The month of April always brings to mind my father, Edward Stuart. It was the month when he entered the world in 1948 and the month when he left it in 2003. My father was respected by all who knew him for his unusually curious and open mind and his robust intellectual charity. He was one of the most respected professors at Ferris State University, where he taught for fourteen years. His students came to his wake. His colleagues in electrical engineering donated their sick leave and volunteered regular deductions from their paychecks to help our family. Dad finished the school year and then took ill and never returned, so his office had to be cleaned out; I ended up with his briefcase. I have kept it these several years and recently opened it to sort carefully through its contents.
One of the clasps of this black, hard-shell briefcase no longer functions. But its contents reveal much about the man who carried it to work. As an historian, I am constantly fascinated by what primary sources reveal about human life in the past. Letters, manuscripts, journals, memoirs, reports, and published books are ways of seeing the feats and failures of those who lived before us. This briefcase opens up the world of my father during his last months of health in a way that little else can.
He did not always carry a briefcase. Dad was known early in his employment at Ferris as the professor who carried a five-gallon bucket. Our family had a lot of buckets lying around because they served to transport kindling into the house for the woodstove. Since Dad was thoroughly non-conventional and cared little how others saw him, he thought that a large pail would serve just fine to transport his calculator, pens, graph paper, and engineering textbooks.
Eventually, he acquired the old, black briefcase and would carry it to work every day. That was literally true, for with a half-mile long driveway that often drifted full of snow during long Michigan winters, our family was often snowbound. Dad would walk out to the car parked on the road and then trudge home at the end of the day with his briefcase in one hand and a gallon of milk in the other.
The contents of the briefcase reveal Dad’s wide interests. Only a portion of the contents has anything to do directly with his work at the university. He thought of many things on a typical day.
There is Dad’s witty and provocative sense of humor. I found a droll Dave Barry column on the SAT exam and also a calendar with a random scribble on it that says “Lawyer = larval form of politician.” Then there are several copies of a cartoon poking fun at postmodernism: “Breakfast Theory: A Morning Methodology.” A cereal box reads, “Post Modern Toasties…Like everything you’ve had before, all mixed up.” Dad wrote a joke that I once told him at the bottom of the cartoon: “As the French say, ‘Yes it works in practice, but does it work in theory?’”
Dad seemed to sense that his time was short even before the symptoms of brain cancer suddenly hit him in July 2002. He grew nostalgic. He spent time at the end of his final semester that spring going through old photographs and looking up old friends to try to contact them. In his briefcase I found a handwritten note with the address of one of his old medical school buddies (Dad spent two-and-a-half years in medical school). Then there is the obituary of the Jesuit priest Anderson Bakewell who held advanced degrees in astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy and who was also a member of the Explorer’s Club. Dad knew him in Alaska and wrote on the obituary, “Worked for him 1975/1976 in Delta Junction, Alaska.” Why did he scribble that note on the obituary? For whose sake did he write it? Who could he have thought would read it? Dad frequently wrote little notes like that, even as a kid, such as, “Ed was here” on the underside of a table. They were little reminders of his life, as if he wanted others to know that he had passed that way and that his life held a purpose. I once found a note that Dad wrote out in the forest near our home. In September 2003, five months after he was gone, I rambled across a birch tree upon which Dad had drawn a heart and the message, “September 2001, Ed loves Fae.” I ran home to lead my mother to see it. She wept. He couldn’t have expected anyone to ever read it. He just wrote it because… he wanted to. That was the kind of man he was.
Dad admired Father Bakewell as a man of God and a man of learning. These two characteristics defined Dad himself and are seen in his briefcase. There is his New Testament, which Dad frequently read. There is a list of verses for memorization, the “Hail Mary” in Spanish, and several pages of research on the alleged Marian apparitions at Medjugorje, where Dad visited during the early 1990s. This love of God accompanied a lifelong passion for learning. His friend Jim Loftis remembered that “Ed had the only set of ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’ in the neighborhood. He would read them voraciously and pass along information he learned from these books.” The “A” encyclopedia rested near him during his final sickness—next to a book on purgatory and a set of German tapes. I found in the briefcase a magazine article on DNA (Dad was fascinated by genetics during his last two years of life). Dad would often work on problems in astronomy as we children were growing up. In his briefcase I found a piece of graph paper on which Dad was trying to work out the most likely date for the birth of Christ using historical and astronomical evidence. He would have appreciated what Galileo wrote in his 1613 letter to Castelli: “Sacred Scripture and nature proceed equally from the Divine Word.”
Dad kept up on news and contemporary concerns. I found critical responses to the outbreak of news reports on the priest scandals in the spring of 2002. Dad had studied Russian in college, and in his briefcase I found an appeal letter for aid to the Church in Russia. There were two other charities that he was evidently interested in: one for the restoration of a church structure in Stuart, Iowa, where he had once visited, and the other for aid to the people of Afghanistan.
I found personal and poignant evidences of my father’s last concerns as a working man. There are three copies of a photograph of our family. There is a printout of the lyrics to “Don Quixote,” a song by Gordon Lightfoot, one of his favorite musicians. Dad sometimes saw himself as Lightfoot’s Don Quixote, a lone wanderer through life. There is a copy of his resume, which I am glad I found because I would not have had a copy otherwise. I was moved when I came across a handout from a lecture I gave at the Russell Kirk Center in February 2002 on “Progress and Religion,” a book by the English historian of culture Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). Dad must have been interested in the topic, for there is in his briefcase the first page (where is the rest?) of Joseph Koterski’s article on Dawson called “Religion as the Root of Culture.” He underlined Dawson’s phrase “religion is the key of history.” My father did not live to see me mature into the historian and scholar of Dawson and early twentieth-century Britain that I have become. However, he was there at the beginning and was fascinated by the history of Christianity as his briefcase testifies.
An historian reconstructs the past out of the debris that is “cast up by the sea from the wrecks of countless ages” (Herbert Butterfield). All of these papers and articles in the small confines of a briefcase reveal the essence of my father. His quiet example of a life of prayer and intelligence has inspired my life and even this series of columns “The Apprentice.”
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