An Ode to Paul Diegel - the final chapter

I mentioned in the first post that our dad was a good card player; good enough to come out of the navy with a fair bit of his friends' money.  Though he liked poker (and taught us to play, and the four of us played various versions as a family after dinner) his real love was for bridge, which represented far more strategy than the luck component of poker (not to say that there isn’t strategy to poker, but bridge – from what I understand – is all about strategy).  PC continued to play in the bridge leagues, and as the autocrossing faded a bit, he sort of redoubled his enthusiasm for bridge and started playing in tournaments, doing pretty well.  I think one of his biggest regrets about me (aside from me not being into cars, dogs, or hunting) was that I never learned bridge, though I do remember once telling him how great bike racing was with all the drafting and teammate strategies, and he said “it sounds a lot like bridge!”  That got me intrigued, but I guess not enough. 

One day he came home and said to my mom “You’ve got to start buying your groceries at Fred Meyer for a while.”  Huh?  Why? “They are having a contest and the more you buy the more chances you have at winning the contest.”  Well, ok, we aren’t big grocery store contest players, but…we’ll bite.  What’s the contest?  “There’s a big regional bridge tournament coming up, and the winner of this contest gets to play with this huge bridge grand master champion!”  My mom and I couldn’t believe it:  a grocery store contest for someone to be able to play a bridge tournament with some guy?!?  But to humor him, our mom indeed started buying groceries at Fred Meyer for the next month, and I’ll be damned (to use a favorite phrase of my dad’s):  we (he) won!  There literally was a drawing and we had a fair number of tickets in there and ours (his) was chosen!

The tourney was a few weeks hence and he started playing even more feverishly to get his full game on, and the finally the weekend arrived, and sure enough, PC was paired up with “Boris” (not his real name, which I can’t remember, but Ashley thought that the guy was Russian, which he wasn’t, but he was an imposing physical guy and it makes for a better story).  These tournaments were pretty intense and people played morning to night, and ol’ Boris and Paul kept on a’winnin’, and sure enough, on Sunday night the Grand Champeens were….Paul and Boris!  

After the spraying of champagne and the kisses from the podium girls and the medals being hung around their necks Paul said to Boris “wow, that was so amazing playing with you; I learned so much and it was so fun!” To which the very gracious Boris replied “Not so fast!  I could not have done that without you! You played as well as any partner I’ve ever had, and that’s the truth!”  (or something to that effect).  I think it was another highlight of my dad’s life, ironically again near it’s end. 

In addition to climbing when few were climbing, spaniel field trials, hobby farming, ping pong (we belonged to the “Ping Pong Palace" in downtown Portland), small cantankerous British sports cars  (and station wagons?  “hate vans, hate pickups…. love station wagons!”) our dad was also into….roses!   Not that I tried, but I couldn’t figure out that passion.  Certainly spending most of his life in the Rose City of Portland he knew that it was an ideal climate for roses, but as kind of a man’s man it seemed like a strange pastime, but he was into his roses, and again let his competitive juices flow and started entering his roses into the contests or races or shows or whatever they were called.  I don’t think he achieved the same level of success there that he did in his other endeavors, but he didn’t seem to care as much, and continued to futz with his rose gardens even as the rest of the hobby farm gradually deteriorated (with his cheap labor sons mostly gone and losing the energy/motivation to keep it up). 

I’ve talked a lot about what Paul C Diegel did, but not too much about who he was.  I have many times described him as an odd guy:  generally pretty taciturn, but loved telling stories and had a great sense of humor.  A bit standoffish:

 

A hilarious photo that can be captioned many different ways, but this early 80's family Christmas photo shows that PC's sorta off-to-the-side, not-quite-smiling was kind of his thing.  

Who poses for a picture with his wife standing that far apart?!? 

But tremendously loyal to his family and friends.  Quite a snob in some ways:  “Beer is for the common man, not for sophisticated men!” but happy to be a bit of a boor (Boones Farm Strawberry Hill!).  He had high standards and was pretty judgmental, but was respectful of other people’s decisions; when I took a semester off of college to be a ski bum at Snowbird, he was convinced I’d never go back to school, but he bought me a car to help enable that:

And when I graduated from college and didn’t want to get a job and just wanted to ride my bike around Europe, he thought it was a poor idea but gave me $500 the night before I left because “I’d need it”. 

He valued (having read) high literature, but loved trashy novels.  He liked being a father:

With Brother Paul

 I think – but he wasn’t a big supporter of my baseball, soccer, cross country, track, etc; they simply weren’t his thing.   He loved the outdoors, but I think this was his last hike, when I was about 13:

His last job was starting up a property management company called, appropriately enough: “Practical Property Management”, because “Practical” was pretty much a term that he lived by.   He never made a lot of money and was frugal to the point of always re-using paper towels, and put more stock in fun than money, yet he had a lot of financial acumen and we lived a comfortable life.

But more important than practicality to him was the concept of integrity.  I think that regardless of a bit of surliness that some people may have perceived in him, he made a huge point of being super committed to his bosses, his clients, his friends, and his family, doing what he said he’d do, treating everyone fairly, being honest to the point of bluntness, and being generous enough to be the guy who would “go to the bank for you;”  that is, if you needed help, you’d just say “I need help” and he’d take you to his bank and say “how much do you need?” An important characteristic in a spouse, friend, and dad. 

Our dad’s obsessions weren’t all healthy; he was a lifelong smoker that resulted in getting bladder cancer in his early 60’s, and while he tried to quit several times, he simply couldn’t even as he hated what smoking did to him and even after getting crushed by the surgery, which resulted in an ostomy (a plastic external bladder via a port in his abdomen). Eventually the smoking led to his demise at a too-young 73. We found out later that he wasn’t feeling very good so he went to the doc, who told him that he was riddled with cancer and the end was nigh, but – ever the stoic - instead of making a huge deal about it, he literally told no one else, spent a lot of the next period of time making sure everything was in order and our mom was going to do just fine after he was gone, and two months later he died, leaving behind a nice note to us.  I've never visited his grave in Portland, preferring to think of him as he was, not as he is. 

Twenty-seven years later I look back on his life and realize that I really admire him for the fact that he led a life that he sought.  After surviving World War II he realized that life is tenuous and short, so it’s best to get after it and do what you wanna do, “damn the torpedoes” (a phrase he liked).  One of his favorite things was to sit out on a dog box that was next to the barn with his favorite dog Willie to survey his domain of the little farm with the fields and woods spilling out on each side.  With a stout gin and tonic (complimented with a crushed sprig of mint) he'd quietly appreciate the life that he had created, before finally giving the ginned-up ice cubes to Willie and heading back into the farmhouse. 

Happy 100th Birthday PC