Sunday, 8 April 2007
Robert “Pappy” E. Allen, Jr. 1921-2007
My grandfather, “Pappy,” died last night sometime before 11 p.m.
He died in his bed from a heart attack. His last hours, by all reports, were filled with new friends and laughter. Robert Allen is survive by his daughter, son, and an extended family of grandchildren.
But who was my grandfather?
Many of you reading this will have met Robert Allen. And maybe what follows will allow you a smile, no matter the memory, about the man that was my grandfather.
I don’t know much about his childhood, other than he grew up in the Great Depression-era south. It is from this childhood, that he could reveal emotions of sorrow and regret in stories from an era, and place, steeped in bigotry.
He joined the Marines before the legal age of 18 (17 as I recall), before the start of World War II. When the war started, he was deployed, as so many Marines, to the Pacific. He served as a metalsmith in Guadalcanal. “I dismantled the first Japanese ‘Zero’ captured,” he once told me. National Geographic aired a special in this decade about the Guadalcanal theater. Robert’s eyes lit up as 60 year footage of his friends standing on an airfield in the Pacific was ran, “I was standing right there!” He was disappointed that the footage was cut, he believed that if only they panned just a little more, he would be seen standing under the wing of an Navy plane.
He returned home from war with stories, as so many veterans of World War II had, that were rarely talked about. I know about the jeep they stole from the Army, for use in the Marine’s motor pool. Or the Japanese naval shells that rained destruction on his station, Robert diving for safety of a bunker. There were stories of the aid station he was in: the memory of wounded Marines breaking him down in tears. Yet I know a little more about his life after the war.
He studied photography under the newly created “G.I. Bill.” Robert married Lois Naomi Claycomb and moved west to California, where he worked as the photographer for Smiley Burnette, of Petticoat Junction fame.
Somehow his photography work did not pan out and he landed in medical sales, and his intellect shined, if only recognized later in the accomplishments of invention.
As I understand the story, he was frustrated by the design of an instrument for removing lens cataracts by his employer (this would prove something of a reoccurring theme in his life, frustration that his ideas, even his intellectual positions, were better). Robert partnered with a doctor to design, patent, and produce the DU-AL Cryoextractor, a unique device that used the same principles of cold and frost that make your tongue stick to a flagpole in the middle of winter. The DU-AL II, a second generation of the device, is used around the world, in too many countries to count, to restore the sight of otherwise blind people. The cryoextractor has found reuse in other procedures, names that escape me. Tens of thousands of people have been effected by his invention in the second and third worlds by the work of organizations like Christoffel-blindenmission, Doctors Without Borders, and more.
Robert Allen was a person that could take the opposite side in most debates, be they political, religious, domestic...well, most anything that could be debated, he had an opinion that was probably not yours; and that opinion could be so far removed from the point you stood, he could shake your resolve, even if it was your resolve just to continue talking to him.
Robert was a zealous advocate for any of the following, allowing someone that didn't know him a peek at the intellect of a man that did not have a formal higher education: the economic policies of Henry George and the life’s work of George M. Lamsa, a translator of the Bible from Aramaic. Robert refounded Aramaic Bible Society in 1995, archiving, collecting, and republishing much of Lamsa’s works.
Some might argue that he had a penchant for the fringe candidate or the underdog in a fight: Robert supported the presidential aspirations of Lyndon LaRouche and H. Ross Perot. If ill-fated, comical, and sometimes both, as those aspirations might have been, each in turn were catalysts for discussion on the national scope.
There is so much more of course. This small memorial could only be a glimpse at the life of Robert E. Allen, Jr. And regardless of whatever disagreement, disagreements that might send some to consider knocking on the door of an anger management counselor, he was a man that loved his family, and was loved by his family.
I will miss him.
