(? - March 2002)
Joined Desert Brotherhood M.C. in 1999
Eulogy by Lou Clark (Ted's Daughter):
I spent the last four years in his presence...
almost every single day we had coffee together and talked about everything...
he was a rock...
and he was the one person in my life who ALWAYS saw me whole....
and he was never shockable...
he could listen to anything...
and he was constantly willing to grow and look at his own position with openness to change.He told many stories during the last few years...
about his childhood and his family...
about being the son of his father who worked as a superintendent of the Kaiser Steel mill during the war...
about moving from Pennsylvania to California when he was about 12....
about going to the mill on the weekends, because his dad had to work seven days a week....
about crawling around in the great vats and blasting hearths....
a time of industry and labor that few of us today can imagine...
that his grandsons, all seven of them, and his step grandchildren and great grand children, will never know...
a time when as the son in the family, he automatically knew when the driveway needed to have a curb poured and at 14 years old, he was trusted to lay out the plans and call the cement mixers and oversee the curb being set...
because his mother and father trusted him and he was expected to handle things without having to be asked.....
memories of learning to like different foods because he had to get a job at the local diner, the Apple Pie Cafe, to help with expenses - a time when his father died at home, with the family all around, of a cancer of the internal organs caused by the poisons of working with the chemicals in the steel mills, and at 19 years old he became the "man" of the family - to his mother and sister - and went off to Stanford to fulfill his father's dream so that he would not have to labor as his father had always done....
a time when he was expected to be soooo strong and steady...
and a time when he graduated from Stanford and took a job overseas as an engineer for Standard Oil on the tiny empty island of Aruba...
where he took a young wife, who had also recently lost her father...
and where they lived in a little colony of refinery families with kerosene stoves and empty beaches and scorpions on the walls and in their shoes...and the first two of four babies arrived to support and provide for...
a time when he returned to the states and to the Bay Area..and two more children arrived to be supported and provided for...
a time when a husband could provide for a wife and four children on $20,000.00 a year, without the wife having to work...
and the tradition continued...living up to the family expectation to be a man...
and then the love for his children being overcome as his children grew closer to the age when he had lost his dad...
and his wife was bitter and mean and self centered and had expectations that overwhelmed him....
and the fighting got too brutal to bear...and his own inner work called to him...
his time to grieve the loss of his dad and to find peers and his kindred spirits...
and he was banished from the presence of his children for the choices he made as he finally took the steps he needed to take to heal his own soul....And he fell in love with a man,...
and with another man...
and with one man in particular who he committed himself to for twenty years...
and he built another home and laughed a lot and lived a good life, and had a ranch and whippet races and May Day parties and traveled to Norway to meet his lover's family and to China as a representative on the President's Commission on transportation and he continued to care for his mother as she aged and his children began their families and he was confronted with his own mortality and the reality of the meaning of being a grandfather - and he watched many friends and finally his beloved partner and friend taken by a disease beyond anything imagined...
and he was once again forced to leave, this time because the man's illness made him so crazy that he would meet my dad at the door with a shotgun, lost in the psychoses that sometimes take the brain as a result of AIDs.....
and so my dad came to Las Vegas....and made another home...and, needing a place to keep talking about the many things he had experienced and a place to listen to others so he could know he was not alone in his pain and in his experience of life. ...
he committed himself to a support group and he strove to work out his own great grief and understanding of himself by giving of himself to others in the same loyal, steadfast, committed and hardworking manner that his whole life and history had been...
the roots of which had been in his heritage and ancestry...
the same roots that brought the only one of seven children to survive past adolescence from Germany to Pennsylvania to make a home for Lenhart family in the town he named Lenhartsville, Pennsylvania.....
in the 1700's - fleeing out of a time of religious persecution..
coming to a land where there was freedom to think and to express different opinions and it was safer to be different, and even sometimes to be wrong....
and my father met another man...
a beautiful, young man...who amazed him by loving him back and gracing his home with his beauty and listening and sharing his own gentle spirit...
and my father was able to watch this young man heal some of his own pain...
which made my father believe again that people were truly beautiful and that, he himself could heal and he became more gentle and his understanding of people stretched again ....
and he continued to commit himself to projects where he could give back to the community that had helped him find his soul and his feeling of being valued and whole...and he was proud of being gay...
and so proud to be a member of such a brave and amazing community...
and he enjoyed so many wonderful friends...and you all loved him and gave him so many moments to treasure and ponder and then...
In about March of 2002, he hurt his back....
and he could no longer ride his motorcycle without pain, he could no longer clean his own pool, and care for his beautiful garden...
and he insisted on getting on his knees to get things out of the refrigerator because he wanted to make me my lunch everyday...
as he did up to the day he had me take him to the hospital for the
"surgery that was supposed to give him back pain- free- independence"...
he wanted to believe it soooo much.....
and the surgery turned into a nightmare and then gently and quietly, took his life...
I know he went directly to his father's arms and that his mother was there to sooth him and tell him that those of us who were left behind would be alright...
that he could let go..
that we would survive....
and I know they are all with us here today, watching over us and loving us and seeing us each as such precious individuals...
as wondrous human beings....
gifted with this instant of life..and then maybe the next instant as well.....
minute to minute....
and the only questions I think he might ask are...
do you know that you are doing the best you can to be truthful and loving in all that you do, are you being kind with your thoughts of yourself and others...
are you setting an example....
and are you contributing something to try to make the world a better place...
do you really care...
I also know that when somebody dies, a cloud turns into an angel and flies up to tell God to put another flower on a pillow. A bird gives the message back to the world and sings a silent prayer that makes the rain cry. People disappear, but they never really go away. The spirits up there put the sun to bed, wake up the grass, and spin the Earth in dizzy circles. Sometimes you can see them dancing in a cloud during the daytime when they're supposed to be sleeping. They paint the rainbows and also the sunsets and make waves splash and tug at the tide. They toss shooting stars and listen to wishes. And when they sing wind-songs, they whisper to us,
"Don't miss me too much. The view is nice and I'm doing just fine."