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Goodbye to Dad —
A Good Man
By Wayne Trotter, Tecumseh Countywide News
WINNING COLUMN-April 2004
It was drab in New England this past weekend. Spring hadn’t reached there yet. Early on Saturday morning while I was driving a rented car along a misty Interstate 95 somewhere in Southern Massachusetts, my father’s 91-year-old heart stopped beating in a hospital 30 or 40 miles away. The world lost a good man.
It was a tragic week for our family. Only three days previously, the world had lost a good woman. Dad’s youngest sister, Anna Matilda Trotter Damon succumbed to cancer on Wednesday. She was the last of his four siblings. Dad got to see her before she died.
I knew about Aunt Anna Mae when I left for New England but I didn’t get the news about my father until I pulled into the motel a little after 2 o’clock Saturday morning. Mary, my sister, was in the lobby. She ran over and hugged me. "Dad died tonight," she said between sobs.
Something happens at a time like that. You go into a daze. Although I would have loved to have spent another hour with Dad, that wasn’t my mission in New England. I was there to help Mary take him home. The two of them had flown up from Mississippi especially to see Anna Mae whose condition the family had learned about only the week before. The doctors thought Dad could make the trip. He thought he could make it. Mary thought he could make it. I thought he could make it.
Fate intervened in the form of a freak accident. They were staying with one of our Massachusetts cousins. Dad got up in the middle of the night and fell down a flight of stairs. He was hospitalized but didn’t break anything major. The doctors felt he was getting better. They even discharged him to a rehabilitation center so he could regain some of his strength and go home. Only a few hours before his death, he was telling Mary how much he was looking forward to watching the OSU-Georgia Tech game with me. He was a devoted sports fan and even at 91, his mind was clear.
As things are defined these days, Israel Leonidas Trotter Jr. didn’t achieve greatness. But in every sense of the word, he was a good man and that made him great to those of us who knew and loved him. Burdened with two given names from another era he followed his father’s lead and went through life as "Lee." He took his first ride to school on a horse drawn "bus" and 80 years later got pretty good on the Internet until his sight began to fail.
He was never a rich man but was never poor either. Born into the hardscrabble world of rural Mississippi in 1912, he lost his dream of going to college to the Great Depression and family necessity. He educated himself in engineering through correspondence school and got on first with the Alabama Department of Highways, then with the Army Corps of Engineers in Mobile and finally with the U.S. Geological Survey in Mississippi. When the lack of an engineering degree threatened to lock him in a lower federal pay grade, his bosses thought enough of him to have the United States Congress remove that hurdle.
Dad’s most impressive trait was the way he dealt with people. I would be surprised if there is a man or a woman anywhere who could honestly say Lee Trotter had ever cheated them or treated them badly. He was fair to a fault and he believed in hard work. If everyone everywhere followed the standards of this one good man, there would be no crime, no war, no chicanery, no ugliness in the world today.
He lived in tumultuous times in Mississippi and grew with every passing year. He didn’t build the segregated society that he lived in the first two thirds of his life but he, at least, always knew the meaning of respect. He was proud of Mississippi and he would brag about the accomplishments of Mississippians of whatever color. He was proud of his country, too, and he went out of his way to serve in the Navy in World War II even after being stricken with a tropical disease that almost ended his life 60 years prematurely.
Yes, I would have loved to been able to spend even a few minutes with this man on Friday night. But I have no regrets either. We were always close. We visited as often as possible in person and talked for hours by telephone when we couldn’t be with one another.
As I came back from a still overcast Massachusetts on Sunday afternoon and arrived in a warm and welcoming Oklahoma, I was struck with the beauty of spring, the budding green of every plant, the wonderful purity of the white dogwoods, the soft hues of the redbuds. I know Massachusetts will have something like this in a week or two and was reminded that nothing worthwhile ever dies and life always renews itself.
On Thursday, we did take Lee Trotter home. He is now in the piney woods and sticky prairie land and good red farm dirt of Clarke County, Mississippi, sharing a spot in a little family cemetery with his wife of more than 60 years and adjacent to the graves of his own parents who taught him the same lessons he and mother passed along to Mary and me. He is surrounded by Trotters and Pickens and Hicks and Bells and Parkers whose headstones trace the family legacy back 40 years before the Civil War. He is within two miles of the house in which he was raised.
Rest in peace, Dad. No man ever earned it more.
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