My father, David Wakeman Calhoun, died on December 24th, 2017; Christmas Eve. He was 93 having been born on December 4th, 1924. We were fortunate as a family to have many months of lucid conversations over his final months to come to terms with our loss. He died peacefully in his sleep.
The contributions he made with his life were significant. After an education in New Haven, CT, at the Foote School, Hillhouse High School and Yale, he worked as a biometrician at G. D. Searle, a pharmaceutical company in Skokie, IL. As part of the Biological Research Division he was a key investigator at Searle for the introduction of the contraceptive pill as well as many other drugs. The first computers he used for research were full of vacuum tubes. Long before the internet, we had a teletype machine at home that connected us to a remote mainframe. He retired in 1986 and with my mother returned to the house he grew up in where he continued his work in original mathematics.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T S Elliot, from: The Four Quartets - Little Gidding
For all his efforts to share his more profound understanding of the workings of numbers, I haven’t developed his sense of wonder. I asked once for his help with homework and after a minute or two explaining what was simple for him, he shared what he found exciting about the subject. His words were meant for me but few of them found receptors in my brain. Even as an adult, our domains of knowledge overlapped, but never fully aligned. This must be a family trait. His own father, Robert Lowry Calhoun (professor of Historical Theology at Yale), recalled talking with his father, David Thomas Calhoun (a lawyer in St. Cloud, MN), “From time to time some questions would come up in class which a teacher would think my father might help to answer and I always took the question to him with confidence that he would listen. He always did. And he always gave me a careful, not to say painstaking answer, as if he were advising a client; and I never understood what the answer was. He tried, and I tried. We just were in different worlds of discourse.”
My father’s range of interests was vast and there were many other ways of sharing them. For many years he taped and catalogued programs of note on television. The result was a wall of video cassettes with over a year’s worth of music and history, art and politics. We asked him to go through the catalogue and identify the ones that were most meaningful to him. The list he created surprised me as one I might have made myself. He had instilled in me a love of Dylan Thomas and Joseph Campbell; Beethoven’s 9th, (Georg Solti conducting), and Jean Redpath in concert. What he was hoping to share, he had already made part of my life.
With worsening eyesight, for many years he could not see well enough to read without great difficulty. My mother read novels aloud and current op-eds in the New York Times. In his last months when I was in Bethany, I read Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology and The Wagner Stories (1907) by Filson Young which his father had read to him. He still found new insights in Brunhilda’s role as the moral center of the Ring Cycle. The last book we started was Faith on Earth written by H. Richard Niebuhr edited posthumously by his son. My father was a man of faith, but, as he qualified this, “the faith of a scientist.” And I wept as I read aloud, “We memorize the multiplication tables as we memorize the Ten Commandments. We have no direct relation at the time to things in large numbers or to large numbers in things which that table represents. But the complete assurance of parents and teachers that 12 x 12 = 144 is communicated to us and we believe it with certainty.”
The world in which I survive him is profoundly shaped by him. These are my words. If you ask his brothers Ted and Bob, and sister Harriet; his wife and companion, Louva; his other son, my brother, Michael or any of his numerous family and friends what part he played in shaping their lives, you will hear many different stories. All of us will remember him giving meaning to our lives.