Hello. I’m Greg Marshall. Chester George Hall—Papa, as he was known to most of us—was my grandfather. It is so very fitting that we are holding this service here in Longview, where Papa and his wife Joan—Nanny to us grandkids—raised a large and loving family. It’s especially appropriate that we are gathered here at Longview’s First Presbyterian Church, which was, for decades, Papa’s church home. And that phrase “church home” is not merely rhetorical—my mother, Chester and Joan’s oldest child, Carol, recalls that the family’s social life revolved around this church. Sunday school, vacation Bible school, Papa’s work for the Gideons, church suppers (with Nanny in the kitchen cranking out giant casseroles—for her, feeding the five thousand was not that different from her daily routine), Wednesday night prayer meetings, Sunday morning worship service…no matter what the activity, if it was church related, you could count on Chester, Joan, and the five Hall children to be a noticeable presence. With that many kids, the family filled their own pew, and it makes me smile to look out today and see how Papa Hall went from husband of one to father of five, to grandfather of 17, to great-grandfather of 26. One begins to suspect that Papa may have taken a bit too literally the Biblical injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” I am the oldest of those seventeen grandchildren, and after my cousin Kerry and her husband have their son in November of this year, in December, my wife and I expect to welcome our new daughter Brenna, who will be Papa’s 28th and latest great-grandchild. I assume it was this “alpha and omega” status that led to my being asked to speak on behalf of the family. I am honored to do so, but at the same time the prospect is humbling. How do you do justice, in a few minutes, to a life that spanned nearly 92 years? How do you narrate the highlights of a long and happy life when you yourself weren’t around to witness more than half of it? The answer, I think, is that you listen to the memories of others, many of which have been placed on Papa’s memorial web site by friends and relations from as far away as Canada and the middle east, and from these, you fashion a collage of memories. Like the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant by touching it in different places, each of us who knew Papa in different phases of his life have our own unique perspectives, but reading and listening to these many different tales, it’s become obvious to me that there were some very clear common themes: he was a clever and talented man; a joyful and humorous man; a patient and loving man; and above all a devout and Godly man. Chester George Hall was born in Fresno California on September 10th, 1915. He had two brothers, Clyde and Kenny and a cherished sister, Catherine, known to our family as Auntie Kit. I remember him describing to me, with a complete absence of regret, that his was a family of modest means: “We didn’t have much but we had a lot of love,” he said. It must have been from this loving Irish-American family that Papa learned the patience and love that he later showed toward his own family. Certainly, a great deal of patience was shown to him in his early years. As Papa’s son Ken remembers: One story Papa told about his youth was of a rudimentary phone he and the neighbor boy built between their two houses. It involved 2 buzzers, a homemade battery using a galvanized bucket, copper pipe, acid of some kind [the most readily available option being cow urine] and a considerable portion of his mother’s clothes line wire. It all worked fine until the neighbor boy’s father needed his galvanized milk bucket and poor Grandma Hall found all of her clean clothes in a pile under the tree. Needless to say, his communication system was immediately shut down and his budding ingenuity was delayed until several years later when he built a crystal radio for his mother and used the same galvanized bucket as a battery. Since his mom loved the new-fangled radio and the music it produced, a swap of galvanized buckets was arranged with the neighbor and all was forgiven. But even in his childhood, Papa’s cleverness wasn’t restricted to scientific or engineering pursuits. Very early, he evinced an interest in words and music, composing, at the age of four, an original song which is much beloved in our large extended family. The name of the song is "Hammy Doggy," and even though some of them may shortly attempt to deny it, every person over the age of three who can trace ancestry back to Papa Hall knows both the words and the tune. I say that by way of preamble to the following statement: I am not going to sing this alone. I expect all of Papa Hall’s family to join in. How many opportunities are you ever going to have to sing "Hammy Doggy' in a beautiful sanctuary like this? So no sitting there pretending to look for something in your purse or just mouthing the words. I’ll know if you’re not really singing. We will sing only the first verse: Hammy Doggy I give ham to my doggy My doggy likes ham I give him some ham He says “Thank you.” Of course, as anyone who ever stood near him during a church service quickly came to understand, Papa’s love of music did not necessarily equate to a talent for music, but that never stopped him from belting out his favorite hymns with great gusto. His wife Joan, who truly was a gifted musician, showed her great love and patience on those occasions. I’ve often wondered if that wasn’t why they always sat on opposite ends of the church pew with a long line of children and grand children in between them. Interestingly, as the Alzheimer’s that slowly took Papa away from us began to relieve him of his memories, one of the last things to go was music. Papa’s granddaughter Taffy, mother to three of Papa’s great granddaughters, remembers that not only did he sit patiently for hours, enjoying invisible tea and cookies, but he also happily sang and danced with them to every toddler song, and whenever Papa would get confused, Taffy would ask him, “What was that song about Barney Google?” And he would think for a moment, then sing the whole thing. How wonderful to see your own immortality laugh and play, and be a part of their lives. How wonderful for those little girls to have such precious memories of such a patient, loving, and gentle man. Chester graduated from adventures with buckets of cow urine to actually graduating from high school. It was 1932, the great depression was by then a harsh reality, and given the family’s finances, college was out of the question. I remember Papa telling me how the R.G. LeTourneau company hired a few local boys right out of high school, and offered them a crash course in drafting and a little math, enough to make them useful apprentices in the business that "Mr. R.G." ran, one which designed and built industrial equipment such as revolutionary earth movers, arctic “snow train” transports for the oil industry, and offshore drilling rigs. For this bright young man, struggling to better himself in difficult economic times, these scant few weeks of education beyond high school were a lifeline. Papa seized it; made the most of it; and excelled. That program, from its humble beginnings, has now grown into LeTourneau University. And my grandfather, from his own humble beginnings, progressed from blueprint boy to draftsman, to design engineer, and eventually, to chief design engineer, in the process following Mr. LeTourneau from Stockton California to Peoria Illinois to Toccoa Georia and eventually here, to Longview Texas. Through the opportunity provided by “Mr. R.G.,” Papa’s own native intelligence, hard work, and the grace of God, my grandfather’s greatest engineering achievement was the life he built for himself and his family, and the opportunity he afforded to all of his children to pursue the college education that he himself never received. Mr. LeTourneau and my grandfather were very close. Fearing they might fall victim to unsavory influences as residents of the men’s dorm at the LeTourneau plant, Mrs. LeTourneau had invited my grandfather and another young man to take up residence in the LeTourneau home, and it was this which brought Papa together with the woman who would share his life throughout 52 years of marriage. Mr. LeTourneau was a lay minister, and spent most weekends traveling and speaking in churches around the country and even across the border in Canada. On one such trip, to the Toronto area, he heard my grandmother Joan Winnefred Eggleton and her friend Mary Peale playing a violin and viola duet at their local church. After the service, he and Mrs. LeTourneau spoke to the young women’s parents and offered the ladies summer employment as LeTourneau secretaries, the opportunity for travel as the musical act accompanying Mr. R.G. and his wife in their ministry, and room and board in the LeTourneau home. According to his son Ken, Papa returned home one day to find his lodgings stocked with two beautiful young girls and being the shy, bashful type that he was, he struggled for days for a way to introduce himself. He finally solved his dilemma when a hapless possum presented himself in the front yard. Ever the rogue, Papa caught the critter and hid it on a shelf in the girls’ bedroom closet. That night, when the expected scream occurred, a dashing young Papa rushed to the rescue, wrenched the hapless critter from the shelf, flung him back outside and, shortly thereafter, married the young damsel in distress. To get even, one by one, she dumped five squalling kids in his lap. Papa lived a moral, non-judgemental life, more Christ-like than Christian—-an important distinction, I think. He was active in local charities, notably the Lions Club. Through their church, he and my grandmother opened their home to students from India, Africa and Thailand. As a Gideon for more than half a century, Papa took donated Bibles wherever he felt they might be needed, including prisons, where he spoke to the inmates simply, humbly, about morality and his own journey of faith. He took Bibles to African American churches and spoke at their worship services; and, bear in mind, he did this in Georgia in the 1940s--though perhaps somewhat out of step with the prevailing attitudes of his place and time, he was perfectly in step with the example of his Lord and Savior. We've spoken a bit about Papa’s gentle, loving and patient manner, his profound faith, and his talent as an engineer (and, arguably, as a song-writer). But let me digress for just a moment to talk about another of the most notable facets of my Papa: what his nephew Don Yokum aptly described as his “sly witticisms." Papa was an "encouragable punster.” Most of his best efforts were more likely to elicit groans than guffaws, but this did not lead him to show any mercy. All who knew him, especially his family, heard on more than one occasion about "sea-gars" (cigars) and their more evolved counterparts, the “land-gars.” Every automobile trip subjected his hapless traveling companions to musings about why it was that Toyotas were still seen on the road in great abundance, while the full-sized Otas were nowhere to be found. But by far his greatest joy seems to have been plays on his own family name. “Do you know we’re related to royalty?” he once asked his nephew Don. “They live right there,” he continued, indicating a Jehovah’s Witness church they happened to be passing at the time, the building clearly emblazoned with the name “Kingdom Hall.” My mother and others heard many a time about this royal family’s distant colonial cousin, “Independence Hall,” about the "Halls of Montezuma" and the "Halls of Tripoli," and I myself recall quite clearly the detailed engineer’s illustration that Papa would draw at Christmas time, showing himself, Nanny, and the five Hall children newly felled by a large wooden branch which he assured me had been cut from a prickly-leaved, red-berried evergreen, explaining that someone must have "decked the Halls with boughs of Holly." I blame the fact that Papa is one quarter of my genetic make-up for the fact that I still harbor a desire to construct a child-scale replica toll booth, complete with lever arm, which we will bring out only at Christmas so that my daughters can stand beside it when their Nana Carol comes to visit, hands outstretched to collect whatever coins she will provide, and thereby “toll the ancient Yuletide Carol.” If ever two people complemented and completed one another, my Nanny and Papa did, so it was surprising to few that, when Nanny died in 1992, Papa’s world began to unravel. The shock of that loss, and the beginnings of the Alzheimer’s symptoms through which he would progress for more than a decade led to Papa closing his household in Portland Texas in 1995 and moving to Vicksburg Mississippi to live with his son Ken and "his good wife Cathey." There, Papa spent many a happy year surrounded by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, attending Gideon meetings with the next door neighbor, and industriously raking every leaf that landed on Uncle Ken and Aunt Cathey’s sizeable property. When, in late 2004, it became clear that Papa needed full-time custodial care, Ken and my mother’s partner Steve found a facility in Fort Worth devoted specifically to the special needs of Alzheimer’s patients, and it was here that Papa spent the last three years of his life, visited regularly by his family, and in particular by his youngest daughter Susie, her husband Frank, and their three daughters. It’s hard to lose someone you love. Losing them slowly, by degrees, as we did Papa due to the progression of his Alzheimer’s, in many ways is harder. It was hard to see Papa struggle with the realization that he should know you, and know more about himself. It was hard to watch his brilliant mind and a quick wit drifting slowly but irreversibly toward confusion, the end of his sentences trailing off into silence because in the course of speaking them, he had forgotten how they began. In others ways, paradoxically, forgetting was a blessing. Others may feel differently, but I myself was comforted to know that as his memories of Joan ebbed slowly away, so too did the ache of that loss. Now, having lived a long, loving, useful, and virtuous life, having raised a family and seen his immortality proliferate through three generations, and having set an example of good humor and good works that I know will inspire us all for the rest of our days, I rejoice that my Papa has ascended to his certain reward, restored to himself, and reunited with his mate and his Maker. I can think of no more fitting final tribute than that selected by his children to adorn Papa’s memorial. It will read here on earth, as I feel sure it does already in Heaven, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” Goodbye, Papa. "Flights of Angels sing thee to thy rest."