Editor's notebook
Hoyt, Robert C.
AN EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK DEWEY REMEMBERED BUMBLING TOWARD BETHLEHEM is full name was Carlyn P. Dewey, but everybody, including his wife Anna, called him Dewey. His firstborn, Mary Anne, gave...
...I was not enough like him...
...That includes his family: besides M.A...
...Dewey loved the Latin, so we sang the Kyrie, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei...
...He bugged the Star at all times...
...living with a saint requires a supersaint...
...What he or his family needed but couldn't buy he invented...
...To celebrate the Feast of Saint Nicholas in proper style Dewey arranged to hire a horse, donned a robe of sorts, put a homemade episcopal miter on his head, and came riding up our driveway bearing gifts, just like the good bishop...
...Fourth of July rockets were out of the question, so he tied sparklers to arrows and shot them into the night sky...
...I had neglected him, and disappointed him...
...I had other reasons...
...he was a humble man, but he gave the Lord a lot of lip...
...Not all the inventions worked, but he bumbled away, made do, eked out...
...when it was ready he piled them all into his beat-up car and took them to Swope Park...
...Job answers, "I have spoken once, I shall not speak again...
...I hope he's still praying...
...whether lightning flashes will come at Job's command, whether it is Job that makes the horse so brave and causes the eagle to soar...
...I'm sure he was a pain...
...I cried some more then, and when I saw his widow weeping...
...The Sun Herald did get launched but folded after five months, and he went back to his old job...
...I realized, at last, that I was crying for myself...
...I first felt tears when I learned he had spoken of me often on his death bed, and that he had always prayed for me...
...Dewey often made news on purpose, sometimes by accident...
...Anna, to my knowledge, seldom wept, but now she had good reason...
...a Kansas City Star photographer once caught him unawares giving away his overcoat to someone on the street...
...but on being told that Dewey was gravely ill, the Star's editor arrived at the hospital in ten minutes...
...He knew himself as an ordinary bloke, a little guy, but he did things on a large scale...
...What made the reading exactly right was that Job in fact did speak again, and again...
...Bernadine recalled that when he built a kite for his kids (and mine) it was huge and its tail was long...
...He was a Catholic of his times, the fervent forties...
...Before Dewey died I had seen him very seldom over a span of forty years...
...The string broke, the kite sailed off—with Dewey and the kids in the car in instant pursuit across the city...
...When Dewey installed a swing on the ancient elm in our yard it was strung from a very high branch...
...He was late, the horse was skittish, we all nearly froze waiting for him on the porch, but Saint Nick became more real than Santa Claus...
...I have spoken twice, I shall not speak again...
...and B., there were Elizabeth (Dady), Cecilia, Joseph, and John...
...The story made the wire services and ran in papers across the Commonweal country...
...riding it was like soaring...
...what made me cry were his gnarled and calloused hands...
...when he learned that a group of us, even more impractical dreamers than he, were trying to start a Catholic daily paper in Kansas City he first volunteered to help, then quit the Post Office and joined the staff, using his postal lore to help run circulation...
...I cried again when the funeral director, obeying Mary Anne, opened the casket for me and for an old black woman who, like me, had not been at the rosary the night before...
...It's more than likely that he knew the griefs and sufferings of everyone on his route, and helped where he could...
...Dewey's eighty-four-year-old face was as handsome as ever...
...he knew about the Young Christian Workers, Friendship House, the Catholic Worker, Integrity, priest-workers in France...
...So did Dewey...
...Anna was his perfect wife: dry, practical, witty, tolerant of this holy fool...
...Once he sent a postcard—to the White House, I think—that was made of plywood, measured four feet by eight feet, and cost something like forty dollars in postage...
...ROBERT G.HOYT Commonweal...
...he also knew how to get through to earthly powers...
...He did the same for the president, whoever it was, for the postmaster general (he was a letter carrier much of his life), for the successive mayors of Kansas City, Missouri—for anybody who could right wrongs or help the needy and didn't, including me (I was, for a while, his boss, in a sense, and, in a way, his landlord...
...Dewey's youngest daughter, Bernadine, gave a eulogy that seemed artless but was heartwrenching...
...Good and faithful and insistent servant that he was, I'm sure he had no trouble getting Yahweh's full attention...
...she had lost him...
...His firstborn, Mary Anne, gave a reading at his funeral that was taken from the book of Job, the part in which Yahweh asks his servant where he was when Yahweh laid the earth's foundations, decided its dimensions, dammed up the sea...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 22
