In Celebration of Robert John Drabek

By Elliott F Drabek

5/7/2022

Hello and good morning everyone. Thank you for coming. I’m deeply honored on my father’s behalf.

I want to start with something about my dad’s sense of humor. Some of you may or may not have noticed he was missing the index finger of his right hand. It happened I believe in 1971, a few months before I was born. He was working as a carpenter at the time and had an accident with a circular saw. It healed over fine and I think it was a pretty minor thing in the big picture, but I remember him telling me once he was always hoping someone would ask him a question that he could answer with “Nine.” I can still see his smile as he said that. Those of you who know his sense of humor know he would be disappointed if I missed this opportunity to make a joke with the punchline “Zero”.

Since most of you only knew him in his later life in his later environment, I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about where he came from, a different man in a different world

My memory of some of the details of the early years may not be entirely reliable but the only person here who can fact-check me has forgiven me for far more than that.

My dad was a third-generation single parent, from a line going back to a Catholic orphanage in Shreveport, Louisiana, a line that moved west to San Antonio, Texas, and then to Phoenix,

where my father was raised by his mother Helen and the man he called his “real father”, Tom Barnes. 

My grandmother told me many times how early she saw some of his characteristic traits: quiet, serious, thoughtful, loved dogs.

My knowledge of the next decade or so is a little fuzzy, but the next image I have, I think goes a long way to painting a picture of the man and where he was coming from. The image is of him in high school and soon after he dropped, with his good friends Ernesto, Gene, and Lawrence. I wish I could check the details but with Ernesto’s death this past January there remain no witnesses. The four of them spent a lot of their time, and sometimes lived, in an abandoned house they called “The Shack”, on what was then the outskirts of Phoenix, on the property of an old miner who lived in another shack nearby. There, among other things, they hatched up a plan for adventure. With my dad’s advanced high school calculus and electronics skills (I don’t know how technical the others were or were not), they would build a device, the Universal Thought Machine, capable of understanding and predicting the behavior of any system. Naturally, they would use the device to predict the behavior of the stock market, using the proceeds to further develop the Universal Thought Machine, until they had amassed enough to build a self-replicating robot, capable of mining into a mountain, creating copies of itself until an army of these robots could craft the now hollow mountain into a spaceship, which would lift off and carry them to explore new worlds.

They got as far as stealing some parts from the telephone company and stashing them in the shack. I’ve forgotten exactly what happened next, but it ended with them discreetly returning the parts in the middle of the night, narrowly avoiding repercussions.

Although the plan was grand, it didn’t pan out, with Lawrence’s death not long after, and Ernesto and my father choosing to volunteer for military service, hoping to have more say in their assignments, rather than waiting to be drafted and more likely sent to Vietnam.

But that theme of exploring new worlds remained for far longer, seeing grand possibilities both in himself and the universe, far beyond what he had come from or others might see as possible.

My dad joined the Air Force, where his test scores got him sent to technical training in Biloxi, Mississippi, and then to Ajo, Arizona where he spent the next few years way out in the desert maintaining radar equipment.

There’s a good story here I’ve mostly forgotten about my dad returning to base on his motorcycle late at night, something about a pistol, maybe a confrontation with a sergeant. Unfortunately I don’t remember any more than that, but the image of the outlaw inside him, which mellowed with time, and his fearless defiance of authority, which did not.

Not long after leaving the Air Force, he went west to join Ernesto, who was living in LA near his family. There he remade the acquaintance of Ernesto’s younger sister Consuelo, a rare match for his intelligence, aspiration, and perhaps his fiery temper.

At that time, there was really nothing much to distinguish him from any other trailer park high school dropout, beyond his long hair, those test scores, his aspirations to wider horizons, and his belief in his worthiness of them. Fortunately for me, Consuelo saw something more in him, the viability of those aspirations and beliefs, I suppose.

There’s a sort of parallelism between saying that that was lucky for me and the finger joke that I think my dad would like.

Anyway, by 24 the freewheeling hippy was a married man and a father, getting a degree in mathematics, and learning fluent Spanish, a tool to explore new worlds and to provide his son with a bilingual environment and a connection to the other half of his heritage. Although we gradually shifted to English over the years we still spoke some Spanish at home even decades later.

When I was an infant, they took me to Uruapan, Michoacán, where my mitochondria come from. While my mother did anthropological fieldwork, my father stayed home as househusband to take care of me. My mother remembers how well he adapted. When their car broke down, my father rebuilt the engine together with a Mexican mechanic working entirely in Spanish through the entire process.

By 30 he was a single father, teaching math in a series of little Arizona mining towns, where I first came into a sense of who I was in the world, who I thought my peers were. I’ve gone back since. Seeing the stark contrast between my life and the lives of most of those peers, economically, culturally, I realized how much I owe to my father’s at-that-time-still-mostly-hypothetical vision of who we really were. 

He continued to proudly embody a progressive vision of manhood, taking night classes in sewing -- he made me a blue checked shirt I wish I still had -- and learning to cook. My earliest memories of his food are of boiled hot dogs, spaghetti, Bisquick pancakes for breakfast on weekends. Only a few years later, we were vegetarian, the Moosewood Cookbook was a staple celebratory foods were asparagus and artichokes, and crepes for special weekend breakfasts. Many of you may not realize how sophisticated and exotic those things were in that time and place, at least for people like us.

Much later, when I took a sociolinguistics course in college, I learned that when different social groups in the same place, classes, castes, ethnicity, speak differently from each other, it is often a reflection of a history of migration that has brought those groups together, bringing their regional dialects or influences with them. I thought myself insightful to see this clearly in the speech of the three largest groups around me: Working class Whites, audibly from an early twentieth century wave of migration from the South, working class Hispanics with echoes of Spanish from sometimes generations ago, and educated folks like ourselves who talked like educated folks everywhere. I knew I was partly Hispanic, but it says a great deal about my father’s striving that it was only decades later that I realized the obvious point that I was also part of that migration from the South, and I understood the context of his forceful insistence that we don’t say “ain’t”.

Over time, he kept growing and exploring the possibilities of the world. We moved to Tucson in 1980 when he started grad school, a few years later becoming a professor of computer science, taking me to art house films, and protest marches, for women’s rights, nuclear disarmament, making the very smart decision of marrying Yan.

It saddens me to think how difficult I was as a teenager, the unbelievable fool and occasional expletive deleted I was as a young adult, how that distanced us and I think damaged us both. But we healed and he was always there, supporting me and giving me some of the best advice I ever got.

Like when he gave me an ROTC pamphlet about the opportunity to take army officer basic training without obligation. It was an unexpected and brilliant suggestion from the anti-authoritarian peacenik. I didn’t end up joining the military but the six weeks of training was transformative, showing me broader horizons and a larger vision of who I could be.

He was the one who pointed out that if I was passionate about learning Chinese, and aware of the practical benefits of a computer science degree that I could have both by studying computer science in China. A totally unexpected idea in that time and place, and one of the best decisions I ever made.

It was my father who gave me my trade. It’s much easier to learn deeply when you’re young and my father taught me essentially the entire undergraduate computer science curriculum before high school, giving me a trade that has sustained me throughout my life, something that would likely otherwise have been much more difficult to achieve for someone as disorganized and erratic as myself.

My father spent the last twenty years of his life battling one cancer and another. It was hard, but he kept his pride. He started buying nicer clothes. He even got highlights in his hair. To this day I think of him when I stop and choose a nicer shirt to go to the store in, to present myself like someone worthy of respect. And always dress up for the doctor he told me. Dress like someone worthy of the best care.

I don’t really have a good conclusion to wrap this up, but I can hear my dad saying I’ve talked enough already. Thank you.