No posts lately – I have been traveling a lot and been overall distracted. One of my trips the past couple of weeks has been to sit with my father in hospice, pack up his belongings and clean out his apartment and then plan and attend his funeral.
My father was a good man. I wrote his obituary for the paper:
“Wayne Drummond Pruitt died Sunday November 02, 2014 in hospice at St. Vincent’s in Hot Springs. Born October 23, 1928 to parents Callie Morgan Pruitt and Joseph Melton Pruitt in Duncan Oklahoma, Wayne graduated from Duncan High School in 1946 and from Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University) with a degree in forestry in 1950. Wayne achieved Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts of America; in 1943 he was a camper at Philmont Scout Ranch and for three summers during college summers worked at Philmont as a ranch hand. He served in the U. S. Army from 1950-1952. A long time resident of Murfreesboro, Arkansas, he was a member of the Murfreesboro First United Methodist Church. Also a member of the Murfreesboro Lion’s Club, Wayne had perfect attendance at Club meetings for over twenty six years and served the club in most every officer capacity. In 1983 he was named the “Citizen of the Decade” by the Murfreesboro Chamber of Commerce for his many volunteer acts in the community. He organized the Boy’s Baseball Association in the late 1950’s soon after moving to the area.
Mr. Pruitt retired from a thirty-five career with International Paper Company in 1985. Wayne, an avid fisherman and outdoorsman also loved quail hunting. He made many happy trips out in the west hiking, camping and fishing his way through New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.
Wayne was preceded in death by his parents, his brother, Joe Morgan Pruitt of Duncan Oklahoma, his sister Vernelle Pruitt of Houston, Texas, and his son, Joseph Morgan Pruitt.
He is succeeded by two daughters, Sarah Pruitt Campbell of Charlotte, North Carolina and Mary Sue Pruitt of Knoxville, Tennessee. He also leaves two grandsons, Andrew Templeton of Chicago, Illinois and Thomas Campbell of Charlotte, North Carolina.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that memorials be made to “Memorial Fund” at First United Methodist Church, 403 2nd Avenue, Murfreesboro, Arkansas 71958.”
We had a lot of pictures of him at all ages. This was a college graduation pic, I believe:
We did NOT use this one for the obituary. He was very handsome as a young man. Face it, most of us are good looking when we are young. It is as you age that you must develop character or personality or something else to carry you through because those looks fade.
Not that I spend a lot of time reading the obits, but I do not like it when someone is in their 80’s or 90’s and the picture accompanying the article is obviously from their debut or something.
We used this pic. My sister was not so keen at first; I think she considered it undignified or something. However being the overbearing older sister that I am, and taking advantage of the fact that she was flurrying around in some agitated emotional state and couldn’t deal with the tactical stuff, I gave this pic to the funeral home.
This is so much more “him” – it just captures who he was. This was from one of his last fishing trips and he was so happy!
He was a “manly” man – much more at ease with men than women. He did like women however – we had to keep a couple of girlfriends from running into each other at the funeral and the man was 86. He was an old-school John Wayne kind of guy; he did as he pleased and didn’t worry about material things. He didn’t have the John Wayne swagger thing going on though; Dad was mild mannered, humble and unassuming.
He was principled and stuck to his values. He prized his friends and his community most of all and he had some incredible friends. Loyal, kind and true friends; we should all be so lucky.
His IQ was off the charts and he had a keen aptitude for math. Growing up in Oklahoma, with those skills, he was encouraged by his parents and teachers to study engineering at university and go into the petroleum business like his older brother and everybody else in Oklahoma and Texas possessing a similar acumen. For whatever his reasons, all he ever wanted to do was be a forester, so those engineering suggestions fell on deaf ears.
He was like that in many respects. He had his values and his friends and his way of life and that was what mattered to him. He was not swayed by anything outside those self-imposed standards.
He was a terrible housekeeper; I remember once when I was little my mother took us kids somewhere for a few days and my dad had to go out and buy new clothes because he wore all of his stuff and it finally got too dirty to wear again and he had absolutely no idea whatsoever how to do laundry. The places he lived after the divorce from my mother were always terribly dirty and messy. I would starve before I would have ever eaten anything from his fridge.
I learned a lot from him. I learned to do things correctly the first time and to never do anything in a shoddy or inferior manner. He taught me to play basketball and drilled into me to “never quit on a miss” when practicing shots. He taught me how to fish. He exhibited a great sense of enjoyment and having a zest for life. I am sad that he is gone, but I miss the man he was. I do not begrudge the fact that he is no longer here because he was declining so much the past few years. He was losing his sight and his hearing, and his throat muscles atrophied so he could no longer talk or eat. In spite of this, he kept on going as best he could right up until the end. And he did have a lot of really great years when he was able to live pretty much as he pleased and do the things he loved.
He was a good man.
The post Funeral for a friend appeared first on .