melody written by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who was a good friend to my father. We will sing it in both Hebrew and English, those of you who are familiar with it are invited to sing along with us. [At this point, Sherry Whetstone, Janice Tate, and Robin Dion led the song, "Eso Aynai."]
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