Eulogy
i was honored to be asked to deliver my father's eulogy. Many family members and friends asked if they could have a copy. So I am posting the text of the eulogy here for anyhone who might want to print a copy for themselves.After the funeral, many folks came to me with their own stories about Pops. At the bottom of this post is a link to add your own comments. If you have stories about my dad that you'd like to share, please post them.
Leonard Soderman came to the US in late 1963, with virtually nothing but the shirt on his back. Now, put yourself in his place. You come to the United States, ready to make your fortune. You’re here roughly a week, and the unthinkable happens – President Kennedy is assassinated. How’s that for a welcome? I can only imagine what must have been going through his head.
He worked hard, building his own business not once, but twice, repairing TVs in the days when it paid to repair TVs. One of the valuable lessons I learned from him about the value of knowledge came in the form of a story he told about going on a service call. He had gone to a customer’s home whose TV had lost its picture. The customer explained that they had changed all the tubes (TVs had tubes in those days). Well, that particular model of TV had a known problem with a connection breaking. It took my dad less than five minutes to fix the problem. He closed up the set, and told the customer it would be $25. The customer complained that he had only been there five minutes. My dad explained that he wasn’t paying for the five minutes it took to fix the TV. He was paying for the years of experience that it took to know HOW to fix it in five minutes.
While we didn’t understand it as kids, he was always teaching us. As my brother Chris has pointed out, it turned out, he was right a far larger portion of the time than we liked. And he had some unique ways of teaching those lessons.
One of these lessons came in the way he handled brotherly disagreements. When two brothers got out of hand (ok, it was a fight), his solution was to make them stand in the front yard, holding hands. If you didn’t love each other, you were going to LEARN to love each other. Yup, here are the neighborhood kids, riding by on their bikes…laughing….and don’t let go – it only meant you were going to be out there that much longer. Did you stop fighting? No, but you sure thought twice about it.
He didn’t just educate his kids. I would wager that there are few of you here who have not tried at least one of Pops Argentine recipes. Empanadas, chorizos, mollejas, humita (that’s the really good corn stuff he made for Thanksgiving), milanesas a la napolitana – if you’ve been to any family function, you’ve probably had one of his meals. And each of these broadened people’s taste in food, introducing them to something delicious and different. He passed on these recipes as well – his granddaughter Bethany (she prefers BJ) learned to make milanesas. Amanda – BJ’s mom, learned to make gnocchi. My brother Paul learned to make empanadas and milanesas, his wife Ginger makes his salad, my wife Stacey makes his chimichurri sauce, and I can make his salsa. We all learned from him.
He taught other lessons as well. The first time Pat brought Pops over to meet her mother, they walked in the door and Pat said hello. Pops leaned into her and said “Don’t you give your mom a hug and a kiss when you see her?”. Well, that wasn’t exactly the Weber family way. So, she said “no”, figuring that would be the end of it. Wrong. He told her to go and give her mother a hug and a kiss. And he didn’t give up until she did. In fact, he did this with just about every family member. Now, hugs are as common as breathing. He taught an entire family how to show their affection for each other.
To some, he was Uncle Leonard. To us, he was Pops. I remember the day I first called him Pops. I was a teenager, and just called him Pops one day out of the blue. He didn’t like it at first, but was persuaded that it was just a shorter version of Papito – Daddy in Spanish. That’s what I’ve called him ever since. But regardless of the name you knew him by, one thing you knew was that you could count on him. He’d give you his shirt and the back to go with it. He went the extra mile to help, and we all benefited from that generosity. And what he really wanted was for people, especially his family, to be happy. Many of the people here are people he considered family. When he married Pat, my stepmother, he became part of her family, and made her family part of his. He accepted them as brothers, sisters, mothers, nieces and nephews. And they made him part of their family as well. When his children married, he adopted their families as well, making every effort to include them in family events. When Karl married Dawn, Pops gained two grandchildren in Donavon and Skyler. And they became part of the family as if they had been there all along. His capacity for love and affection toward the children in his life was remarkable.
Pops learned his lessons from the school of hard knocks. By the time he was thirteen, he was working and earning enough money to support himself. His experiences led him to try to prepare us for the world. Because of this, as we were growing up, he didn’t outwardly show his pride in things you did. He didn’t want to show too much praise, for fear that it might make you “soft”. In the real world, you didn’t get pats on the back very often. For me, this was frustrating, as I tried to get him to show some appreciation for things I did. One afternoon, I had gone over to his house to play for him a tape of music I had worked on. The best I got was a “hmmph…it’s okay”. I was ticked. I had worked on this for 2 days. But a visitor stopped by a few minutes later, and I heard him pop the tape in the player from the other room. “Listen to that – Leo made that tape”. He was proud, and without trying, he taught me another lesson…you need to be proud of your own achievements, without chasing the approval of others. From that day forward, my relationship with Pops changed. I stopped looking for approval – and he seemed to start giving it.
He was proud of all of us, and yet, always wanted more for us. One lesson he taught Paul was that if you don’t ask a girl to dance, it’s practically guaranteed that she won’t dance with you. But if you ask – she just might say yes. He always wanted us to try for the next brass ring.
But his wisdom didn’t just come in the form of sayings. He was a smart cookie. More than one person found out just how smart by playing against him at cards or chess. Karl remembers one time he was beaten by Pops in just six moves. The real impressive part? He never looked at the board. And boy did he get a kick out of Jeopardy.
One thing everyone will remember about Pops is his sense of humor, and how he loved to entertain and be entertained. Pat told us about how he used to show up at the bowling alley, always with some new magic trick he’d have to show them. “Here comes that crazy Argentinian again…”. But his tricks and his jokes broke the ice. He passed on these tricks to me, and to his grandchildren.
Before Paul brought Ginger over to meet him for the first time, Paul warned her – my dad’s a little different. He prepped her about his favorite question – “Do you want anything to drink?” The right answer was “What do you have?” – answer with just a “yes, please”, and you were going to get a smart aleck answer like – “What did you bring?”. So, when Ginger was asked the question, she just replied “What do you have?”. And Pops smiled – “Water”.
His sense of humor extended to many things. As we boys got older, sneaking back into the house when we got home later than expected became an interesting little game. The front door creaked, and Pops snored. So, you’d crack the door a little bit and listen for the snoring. When the snoring stopped, you froze. When it started back up again, you moved. It was like a nighttime version of Red Light, Green Light. Pops caught on to this, and devised his own way of trapping us – he put a piano bench across the hallway. Sure enough, you think you were home free when you cracked your shins on that bench. And he’d flip the light on – give you the look – then flip the light back off. But he didn’t say a word. No, that came the next morning, four or five hours later, when he’d make darned sure you were out of bed on time. Again, he was teaching a lesson – stay out late if you want, but you still have to honor your responsibilities.
There are other little things that have become true Pops-isms. For example, if something needed fixing either use WD40, or…(if you don’t know the other – see me later). Or his change jar for poker. It didn’t matter who was playing, or how the night went – as far as he was concerned he always broke even or won. We couldn’t tell – it was all stuffed into one jar.
And you didn’t want to get him started on maps…Start talking about how to get from point A to point B, and out came the maps. Must have been a guy thing, because all the women around him just cringed anytime any of us started talking about how to get somewhere.
And if you had the hiccups, Pops would cure them. All you had to do, he said, was think about him. So, next time you get a case of the hiccups, think of Pops. We always do.
Another Pop-ism is his love for his grandkids. Talk to him about his grandkids, and his eyes sparkled. He had a special relationship with BJ, he was building relationships with Skyler and Donovon and had just started his relationship with Carolyn. To them, he wasn’t Pops, but Papa. He loved them deeply.
Pops was also very involved with the church. But it wasn’t always this way. Pat has been a member of the St. Polycarp congregation since the church was built. She tried to get Pops to join her, but he wasn’t quite the willing recruit. But he did enjoy games. So when the annual Fiesta came around, Pops volunteered to work the Cue-Ball booth. He got so good at it, in fact, that he wouldn’t let anyone else work the booth, saying that when someone else worked it, they lost money.
As he spent more time working as a volunteer, he became more interested in the church, and after Paul’s confirmation retreat mass, he told Pat he wanted to get more involved with the church as a member of the congregation. For over twenty years, he has been attending Mass at St. Polycarp regularly, and has been a member of the St. Michael the Archangel Bible Study group for about 5 years. Another thing many poeple might not know is that he made sure that Grandma and Auntie made it to church every Sunday. In fact, he only missed getting them there once.
I mentioned at the beginning how he started his own businesses – that’s part of what we’d call the American dream. Pops American dream included becoming an American. I believe he loved this country as much or more than many Americans, and one of his dreams was to become a citizen of the country he loved. This he did in 2002. He was so proud of that, getting the right to vote, campaigning for Arnold, voting in his first election, serving on jury duty. and most recently, traveling to Argentina on an American passport. He built a family and a life here is the US over the course of 40+ years. He came with little, but made a whole lot out of his life. He saw his children grow and prosper. I think his life really was an American dream.
So, as you leave today, know that while we grieve, we’re grieving for ourselves. Pops led his life honestly, fully, and with little regret. He touched so many lives, in so many ways that trying to list them all here is impossible. His belief in what was right and wrong led him through his life. He asked for little, and gave his all. Maybe that’s the best lesson he taught us.
posted by Leo @ 10:52 PM
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Normally, I send people to this site for new pictures of Carolyn. This time around, however, it's not good news.
