This is the eulogy my uncle Paul gave at my grandpa’s funeral in Albuquerque, NM, on Saturday, September 12, 2009. It’s the story of a great storyteller, a teacher, a father, a grandfather, a rancher, an adventurer, a fixer, a hard worker, a legacy. And, here’s a beautiful photo set by my brother Dominic (and the nunu web designer!) of the tools in his garage, Ted’s Tools.
My father was born 86 years ago in Del Norte, Colorado, a small town at the northern end of the beautiful San Luis valley in the southern part of Colorado. For his parents, Patrick Espinosa and Josefina Chaves, my father was the ninth child of thirteen. Five of his siblings would die in childhood. He was the last surviving sibling of his family.
Despite a bout of typhoid fever which had him in the hospital for months, my father flourished as a child. His family lived in the small ranching community of La Garita, at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. His great grandfather had moved there from New Mexico prior to the Civil War. My father took great pride in knowing about the family’s history and through his love of storytelling, he was instrumental in preserving and transmitting our family’s story to later generations.
My father’s mother had a special bond with her younger sister, Teresita. They were just two years apart and the youngest in their family. Teresita and her husband, Tio Juan, had lost two children in infancy and were childless.
By this time, my father’s parents were suffering the effects of the depression and had great difficulty in supporting all of their children. As was customary in many Hispanic families, they looked to their extended family to help them raise their children. My father’s brother, Toby, for example, was sent to live with his grandparents and Josefina decided to ask her sister Teresita to take her son, my father, at the age of four. This was not an easy decision. In later years, Josefina would speak of the pain of not having her son with her and my father never forgot the trauma of being separated from his parents. Even eighty years later, his eyes would still well up with tears when he recalled the day he was taken to live with his Tio Juan and Tia Teresita.
But they would raise my father as the son they never had. My father worked on his uncle’s sheep ranch as a young man and learned so much from his uncle, a man who he admired and loved greatly. Every summer he would go up on the high range to help his uncle with the large herd of sheep he owned. My father would stay there for months at a time, often with just another worker, developing a strong sense of self.
My father often spoke admiringly of the strong work ethic he learned from his Tio Juan, a work ethic which he would pass on to all of his children and to so many of the people he came into contact with throughout his life. He learned the art of being resourceful, of making or fixing anything that was necessary to give new life to old things.
Despite the commitment which his aunt and uncle had to ranch life, they were determined that my father be educated. When he was six, they moved to Del Norte so that he could go to school there. Later when he was a sophomore in high school, they sent him to the Holy Cross Abbey boarding school for boys in Cañon City, Colorado.
This would prove to be a decisive fork in the road for my father because here, not only would he be exposed to a first class education under the watchful eye of Benedictine monks and brothers, he would also meet a young woman who became the love of his life and his lifetime partner, my mother, Rosemarie.
In their senior year, my father was elected the king of the prom. He had to select someone to be his queen. And who do you think he picked?
My father’s wonderful talent for storytelling would become a vehicle for vividly relating to us so many of the fascinating experiences of his lifetime. Through his stories, the man whom we had always known as our father, the school principal, was transformed into mountaineer, horseman, sheepherder, athlete and cavalry recruit.
Like most members of his generation, my father joined the army during World War II. He was sent to Burma and India in a Calvary battalion and saw a world he had only read about. He would tell stories about the truck caravans he worked on which carried supplies on the treacherous Burma road over the Himalayas. He described the shipboard voyage he made tending to a herd of mules intended for transporting cargo to India and the knee injury he received from one of the mules who he described as a “jewel” of a mule.
After the war ended, my father received word that his Tio Juan was dying and he was given a high priority pass to return to his uncle’s home. It was a long journey which he remembered vividly with stops in Karachi, in Iran, in Egypt, in Tripoli, and in Brazil. But when he got to Miami, after traveling more than halfway around the world, he was told that he couldn’t board a military plane in the U.S. without a parachute, and they wouldn’t give him one.
My father was stumped but as he tried to figure out what to do, he saw another sailor pacing around. He began talking with him and found out that the sailor was also stuck there but for a different reason. The sailor had been issued a parachute but he could only turn it in at the station where he had received it. So here they were, one man with a parachute he wanted desperately to unload and one man who desperately needed one. As you might guess, they were finally able to get the officers in charge to see the wisdom of allowing the sailor to give the parachute to my father, and they were able to complete their respective journeys.
My father returned to help his aunt care for his Tio Juan through the last months of his life.
After his uncle’s passing, my father assumed he would take over the ranch, for which he had been so meticulously prepared during all those years. But his Tia Teresita had different ideas. She never wanted him to live his life as a rancher, and virtually sold the ranch out from under him. Thus he made the decision to continue his education.
He had carried on an active correspondence with my mother who was now at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My father entered Marquette and earned his Bachelor of Arts Degree there.
As their courtship blossomed, my parents decided to get married and start a family. They were married on August 9, 1948 at the Holy Cross Abbey where they had met as students.
My father then pursued a Master of Arts degree in Spanish literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He told me that the day after I was born he was scheduled to have his final oral exams in Madison. When he came in to meet with his committee, the first thing he did was to exuberantly pass out cigars to all of the committee members. After a rigorous discussion, he was awarded the degree.
At that point, my parents moved back to southern Colorado where they had both grown up. My father got a job teaching Spanish in the small town of La Jara.
In 1954, my father decided that he wanted bigger challenges and he applied for jobs in Albuquerque and Denver. He was offered a teaching position in Albuquerque and he moved the family here where we lived in our first house on the corner of Silver and Cedar, now a Presbyterian Hospital parking garage.
My father began teaching Spanish at Washington Junior High and within a few years had become a guidance counselor and worked at both Washington and Lincoln Junior High. Over the next 30 years, he would establish a vivid presence at Albuquerque High, at Manzano High and finally at Del Norte High. Throughout all of these years, he served as a counselor and later an administrator who worked closely with families and students.
He would see many of the young people who were constantly in trouble for one reason or another and got to know them and their families, as they worked through their problems. In later years, after his retirement in 1983, WE would often be out with my father and come across some student who affectionately remembered my father’s help, often a student who had been sent to the office many times to see Mr. Espinosa.
My father was always a hard worker and he conveyed that value to all of his children. He would never shrink from a job and he didn’t know the meaning of the word “procrastinate.” He loved the challenge of getting things done, from the smallest task to the biggest job – of finding just the right tool to fix the problem at hand. Many of you will remember how he would tinker with different projects and how extensive his expertise was in solving problems.
About ten years ago, I asked for his help in making some book shelves for my extensive video collection in San Diego. He and I spoke on the phone and he had me take careful measurements of where I wanted the shelves, both in my house and in my office. He designed the project and cut all the shelves in his garage here in Albuquerque and then drove out to San Diego with most of the shelves pre-cut. We took several days to install those shelves. There was never a prouder moment than in those days that we spent assembling those shelves.
I remember just last year, after he had already has his operation and gone through chemotherapy and radiation, we went to buy a refrigerator. He and I went over to Sears in his pickup and the guys loaded it into the back of the truck. My brother, Peter was going to take the refrigerator to Chama so my Dad wanted to make sure the refrigerator wouldn’t move around. So no sooner was the refrigerator in the truck, than my Dad, now 85, hopped into the back and began lashing it down, using all of the special knots that he was so famous for.
One of our fondest memories as a family is the year we went to New York City in 1963. My father was one of small number of students from throughout the country accepted to Teacher’s College at Columbia University to pursue a Doctorate of Education. He and my mother loaded up the station wagon and all five of us children – aged 6 to 14 - and we drove to New York. Out of economic necessity, we camped on the way out – my mother would never forget the first place we camped in Texas which was full of mosquitoes or the next night when the lakeside campsite flooded in the middle of the night, forcing us to move all of our gear to another site – what a way to see the country!
We finally arrived in New York City, driving through the Lincoln tunnel which drops you right onto 34th Street in Manhattan. We were truly the country bumpkins as we looked in amazement at the Empire State Building which seemed to go up forever into the clouds. And in the midst of a huge traffic jam in midtown, the radiator overheated and we had to be very resourceful to find some liquid to cool it off with!
When I think back on that experience, I am truly amazed that my parents had the courage to take a family of seven to New York City.
I think that episode demonstrated the values that my father lived for – the importance of taking risks, the importance of education, the importance of family, the importance of continual curiosity about the world around him.
My father lived a rich and meaningful life. He will be greatly missed but he has left a rich legacy for all of us.
I want to take a moment to thank all of the many people who provided a loving hand in the care of my father over the last year and a half. He fought a long difficult battle with pancreatic cancer – a battle which included chemotherapy, radiation and a very challenging operation. Along the way there were many, many people who cared for him and made his last year and a half manageable and worthwhile. I want to thank all of them today. Gracias por su amor y apoyo para mi papa en estos dias dificiles. Yo se que el estaba muy agradecido a todos por su carino.
And I’d like to thank my mother, my sister and my brothers and all of their wives as well as their families, along with my wife and daughter for the love and support they have shown my father.
On behalf of our entire family, I thank all of you for joining us today to commemorate my father’s life. I invite you to join us after the mass for a reception here in the Newman Center auditorium.
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