In Atkinson, Neb., a town I’ve never visited, flags fly at schools because of my father. I’ve never seen these flags, and until last month, I’d never heard of Atkinson. But it comforts me to know they are there, a little part of the big legacy of Francis Xavier McArdle, who died in May at age 82.
My sister and I learned about them after we started going through the mountains of papers in Dad’s home office near Boston and came across a folder labeled “Atkinson, Nebraska.” I opened it, and out fell bunches of letters written by children at the West Holt elementary school.
An hour of Googling revealed the full story: After 9/11, when he and I were both working with one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero, he had been handed a care package that the children of Atkinson had assembled for the rescue workers. Touched, he had sent a check, and then others, totaling $6,000 over the years. The money was used to fund, among other things, new flagpoles at the elementary school and junior high.
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“Use the enclosed to help your students remember that we all worked together to rebuild a better America,” he told the school in a note. He told his children nothing about this, because while Dad was a talkative man, he was also a private one. He expressed his love through ideas and action, not confessions or reminiscences about his frequent acts of impulsive generosity.
I grew up on fact-filled tours of New York City and debates over the Sunday political shows, in which he graciously humored a teenager’s passionately garbled ideas about the world. After I left home, there were marathon phone calls, during which he taught me most of what I know about infrastructure and urban policy, and the way that government actually works.
You see, the supreme irony of my life as a libertarian columnist is that Dad was a lobbyist. He spent a decade working for the New York City government at various levels, eventually becoming commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection. After that, he spent most of the next three decades running a trade association for the heavy contractors who built most of the infrastructure in the tri-state area. Whenever I wrote something particularly salty about lobbyists, I usually got a humorous note: “You do know what paid for college, right? — Love, Me.”
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He was not cynical about his profession, because he believed his members were, as his note said, building a better America. We would drive around the cities he knew well — New York, Boston, D.C. — and he would narrate their histories as told by their roads, bridges and famous buildings, their water treatment plants and sewers. Of course, we also talked of much else, because his interests were wide and his mind, like his office, overflowed with information neatly labeled and filed away.
I still remember the time when I, a college student fresh from learning T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” opened our front door and said, “Let us go then, you and I … .”
Not missing a beat, my father continued:
“When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
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The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.”
I don’t know why I was surprised; he was inordinately fond of wordplay and puns, and also of that particular era of poetry, which included his favorite poet, William Butler Yeats. And what he liked, he remembered.
When people reached out to commiserate on his passing, they all said the same thing: “He was a brilliant man. I learned so much from him.” As a young child, I got into the habit of using him as a kind of walking encyclopedia, and I still recall my shock the first time my father didn’t know the answer to something I asked. I don’t remember my question. I do remember that I was in my 20s.
Luckily, he had endless patience with my questions, because he liked questions, and answers, above all things. And also because he was a girl dad before girl dads were spoken of, a shameless booster of anything and everything my sister and I did. He made a point of coming to many of my basketball games, even though in the 1980s, parents usually didn’t (and even though I was frankly terrible at every part of the game except “being tall.”) When I went to camp or college, there were daily cards carrying tidbits of news from home, followed by the eternal signature: “Love, Me” — illustrated by a stick figure in a top hat.
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I wish I’d saved those cards, but, at the time, I didn’t understand their real message: that no matter where I went, he would be right behind me, thinking about me, watching out for me, cheering me on. He feigned enthusiasm even for my wildest schemes, such as using a ruinously expensive MBA to take a very modestly paid job in journalism. Though, admittedly in that last case, he couldn’t quite hide the terror in his eyes.
(See, Dad? I told you it would work out.)
I don’t quite yet believe that there will never be another card, another phone call, another impromptu tour of a city’s bones. But I am glad to think how rich the world is with the things he left behind, with the people he loved and the infrastructure he helped build, including two flagpoles in Atkinson, Neb.
