Remembering John

I went to a funeral on Christmas Eve for my friend John Reuler. That's him and his wife of 61 years, Sunny, back in 1946.

I've never been to a Jewish funeral, but according to the custom, John had to be buried the next day in a plain wood coffin. As I stood in the cold rain at the Temple Emanu-El Cemetery, I thought this was kind of odd because John wouldn't want his friends and family standing out in the rain. But the elegant simplicity of the service was very John. It was a true celebration of his life. I was thankful for the chance to stand in the rain to have a chance to say goodbye to a friend.

John looked kind of like an elderly Robert DeNiro with a crooked smile and his pants hiked up practically to his armpits. That's John below in 1984. When you met him, he always treated you like a long lost friend, like you were just the person he had been waiting all day to see. Even though he was in his eighties, he still came to work every day at his little office down the hall. In theory, he was liquidating his real estate holdings. In reality, I think he just want something to do. He had suffered several strokes and falls, but he couldn't be kept down. He always recovered and came back. He was a tough guy.

I used to help him with little things. Computers vexed him. Most of his software and hardware was 1980s vintage, but I would help him with little problems from time to time. Once he gave me a Tootsie Roll for fixing his printer. Another time we had to fix something on his Buick.

Once every couple of months, we'd go to lunch at Luby's with his pal, Barney. I would try to get John to talk about himself, but to know avail. He graduated from West Point in 1945 and still had the diploma hanging on his office wall. "Don't look at that!" he said when I tried to steal a glance at it one day. I tried to get him to talk about his Heisman Trophy-winning classmates, Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis -- Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside. Or about his time flying B-24s and B-17s. But he didn't want to talk about it. Maybe it didn't interest him or his memory had faded. But he loved to talk about his wife, whom he called She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Today, I did a bit of Googling and found John's West Point autobiography (it starts on page 385 of the PDF). Among other things I learned about John:

He lived in Switzerland as a child in the 1920s and attended French-speaking boarding schools. When he returned to the U.S., he had to repeat second grade because he could only read French.

He came from a prosperous family, but they lost everything in the Great Depression.

He also attended Duke University and the University of Minnesota before attending West Point and later studied nuclear engineering at the University of Chicago.

He was one of the 16-man honor guard for the funeral of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

While serving in Germany after the war, he was appointed Defense Counsel for a black enlisted man accused of murdering two white enlisted men. He was able to prove the man acted in self-defense and the board found in favor of the defendant.

What an amazing man. He was irrepressibly upbeat and always positive. As his West Point yearbook described him, "The possessor of a naturally friendly spirit towards others, John's inborn qualities have made lasting comrades of his many friends. His ability to analyze and solve any problem caused many of us to seek his counsel and advice. His personal problems were never too great for him to give his time to the helping of his brother cadets. This exemplifies John's typical unselfishness and love for his fellow men. To those of us who knew him and lived with him, John will always be a fine officer."

I'm honored that I got to call John my friend. I'll miss him.