Charles
Cully Van Riper touched the lives of unnumbered speech-language pathologists
throughout the world, and their clients, especially those who stutter. He also
touched directly, the lives of many who stutter. But an email sent in September
2002, demonstrates vividly how deeply Van Riper touched lives in other fields
and in as well. The following is produced below with the permission of the
author, Jeb Waldschmidt.
“I
got to know Cully as a writer - I
bought some of his Northwoods Readers at the Rainbow Lodge on the Two-Hearted
in case I was cabin-bound. It
rained for a few days, I had plenty of lantern fuel-- and I was totally blown
away. So I dashed off a letter
telling him how much I liked his stuff.
Imagine my surprise to get a reply! This began a correspondence that lasted from 1988-1994. It was through these letters I learned
he was a speech pathologist and he tossed off that he'd "written some
books about it." I had NO
IDEA.
“The
man changed my life... as a WRITER.
I went back to school 1n 1992 (at age 44) to complete my
undergraduate- and now I'm working
full-time as a grad assist and will complete my MA in English soon. goodbye corporate cubefarm! forever! And it never would have happened if Cully hadn't liked my
stories (or at least he said he did... and I believed him). He did receive the letter/ read the
story. I was one of the small
faces at the back of the room at the memorial service.
“Hardly
a year passes but I uncover another wonderful influence on the world by your
"Dr. Van." We ride on
the shoulders of a Titan.”
Jeb
The Last Day of September,
1994
Dear Reader,
You and I share a special bond. Your end of the bargain is far more
mysterious than mine. I am only a
little Nighthawk, turning in the dark sky and crying the sound as Nighthawks
do. Perhaps you are there...
perhaps not. But there is a
magical chance that the solitary cry beneath the stars starts a dream. I have heard that sound myself, and it
started my dream. Today I received
a three page letter. It began this
way:
Page 1:
September 24th, 1994
Hello!
Well, I guess this is about the last of our many
communications, all good ones. I
don't think I'd better try to prepare another. I thank you for the good company of ordinary times and for
the ease you brought me in times of trial. Good connections.
Good bye.
Love,
Cully Van Riper
Page 2:
September 26th, 1994
Now together again with his wife, Catharine Hull Van
Riper, who preceded him in death, he is survived by his children, great
grandchildren, brother and sister, and a multitude of dear friends who touched
his life in special ways.
Cremation has taken place. Arrangements by the Cremation Society of Michigan. There will be no funeral services at
his request. The family asks that
you celebrate his life in your own special way. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Van
Riper Memorial Scholarship Fund, c/o Van Riper Clinic, Western Michigan
University, Kalamazoo, MI 48007.
Perpetuate his memory by finding the joy in your own
life, extending kindness and understanding to others, and finding solace in the
beauty of creation.
Aw, the beautiful old bugger
even wrote his own obit. And there
it was on page 3. I recognized his
manual typewriter strokes and his wobbly signature. I choked and read:
OBITUARY
What shall you say about me when I'm gone? Say:
- That vicariously I lived a
thousand lives in the people I served.
- That those I touched were never quite the same.
- That through my works and texts I helped pioneer a
new helping profession.
- That I loved to see the flowers bloom, expecially
those human flowers, my students.
- That through my Northwoods Readers I made many
smile.
- That out of a barren field I made a park with tall
trees, a pool, and many flowers.
- That I never quite managed to grow The Perfect
Potato.
- That in my old age I again danced in the
moonlight.
- That the deep forests and lakes were a part of all my
days.
- That I was blessed to have lived with a strong lovely
woman for many years.
- That we raised three fine
children and they in turn nine grandchildren, all of whom loved me.
- That I fought myself out of
the swamp of despair to make of my life a shining thing.
- That a bit of my tiny impact
has been felt all over the world.
(signed)
Charles (Cully) Gage Van
Riper
Dear Reader, we have lost a
National treasure. It is a sad
thing, it is a great thing. It was
no surprise, for he was old and weary from such a long and shining life. Many's the time over many a year we
swapped letters and stories. It
was in Febuary of 1994 that I received his letter stating in his dry Zen-like
way that he was given over to the care of a Hospice service and that he was
going to die. I brooded over that
weekend, pondering a long drive to Kalamazoo Michigan with my two small
children, that they may look upon a great master, that I could thank the man
who so changed my life. Finally,
not wanting to intrude on the family, I decided to make a phone call instead,
and for the first time, I actually heard the voice of Dr. Charles Van
Riper. When he heard Jeb was on
the phone (I was speaking to his son), he took the trouble to rise from his bed
and say hello.
Such an honor!
And yet I felt ashamed to disturb the tranquility of a great Master
whose shoes I was not worthy of carrying!
Still, he put me at ease, and in a minute we were shooting the shit like
a couple of good old boys about lakes and trees and the Upper Peninsula of
Michigan we both love so much. He
assured me he would hold out until Spring at least, to see "... that first
damn flower." The tough old
crust held out all Summer,too. I
ain't the least bit surprised. So
afraid, I was, to send that last letter he requested this Summer, afraid that I
would recieve the sad news that came in the mail today. Take pity on an old fool little more
than half the age of his master and let him share with you the last letter and
the last story he sent along when the year was young.
So if you've the heart and the time and the patience,
bear with me. Through electronic
elocution I shall cut and paste these last words. If they penetrate the hurly burly of the day to day, the
stock fluctuations and traffic, we are most fortunate. I will again turn in the night sky and
sing the little Nighthawk song. I
so miss my older brothers. But we
still have the dark sky... and freedom.
The
Last Letter:
(and
it's all true)
December 21, 1993
Hiya Cully!
I can't possibly express the joy I felt hearing from
you again. So I won't even
try. But it's still gotta be
said. So I said it. There.
What of me, you ask. Well, after a year of unemployment I finally got a real job
with WaterFurnace International, producers of fine geothermal systems. My official title is. "Creative
Director." I started in
August.
The year before that was a hard one, free-lance
writing, selling encyclopedias, cutting wood and driving around a lot. Winter was especially hard, spending
days with a six-month-old and a three year old in our cobbled-together
freshly-moved farmhouse on a field of mud. Any appointments required daycare we couldn't afford. Hard times, but, glad to say, I believe
we're through the worst. And if
money is all a guy ever loses, he's lucky. I learned a lot being a stay-at-home dad. I have a greater respect for women and
children.
I finished the book. Couldn't get anybody to read it, though. Now it's going through a major
overhaul, and I'll keep at it until somebody reads it. Lots of rejections. You know the story.
Went back to school. Dropped out of college for a lot of reasons back in the
early '70's and never looked back.
It's going to be a long road, but I'm determined to be a scientist. I've been an artist all my life. Time to try something new.
I got to break away at the opening of Michigan's deer
season to go to deer camp with a couple of guys from work. I didn't take a rifle. Jeez you guys. I thought you said, "BEER
camp." The guy who owned the
cabin (above Grand Haven) had one of the finest outhouses I'd ever seen. Inside, your story "The
Privy" was tacked on the wall.
I was proud to tell the blokes about how you changed my life.
The book is still being reworked, but I'll send you the
first and last chapter. Have
somebody read them to you. This
junk isn't worth busting one rod or straining one cone. I'm going to try to record the story
soon. Maybe it's best to wait for
a tape.
Diana and the kids are fine. Ezekiel (Zeke) is a little wind-up bubba toy with big blue
eyes just like his mamma. He'll be
two in March. Amelia is her
daddy's little punkin seed. She
loves Cully's stories. Diana reads
them when she has chapel at school.
We're all waiting for the next one. They just keep getting better.
Naturally your high and low times this year touched my
heart. Aye, if the fabric of my
life is as rich as yours, Sensei, if I am fortunate enough to attain such age
and wisdom, good sir, I will be lucky.
I would never presume to console one so much wiser. But I still believe nothing is
forgotten and nobody dies. And
she's only a smile away.
Please please take care of yourself, Cully. You are one of our Nation's great
treasures.
More Later.
Yer Pal,
Jeb
January 17, 1994
Had to get off this letter. Just returned from our U.P.. Snowmobiled in the last 12 miles to the cabin at Crisp
Point. Spent four great days in
winter's terrible beauty with my father-in-law and our friend Mike Hawfield, a
professional historian. Barely
made it out in a snow squall with 30 below cold and 40 knot winds blowing off
Lake Superior. You can imagine how
this made an impression on an Indiana boy from down below.
Amelia's grampa bought me a copy of "Old
Bones..." in Paradise and I loved every word of it, especially "Old
Man Pone" and your conversations with Robert Frost. I blew a couple of mental raspberries
at the publisher for being such pantywastes about "Grampa tells me about
sex." I'm really looking
forward to your new one this spring.
Most of all, I hope I too will have the good fortune
one day of being Monkey Business Grampa.
Sadly, my children only have one Grampa now, but I gotta say he's about
as good as they come.
Still, I wish the Old Man were here. If you get there before I do, please
look him up. Tell him his boy
misses him. Tell him there's a little
blue-eyed boy down below who will learn to say his prayers the same way we used
to do.
January 24, 1994
Just got back from New Orleans. Saw a 120 degree temperature change in
a week. Drove a truck down and
flew back. What's the loneliest
place in Louisiana? Bayou
Self. French Quarter, beans and
rice and the whole nine yards. I
love the place. Cuisine, art,
music and crazy people. Quite a
long way from the U.P., but there plenty crazy people up there too you
betcha.
I stood in frozen solitude and watched the moonlight
dance on the ice of Lake Superior.
I looked up from the drunken jumbled crowd on Bourbon Street and saw her
shine. We can change our scene,
but we see the same moon. Aye,
she's a harsh mistress too. It's a
journey whether you make it in snowshoes or sandals and it don't make a helluva
lotta sense sometimes.
Now I'm caught in the day to day with work and classes
and the band and babies. I try to
keep my hand in my writing, but I'm not sure it's going anywhere. I still don't know if the shit's any
good. I feel like a granny making
a quilt for a blimp. Can't get
anybody to even read the stuff.
February 5, 1994
Begorra, it's February now. I shall will this letter into the envelope this day. So help me. So many things I want to say. So little time.
Old age should burn and rave at close of day. You changed a life or two good sir. I am most honored to call you my
teacher for the rest of my life.
You have a hand in shaping the path of my children and grandchildren far
into the future. It's
saturday. Diana's off with the
kids and I have some time to myself.
Getting to the end of the page.
Strong coffee and word processor.
Trip to the mailbox. I have
promises to keep and miles to go.
Keep well, old friend. Your
words truly shine. And most of
all: Enjoy!
and now, the last
story. February 16, 1994, and I
swear by God 80% of it's true...
The
Passage of a Great Ship
The light had turned to amber
in the balmy evening of September, 1848 in the city of Dublin. James Paul Ryan had hovered as close as
he dared to the port of Dun Laoghaire to watch the passage of the great
ship. He had watched the great
ship unfurl her sails and move out with the tide, becoming smaller as she
strained her rigging to plow over the horizon into the Irish Sea. Bound for Amery-cay, she was, and
aboard was his brother and family with the last bit of savings and treasure of
his band of the Clan Ryan. Jamie
watched her sails become a speck on the sea as the sky grew dark and one lonely,
peculiar star shone bright in the evening sky.
Jamie noticed the star, and it
climbed into the heavens the following night as Jamie spent a cold evening
huddled with another dispossessed family in a "scalp," a hole dug in
the earth roofed over with twigs and turf. Hugging himself against the brisk damp, he took little
notice of the lonely peculiar star as it smiled above the scalp on its journey
through time and space. The
terrible famine was upon the land.
The tyrannizing landlords had turned many from the fields where
forefathers had lived and died for a thousand years. Jamie was one of that many, and this fact was little comfort
to him as he walked the long roads through the mountains. Years later, the letters from America
went unanswered.
The great ship was the Golden
Eagle, one of
the last of her kind. She was a
Yankee Clipper Ship and the tallest and grandest in the harbor. Naturally, Jamie assumed his brother
and family were aboard that ship.
Actually, they were aboard the Sara Marie, a squat, ratty little barque
that remained at anchor three full days after Jamie departed Dublin under the
lonely, peculiar star. Jamie's
journey south over the mountains of Kilkenny toward Cork would fill a book. So would the journey of Jamie's
brother. The sea voyage took eight
full weeks and nearly forty of the dispossessed Irish aboard died en
route. Still, the emigrated branch
of the Clan Ryan endured and sent for Jamie when times were better. The letters from America would go
unanswered. This night Jamie
stared into a peat fire and paid no notice to the lonely, peculiar star in the
black Irish night. Many times they
died along the road. He dreamed of
the great ship, the dark sky and freedom.
The star was still there and
the brush burned out of control.
The wounded were burned alive where they had fallen in the Battle of The
Wilderness in the American Civil War.
The man who would later father the little girl who would marry the
descendent of Jamie's brother had suffered an agonizing leg wound. And he was only a cook. He would be pulled out of range of the
raging brush fire by a Rebel infantryman and sent by wagon toward Andersonville
prison. Later, he would roll off
the wagon and crawl back to Union lines.
He would become a successful merchant in Bloomfield, Indiana. Because of his leg wound, he became
addicted to Laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. No problem. As
a successful merchant, he could order it by the case. When the out-of-work bureaucrats needed another witch hunt
at the end of Prohibition, the drug was outlawed. Sometime later, Great Great Grandfather was found quietly
swinging from the roof beams of his store, presumably a suicide. The store was closed, and later it
burned down.
The swirling flames joined each
other and became a fire storm. Six
miles above the German city, a nineteen year old togglier squinted through the
bomb sight and released his bombs.
As they fell toward earth, another B-17 heavy bomber, engines on fire,
drifted underneath the nineteen year old's airplane. The bombs knocked a wing off, and the luckless lower bomber
burst into flames and spun toward the burning German city. No 'chutes. Perhaps the crew had bailed out when the airplane had become
hopelessly crippled. The nineteen
year old had studied hard to get out of the ball turret gunner position. Your ass was hanging down below a heavy
bomber to be shot at by fifty million angry Germans. Worse, the nineteen year old was of German descent. His son would read accounts of bomber
crews abandoning their aircraft before reaching the target.
That was the theory proposed by
the ball turret gunner's son when he heard his father tell the story of the
luckless bomber over forty years later.
He saw the tears in his father's eyes. The lame theory was the only comfort he could offer, but it
was better than nothing. He and
his father sat before the fireplace on a winter evening in the mid-1980's. Above the old brick house, the lonely
peculiar star kept its vigil in the night sky. The son wasn't thinking about the star, but some years after
his father died, that star became most important. The ball turret gunner's son had no way of knowing it was
the same star Jamie had observed exactly one hundred years before he was
born. Sparks crackled and hissed.
The gunner's son closed the top
of the wood stove and set out to the barn for more wood. It had been a strange weekend. Friday night his wife had found him
drunk as a hootie-owl, holding a letter sent from Michigan. Tears were streaming down his
face. "Cully's dyin',
man. Aw, dammit Cully." Cully Gage was the pen name of Dr.
Charles VanRiper, one of the great pioneers of Speech Pathology and Audiology,
author of many texts and theories on the subject. But it was not the texts and tomes that had touched the
heart of the gunner's son. It was
the wonderful stories Cully Gage had written about his boyhood in the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan. Cully's
bones were old now, but the fire was alive, and his stories were a turning
point. The gunner's son was no
stranger to the twists and leaps of his American English language.
All his life he had turned
phrases like a fry cook flips burgers.
They sizzled on the grill of greed, selling cars and cans of soda. Not until he was approaching fatherhood
and forty did it occur to him to use his skills for something besides hustling
spark plugs. When his own ship set
sail, he could leave more than an unfinished tire ad. He even returned to college and was now taking a course in
Women's Studies, where he had just learned that "empowerment" could
mean the power from within, the ability to endure. And endure he must, for life is hard down on the farm with
his scanty income, wife and two little children. On Wednesday he must turn in a written reaction to hearing
young women bicker on the semantics of oppression. It was late Sunday evening.
And, sad to say, many of us are
not free to this day. Children are
killing each other this night in the "War on Drugs." And oppressed they are, the women. So are the Irish by the tyrannizing
landlords. So are the black people
by the terrible bonds of slavery and the Jews in the evil ovens of the
holocaust. Sparks rose up the
chimney. They winked out and
escaped in the form of carbon molecules and heat energy into the dark sky.
Checking the chimney flue on
the way to the barn, the gunner's son saw the lonely, peculiar star and felt
The Feeling. He had seen the star
as a little boy, but didn't know what The Feeling was. Later as a young man and an expatriate,
he recognized The Feeling. Many
called it "homesickness," and in those days he would look at the star
and whisper, "I want to go home." And tonight, the ball turret gunner's son smiled at the
star. "Bon Voyage,
Cully. I'll get there." There were children to feed and he had
to split the bones of oaks who stood on the earth with Jamie Ryan. And there was writing to be done. There was the tide of history. He would write about the passage of a
great ship.
The great ship. The dark sky. And freedom.
***
And now, Good Bye to you Old
Sir. And doncha hurt none now,
doncha hurt. Look up the Old Man,
now, like we talked about. God
Bless, Old Sir. I love you.
And thank you, Dear Reader, for
hearing the cry of the little Nighthawk.
Good Night.