Bob Morrison – A Tribute to My Dad

See the full story in the documentary My Dad The Honor Flight Director.

Well obviously we all want to honor my dad and all the ways he reached people, and so my brothers and I thought that one of the best ways to do that was to bring in one of his favorite bands, Iron Butterfly, and have them play In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on the organ, but they heard on the news the funeral was last week, so you guys missed that and will have to settle for me.

They mentioned earlier that it really was kind of a miracle that he lived as many years as he did, because he had open heart surgery as a kid, but what they didn’t say was that he was actually the first paid open heart surgery in the entire state of Iowa.  So if his parents hadn’t taken him to Des Moines or if he had been born at any other point in history, he wouldn’t have lived this full life, so it really was a miracle.

A lot of you know him from Honor Flight or Marriage Encounter or even scouts or whatever, but for me and my brothers, the things that we’ve been talking about a lot is all the scouting memories we have.  He took us camping every single month, and what he would do with his vacation days is in the summer, he would take a week off and take us all to Scout Camp, and then he’d take weeks off to go on High Adventures for the older kids.  That was kind of the big thing in scouts is you would work toward being 13 years old so you could go on the High Adventures, because those were the bigger trips.  So my dad would leave me at home and Rob and Tom would go sailing in Florida for a week or go canoeing in Missouri for a week.

So I finally turned 13, and he’s like, “All right.  We’re going to go in February and we’re going to go up to Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota, and we’re going to build little snow huts and cross country ski across frozen lakes.”  That first time we went there, every other crew went back to home base and gave up.  We were the only crew that stayed out because the wind chill was actually 30 below.  My dad wasn’t the kind of guy to do something a little bit.  Everything he did was 100%.

On the way back to base camp on the last day, you’re cross country skiing and pulling a sled with all your gear.  We brought tents.  Some people slept in snow huts.  I had to sleep in a tent with my dad because we didn’t make enough snow huts.  The people in the snow huts were nice and warm all night.  For us, the tent poles snapped in the middle of the night because the wind was so cold.

So I was 13 and complaining and we had to cross country ski through a blizzard to get back to the base camp, and my dad took my sled and attached it to the back of his and cross country skied pulling both sleds.  To me, that’s something that really indicates the kind of life he lived.  He was really happiest when he was serving others.  He was all about helping people.

When he got sick with FTD, a lot of times people can, you know, their inhibitions go away, and they can become angry and isolate themselves.  He never did that.  His authentic self was being that generous happy person.  So his life started with this miracle, but really these last 4 years has ended with a miracle.  The fact that he was able to stay home and stay with my mom, you guys cannot imagine how many sacrifices she made to make that happen.

It’s not that they just stayed home the last 4 years.  They packed an entire retirement into 4 years.  They’ve been to 41 states since he got diagnosed 4 years ago.  I can’t count how many times they’ve been to Disney World, probably about a million, and just countless national parks.  They went on adventures together.

It’s easy to think, man his life was cut so short by this.  It’s really a shame, but that’s not the way my dad would look at it.  He would want us to focus on the positive side and appreciate the years we had, and not think about the years we’re not going to have with him.  At the end of every Boy Scout trip, we’d do something called roses and thorns, because he wanted us to appreciate and be thankful of the fun trips we were having.  So everybody would go around the room and they’d say a rose: something they really enjoyed from the trip.  But my dad was always about self improvement and trying to be better the next day than you are today, and so you’d do a thorn too, not to focus on the negative, but just to acknowledge that hey there are things that maybe somebody didn’t have a good time with something, and we can improve on that for the future.

It’s really amazing that Brice Chapman spoke up here.  If you guys had met Brice in 5th grade, you would have never dreamt in a million years that he would do this.  It just means the world to my family, and it meant so much to my dad.  Like Brice told you about kids being afraid of heights/public speaking, it wasn’t just hundreds of kids.  He didn’t just spend years at our troop.  He started a Venture Crew.  He did 3 crews after I went off to college when he didn’t even have any kids in it.  He was going around to other Troops and Packs and training the adults how to be leaders.

Rob and Tom were both COPE Directors with my dad, and they would get people to jump off 100 foot cliffs, with rappel lines of course.  You can’t imagine, that moment you lean back is the scariest thing in the world, and he would get all these people to do it.  At the National Jamboree, he literally helped thousands of people do this.  I think the way that he did that was just by becoming their friend.  He was genuinely your friend, and he just was there and he believed in you.

To be honest, I really wasn’t sure if I should talk, because I get super anxious.  I quit taking drum lessons, because the drum solos made me super anxious.  I quit debate in high school, because I had my first panic attack.  But it’s because of my dad being my friend and believing in me that I’m able to be here, so I just want to end with a quote from one of his favorite characters, or two of his favorite characters, because it’s Spock if you watch the movies a few decades ago, it’s Kirk if you watched them recently:

“You are and forever will be my friend.”

Written by Jimmy Morrison