My father grew up in an upstanding family in Norfolk. His grandfather, Alvah Martin, and his uncle, Samuel Slover, were two of Norfolk’s leading citizens. But somehow as a boy, he fell in with the wrong crowd. Here are some of the things he did: He burned down a building. He destroyed the inside of the vacant house across the street. He leaned buckets of water against people’s front doors and then rang the doorbell. He took paper bags, filled them with manure, set them on fire on people’s front steps, and then rang the doorbell. Where the street car tracks curved at the foot of the bridge across the Hague, he greased the tracks so that the street cars would go straight down the hill instead of staying on the tracks. He skipped school one out of every three days during 8th grade at Blair. And finally, he got kicked out of his first year of Culver.
Needless to say, his family was mortified. Their only child had seemingly died to the hopes and expectations they had for him. But then Culver, in a wonderful act of grace, let my father come back and try the 9th grade a second time.
My father told me that at that time in his life he had low self-esteem. But one person at Culver, the track coach, took an interest in my father and encouraged him. Gradually, my father’s grades improved, he got better at sports, his self-esteem grew, and he developed a tremendous work ethic. He also grew as a leader, and by his senior year, he was commander of a company of cadets. A renewed, resurrected Frank Batten emerged from Culver. Dad’s time there was the first of two transformative experiences in his life.
You know what happened next. He was a successful student at the Merchant Marine Academy, at UVa. and at Harvard. And thanks to the beautifully written article in The Virginian-Pilot, you know what Dad accomplished in business and in the charitable realm. I’d just like to add a bit of color.
My father was a fierce competitor. At one Landmark manager’s meeting, someone asked him what we would do if a certain competitor attacked one of our businesses, and he said, “We’ll cut their balls off.”
My father hated lawyers, even though he hired a bunch of them to run our company. In every meeting at work, he dished out lawyer jokes. Dick Barry and Dubby Wynne just endured this treatment; I think Louis Ryan enjoyed it. My father particularly liked Decker Anstrom, maybe because Decker wasn’t a lawyer.
My father felt the biggest accomplishment of his life was The Weather Channel. But he was always a newspaper man at heart. He often told me what needed to be fixed at The Virginian-Pilot, and infuriating to me, his criticism was always spot on.
My father couldn’t bear to sell anything. He was like a rancher who had assembled parcel after parcel of range land and didn’t want to part with any of it, even though he knew that the cattle business had changed. The company was his life’s work.
Sickness was Dad’s second transforming experience, and this one lasted a lot longer than Culver. He got larynx cancer in the late 1970s, and the doctors took out his vocal chords. Because he had so much persistence, he learned to speak better than almost anyone who had had that operation. And then about ten years ago, Pandora opened her box and seemed to drop a new sickness on my father every year.
Throughout his sicknesses, my mother took great care of him. One of the great comforts of both their lives was Darby, their Scottish terrier. Love for Darby was the one thing my parents always agreed on. When I would come to visit, Mom would say, “Darby, your brother is here.” Once, when Dick Barry and Louis Ryan were driving up to my parents’ house, Louis said, “Dick, if you run over that dog, your Landmark stock will be cancelled.” The most beautiful painting in my parents’ house is a portrait of Darby. And the only art that my father had on the wall in the nursing home was a drawing of Darby done by my sister Dorothy.
A few years ago, my father told me that his biggest frustration was that he couldn’t get much accomplished in a day. My father had always defined himself by his work at Landmark and in the community. His sicknesses humbled him, and he came to more deeply treasure his relationships with his family.
St. John, in Revelation 21, talks about a new heaven and a new earth, where there will be no more death, sorrow, pain or crying. This is not the place we go after we die, rather, it is the renewed earth in which we will live after we are resurrected. Tom Wright, in his book Surprised by Hope, writes that our work for the kingdom of God in this life will somehow be incorporated into that future world. And St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, exhorts us to “be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”
Today’s service began with Jesus’ words, “I am the resurrection and the life, He who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.” I look forward to seeing my father on the resurrection day, when he will again have a strong body and a sharp mind and when he will see all his work in this world brought to full fruition in the renewed, resurrected earth of the future. In that new world, God will give Dad a new assignment, and I expect Dad will persist and get it done.
Copyright 2009 Frank Batten Jr.
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