Eulogy For William M. Waters- 1925-2011

Our father was, plain and simply, a good, good man.

When we were kids we would tumble down the stairs into the basement
where we would find him, head bowed over papers in his study, or
staring intently at the screen of an oscilloscope in his shop. At the
time we had no idea what he was doing there, what the word
“dissertation” meant, or that we could be intruding on an idea that
would improve modern radar technology. What we did know was that Dad
would stop whatever he was doing and listen to our questions. There
was never a “Not now” or “Could this wait until later?” To the
contrary, we could expect that before going back to his thoughts, he
would spend time with ours. There was nothing that occurred in our
young minds that he deemed too small for his.

Looking back, we can never fully account for what Dad thought about,
particularly when his mind wandered (a Waters family trait)—the
memories of a childhood in Japan or the life of a preacher’s kid
listening to his father in the pulpit trying to make sense of God’s
creation even as the Great Depression wore on toward another World
War. He might have thought about his decision to enlist in the Army
on his 18th birthday, or the march from Normandy to Paris, a Signal
Corps private assigned to a Special Services jazz band entertaining
exhausted troops. Surely he thought of his younger brother George,
the dashing naval pilot lost when his plane went down over the Gulf of
Mexico, or the deep love he felt for his wife, Nancy, the woman for
whom everything he did was in some way calculated in his heart.

There can be no doubt that the basement on Woodcroft Road, the site of
neighborhood parties and youth group meetings, of hundreds of
ping-pong games and darts tournaments, was also a laboratory of love
from whose depths Dad would emerge to give of himself to the
scientific community, to his neighbors and friends, to his family, and
to be sure, to anyone with whom there was an opportunity for even a
moment’s conversation.

Dad loved to talk to people; he was a specialist in striking up banter
with strangers. You see, we thought they were strangers, but Dad
seemed to see just a bigger family. We’ve long joked about how Dad’s
accent changed progressively as the four of us headed west in that
bright red, ’57 Oldsmobile. By the time we crossed the Mississippi,
it was “Hi, y’all,” and once we cleared the Rockies it was “Howdy and
I thank yeh.” Mom cringed, and Dad beamed. Dad seemed happiest
chatting it up at a gas pump or gently teasing a waitress at one of
the long string of greasy spoons he chose for our road trip meals. He
never failed to order stewed tomatoes whether they were on the menu or
not, and we wouldn’t be surprised if he placed this order at the
Fireside Restaurant here at Oak Crest or in the dining room at
Renaissance Gardens. You see, Dad talked to everybody because he saw
himself as one of the “everybodies.” He liked to quote his father
who often said, “The folks are as good as the people.” This was one of
those secular scriptures that led us all closer to “The Golden Rule”
than what we heard in Sunday school.

Dad was a good neighbor who shared the sprawling development of
Woodcroft, just down the road from here, as if it were one big living
room. Dad could sit on his dear friend’s back porch watching the kids
chasing squirrels, and we would hear the rich laughter or the
occasional solemn tones, and that’s all we needed to know about
friendship. He was a founding member of the Woodcroft Swimming Club,
he played golf and tennis at the public facilities with his buddies,
and he was one of a platoon of parents who raised all the kids in the
neighborhood as if they were their own. He was Dr. William M. Waters
at the lab, but he was always most comfortable being Mr. Bill or Uncle
Bill.

Dad loved Thanksgivings in Dover, Delaware with his sister Virginia’s
family, the Aulds. Uncle Dave and Dad sat together at the piano while
the gathering of cousins looked on and listened to the shared joy of a
good song. He loved Christmases at home in Millersville, in the
basement by the fire, surrounded by our mother’s sister’s family, the
Coopers, Don and Dottie, and again, a gathering of cousins who
provided the busy background for the season. And he loved that our
clan grew by marriage to include the Rich and Eller families, and a
generation later joining the Williamsons and the Doaks. These were
all causes for great celebration, and for Dad and others who
appreciate the charms of good gin unspoiled by too much Vermouth,
communion with a, dry Martini—three olives ritually delivered to his
wife.

Of course, Dad was raised in the religious and tea-totaling
environment of the many Methodist parsonages he called home. But he
was not what you would call a religious man. He and Mom were members
of Hiss Methodist Church and later Arnolia during the Parkville days,
where Dad sang in the choir. Later they became members of Severna
Park United Methodist Church when they moved to Millersville. Dad
seemed to have trouble reconciling religious dogma with his scientific
training, and yet, there was never a doubt that he saw a connection
between science and what might be the divine. Mom has often shared
the story of a trip to Greece many years ago, when Dad was invited to
speak at the University of Pappas. They were picked up at the airport
by a friend and colleague, the Director of Engineering at Duke
University, who drove them to a beautiful bluff overlooking a harbor
about 50 miles southwest of Athens. It was here, his friend said that
the disciple Paul spoke to the Corinthians. Mom said Dad’s eyes
rimmed with tears, and it must have been as if some great circle had
just been completed where the grown scientist met the little boy
listening to his father read the scriptures, perhaps with the notes of
his favorite sacred music, “Panis Angelicus,” attending his memory.

(singing of Panis Angelicus and reading from 2 Corinthians 5 )

Our father understood and practiced the spirit of Paul’s teaching.
Dad never considered himself a teacher, having spent a semester he
wasn’t proud of teaching at Drexel University, but he was a teacher.
By example, he taught us our sense of devotion—devotion to our loved
ones and to our fellow man and devotion to doing meaningful work. He
came from teachers, and he was proud to have raised teachers who, in
their turn, married teachers.

It is hard to understand how he conveyed this legacy because, frankly,
it was always hard to understand exactly how Dad’s mind worked. Here
was a man who saw the world as problems to be solved and with
brainpower enough to grind away at any of them, and yet he never
became at all cynical. He was a pragmatist, frequently invoking the
engineers’ maxim—“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and he was an
eternal optimist following his own rule—“If it is broke, it can and
will be fixed.” And if he couldn’t fix it, he set about the task of
inventing something to replace it.

Even as a “dyed in the wool” Republican, Dad knew that fossil fuels
were not the way of the future—so he set about building an electric
car in his basement, combining the skeleton of an old Honda Civic with
golf cart motors and batteries. While there was nothing revolutionary
about the idea of an electric car, he was quietly designing a
regenerative breaking system that would become one of the keys to the
modern, practical electric car. He would frequently lament the
obstacles created by existing battery technology, and after
successfully testing his car more than twenty years ago, closed the
project knowing that someday the chemical and electrical engineers
would combine to beat the problem. And they have.

Recently, Mom reminded us that Dad’s father liked to tell the story
from his days preaching in Mt. Savage, a small, hillside, mining town
just west of Cumberland. One night after dinner, Rev. Waters tuned
his radio to catch up on the world news. It was the late 1930s, and
the world faced another war. As he turned the radio dial, he began to
hear some local news about their tiny town. Just as his amazement
grew that anyone might be interested in his piece of the middle of
nowhere, he recognized the voice. It was 12-year-old Bill Waters
upstairs at his desk, broadcasting from a homemade transmitter. Years
later, Dad’s cardiologist and internist would fondly remember a
challenging and skeptical patient suffering from cardiomyopathy. When
they presented test results from an EKG, he presented them with a
printout of his own. You see, Dad had gone home, descended to his
shop and built his own electrocardiogram machine. The tests agreed,
and Dad allowed his doctors to treat him, which to their great credit
they did wonderfully and gently over the next 12 years. Somewhere
between the Mt. Savage radio station and his doctors’ amazement, he
was granted numerous patents in the development of modern radar
technology and wrote and delivered scores of professional papers
throughout the country and abroad.

When he wasn’t mentally aloft, Dad thought about flying airplanes.
His father was a pilot and military flight trainer, his brother George
died in a flying accident, Dad flew and crashed at least once with a
beloved brother-in-law, and he eventually took flying lessons and
received his license. Mom wasn’t thrilled about this, and there were
many “discussions” about this flying bug; they were held down in the
study where some privacy could be achieved, away from what they called
“big ears.” Of course, we kids early on discovered that the
ventilation system doubled as an intercom, so we had already become
privy to these “study negotiations.” The meetings seemed to go on for
a long time—maybe months. But let’s just say that Dad got his wings
and Henry Kissinger reached a peace accord in Paris. Dad would fly
himself and colleagues to professional destinations, us kids to and
from college and summer camp and he flew the whole family on
vacations. Even when we were on the ground, road trips were routed by
way of airports.

It would be years and hundreds of flying hours before Dad retired from
the sky, but it was back to “study negotiation” when he and his
brother-in-law thought a sailboat would be a good idea. So Mom
replaced her fear of falling from the sky for the worry of sinking in
Davy Jones’ locker. And yet, with all the worry, we’re pretty sure if
you listen carefully, you can hear that hint of pride in her voice as
she describes her husband the adventurer.

It’s the same tone you’ll hear in her voice when she tells the story
about the electric car or the EKG.

And she loved to tell the stories about Dad’s zaniness. We think she
thought of Dad as a sort of Fred MacMurray-like absent-minded
professor who loved high-jinx. When she wasn’t talking about the
house blowing up with the projects in the basement, she enjoyed the
stories about the little car—the Isetta—a four-wheeled vehicle,
smaller than the modern Smart Car. Dad bought one while he was
conducting research for his dissertation at the Johns Hopkins
Radiation Laboratory. He must have realized at some point while
eyeing the dimensions of the freight elevator, that the little car
would fit. So it was to follow that his colleagues arrived to work
one morning to find Dad at his desk in his third floor office, with
the car parked in the hall outside.

Dad was always clearly Mom’s hero in her own knight’s tale. She told
the stories of working with her new husband at the Terrace Hotel at
Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, and the stories of flying loop-d-loops
in a bi-plane with her new brother-in-law George. She told us that
Dad was an important scientist who would just as soon talk about cars
at the Woodcroft Esso station as fly to Wallops Island, Virginia to
oversee the radar tracking of a rocket launch. When Mom would share
these stories, sometimes even showing us a picture of Dad receiving an
award from some sort of admiral, we kids would swell with pride even
as we wondered why Dad never talked about what he did. We were in the
process of learning how a really good man avoided being diminished by
the sense of his own worth. Dad somehow knew how to straddle the line
between absolute self-assurance and pure humility.

He was certainly humble in the face of what he didn’t understand—and
that included Elvis Presley and The Beatles, and he was actually
something of an anti-intellectual. When it came to the great cosmic
questions, he preferred consulting Charles Shultz and the Peanuts
comic strip before reflecting on the religious texts of his
upbringing. In his music Dad found a sense of the universal. He
could sit at the piano and find solace in the same world that
disappointed him with the assassinations the Kennedys and Martin
Luther King or the ugliness of the Watergate scandal. But Dad also
heard in his music the spirit of great human accomplishment in which
he believed so deeply—of a Neal Armstrong stepping on the moon or
Ronald Reagan’s challenging Mr. Gorbachev to take down the wall.
After all, Ron was family, according to the speculation of several
letters sent from Dad’s mother to then Governor Reagan. The future
president replied politely if not definitively, but we called him
cousin Ron, and Dad had his picture on the wall above the piano and
later in his room at Renaissance Gardens, right up to the end.

When Dad played the piano, there was a special peace in the house.
Mom would sometimes sing along wherever she happened to be, but mostly
we all heard these favorite hymns and pop standards drift through the
house as we did our homework or cleaned up after dinner. We all
settled this way at the end of the day, as those hands that could make
just about anything at the work bench, conjured goodness at the
keyboard. While Dad was in England during the war, he took walks
through Berkley Square in London, and he heard for the first time the
song inspired by its Nightingales. This would become Mom and Dad’s
song. And Dad played the piano for the last time on Thanksgiving Day,
when he sat down to the keys and another of their favorite songs,
“Misty.”

There was even a Waters family combo that played “Alexander’s Ragtime
Band” around that same piano, and we sang at the top of our lungs
driving that Oldsmobile from coast to coast. Dad’s love was never
more apparent than when we were all together playing a tune, sharing a
meal or singing our way down the road. To be honest, he was never big
on saying the words, “I love you” or “I’m proud of you.” (Although he
might have slipped a time or two with his grandchildren.) But he
didn’t have to. He knew that, and we knew that. Love and pride were
in every note he sang for us, every photograph he hung of us, every
single handshake and hug.



We understood that pride and we always felt his love. The truth is,
we were perpetually bursting with pride that he was our father.
Everywhere we went, you could just tell how glad, even honored, people
were to know Bill Waters—his close friends as well as casual
acquaintances from Parkville to Millersville to Oak Crest, his
colleagues in the scientific community, his doctors and caregivers and
all of his extended families. Mom would sometimes sit the two of us
down when the time seemed right and say lovingly, but seriously, “You
know your father is a brilliant man, and he is a good man.”

Before all else, and until his last breath, he loved our mother.
There was always a dear, implicit understanding in our family, that no
matter what the challenge or the need, our mother came first, and then
we followed. She was the “little Nancy” Dad fell in love with when he
returned from the war, and his father became the preacher at Highland
Methodist Church where the McKinney family worshipped. And Dad began,
at that moment, worshipping her. He never left the house without
kissing her goodbye, and he never returned without another hug and a
kiss. For nearly 64 years, she was his “Sweety” and he was hers.

So today we celebrate this wonderful life with you, Mom, and while we
all must join in your sadness that a good, good man has left us,
somehow we can be assured that he also remains with us, listening to
the song you most enjoyed hearing him play.
William Waters (the Younger) for the family

On the Sport

Cruise-1980

Bill and Don