Opening Words
Something has spoken to me in the night . . .
and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth. --Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again |
ReadingIn the rising of the sun and in its going down,
we remember him. In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember him. In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember him. In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember him. In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember him. In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember him. When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember him. When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember him. When we have joys we yearn to share, we remember him. So long as we live, he too shall live, for he is now a part of us, as we remember him. --Roland B. Gittelsohn |
Musical Interlude
Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2 by Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Reading
Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.
The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air -- these things will never change. The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry -- these things will always be the same. All things belonging to the earth will never change -- the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth -- all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth -- these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever. The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also ever change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April. --Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again |
Eulogy
THE LIFE OF JAMES FRANCIS HERNDON
By David Herndon
James Francis Herndon was born on August 11, 1929, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He died on November 4, 2021, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Survivors include his son, David Herndon, and daughter-in-law, Cindy Kirsch; his granddaughters Rachel Herndon and Meredith Herndon; his niece Hilary (Joe Tesoriero) Beall; and many other relatives. He was predeceased by his wife of more than sixty-seven years, Doris Arlene Beall Herndon, and by his parents, Francis Earl Herndon and Mary Agnes Demmer Herndon.
James was the only child of Francis Earl "Red" Herndon (March 2, 1908 -- July 10, 1952) and Mary Agnes "Toodie" (Demmer) Herndon (1903 -- 1956). Earl (whose parents were James Miller Herndon and Rosetta Pearl (Arnett) Herndon Erwin Attebury) worked in the movie industry as a distributor, connecting the Hollywood movie studios with local movie theaters. His work took the family from Indianapolis to St. Louis, Missouri, for a year, and also to Kansas City, Missouri, for a year, before they all returned to Indianapolis. Mary Agnes (whose parents were Joseph F. Demmer and Mary Beatrice "Bedie" (O'Geraghty) Demmer) worked in a downtown department store, playing popular songs on the piano so that potential customers could hear the new songs before purchasing the sheet music. She also volunteered for the local Democratic Party and as a result had an opportunity to work for many years in local government in Indianapolis.
James attended Little Flower Catholic School, St. Joan of Arc Catholic School, and Cathedral High School, graduating in 1948. As a child, James lived with his parents in their home on DeQuincy Street. He began working at an early age. Aside from delivering newspapers while riding his bike, he worked as an usher in a local movie theater, as an assistant to a sign painter, as a gas station attendant, and as a maker of milkshakes and sundaes at a local drugstore. He also worked at the downtown Vonnegut Hardware Store, although he never met the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose family owned and managed that store as well as several other hardware stores in the Indianapolis area. James also managed to find time to completely disassemble and reassemble a Ford automobile, which was a popular thing to do among his high school classmates.
After his graduation from high school, James attended the John Herron Art Institute, which was located in Indianapolis. After a year of study there, he transferred to Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied Studio Art and Art History. He received his undergraduate degree in 1952. During one of his college summers, James traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, with one of his college buddies. They stayed in New Orleans for several weeks, enjoying the traditional jazz music of that city.
After his graduation from college, James enlisted in the United States Army. He completed basic training at Fort Riley in northeastern Kansas. James became part of the Counter Intelligence Corps and was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, for a year. His assignment was to observe the process whereby political parties were organizing themselves in post-war Germany.
Upon returning to the United States, James shifted his academic focus to Political Science and enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he received his M.A. Subsequently, he enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. During the 1959 -- 1960 academic year, James as an assistant professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. From 1960 to 1967, he was a member of the political science department at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he also directed the Honors Program. In the summer of 1965, he worked at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., as part of a professional development program. In 1967, James joined the political science department at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. For several years, he directed a professional education program called Mathematical Applications in Political Science (MAPS). This intensive summer program was attended by political scientists from all over the United States. At his retirement ceremony in 1994, he was given the designation of Professor Emeritus, and a classroom was named in his honor.
While at Indiana University, James became acquainted with Doris Arlene Beall, a music student and French horn major. They met in the student union cafeteria where James was working as a cashier. They were married on Christmas Eve in 1952 in Baltimore, Maryland, by an army chaplain while James was on leave from his military service in Germany. After graduating from Indiana University in the spring of 1953, Arlene traveled to Europe and stayed with James in an apartment in Stuttgart, Germany. They had a memorable holiday traveling through Switzerland to Italy, where they visited Venice and Florence. Arlene returned to the United States after six months. Their son David was born on February 18, 1955.
James and Arlene lived in Pontiac, Michigan, while he was a student at Wayne State University. In Ann Arbor, while James was a student at the University of Michigan, the family lived in married graduate student housing. In Des Moines, the family lived in a second-floor apartment and then in the first floor of a house. In Grand Forks, the family lived in married faculty housing on State Street and then in a two-story apartment on Fourth Avenue South before becoming first-time homeowners and moving into a two-story home at 1002 Belmont Avenue. In Blacksburg, the family lived in a second-floor apartment on Tom's Creek Road for a year and then James and Arlene bought an undeveloped lot where they designed and built their own home overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. They lived in this home at the corner of East Roanoke Street and Harding Avenue from 1967 until 2015.
The next section is adapted from the obituary of Doris Arlene Beall Herndon, which can be found at www.dorisarlenememorial.com.
The 1960s were revolutionary years in the United States. In 1960, when the decade opened, James was thirty-one and Arlene was twenty-nine, and as young adults, they participated in this remarkable time of progressive change in their own way.
Musically, James and Arlene took part in the folk music revival that swept through the United States. Arlene learned to play the guitar, while James took up both guitar and banjo. They sang and played songs brought to public awareness by well-known artists such as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. When the family lived in North Dakota, James and Arlene would regularly get together with their friends to sing these songs late into the night, paging through their songs books that provided the words and music. James was especially interested in labor songs. James and Arlene also learned to play recorders.
Politically, James and Arlene were inspired by the movements for political change that were taking place in the United States. They participated in a civil rights march that began on the campus of the University of North Dakota. They also traveled to the International Peace Garden, which sits on the border between the United States and Canada, for a demonstration against the use of nuclear weapons. They also visited a nearby Indian reservation on multiple occasions, partly out of curiosity and partly out of a sense of solidarity.
Religiously, James and Arlene stepped away from the religious traditions of their younger years, which was Roman Catholic for James and Baptist and Methodist for Arlene. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they had started attending the local Unitarian Church. Not finding anything comparable in Grand Forks, they resolved to start their own Unitarian Church from scratch. They gathered various friends and acquaintances together, and, with guidance from the Unitarian Universalist Association, a new congregation was born. This religious community offered Sunday services for the adults and religious education for the children. Arlene was a religious education teacher, while James was in charge of setting up the reel-to-reel tape player that played reel-to-reel recordings of sermons from larger congregations that were sent along by the Unitarian Universalist Association.
In Blacksburg, James and Arlene began to enjoy a more settled life. One reason was that the 1970s were a less revolutionary decade than the 1960s. Another reason was that they had increased professional responsibilities: Arlene was quite busy with the opportunities and demands of her career teaching elementary school music, while James became Chair of the Political Science Department at Virginia Tech in the early 1970s, and, as mentioned above, he created and coordinated a series of summer training institutes called “Mathematical Applications in Political Science.”
Outside of his professional life, James developed several different avocational interests for which he developed several different kinds of practical expertise. In the 1960s, he became interested in stamp collecting, model airplanes, and model railroads, and he learned a great deal about each of these avocations. During his first years in the new house in Blacksburg, he learned about carpentry so that he could finish the unfinished basement. In the 1970s, he learned about woodworking, and he built several musical instruments, including a harpsichord, as well as a doll house. In the 1980s, he started taking piano lessons. And in the 1990s, he took up painting once again. (Several of his paintings can be seen in the "Paintings" section of this website.) He continued all of these avocations (except model railroads) throughout his retirement years in Blacksburg.
In the fall of 2014, James experienced a series of medical challenges, and the decision was made that he and Arlene would move to Pittsburgh to be closer to family. He arrived in Pittsburgh on March 10, 2015. James and Arlene lived at Schenley Gardens, an assisted-living facility in the Oakland area that was close to David's workplace and Cindy's workplace. Arlene died from Covid-19 on July 25, 2020. James moved to the skilled nursing residence at Longwood at Oakmont in January 2021. He passed away peacefully on the morning of November 4, 2021.
A member of the so-called Silent Generation who lived through the dispiriting challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War, James lived a life characterized by resistance to political ideologies of greed and oppression that brought needless destruction and deprivation to tens of millions as well as personal philosophies of life that were thoughtless, excessive, and lacking in worthy results. He half-jokingly -- actually, not jokingly at all -- described himself as an "old-fashioned, New Deal, tax-and-spend Democrat," and perhaps this self-description reflects President Roosevelt's statement that "The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are: equality of opportunity for youth and others; jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all." Having witnessed the tremendousness destructiveness brought about by the misguided passions and loyalties that ignited the Second World War, he insisted that emotion be accompanied by thought and guided by reason, and although he experienced deep emotions, they tended to be either internalized or else expressed indirectly through his devotion to his work, his family, his civic participation, and his painting. He measured himself by what he accomplished and what he learned, and the list is long: holding many different jobs as a young person; learning how disassemble and reassemble a car; learning how to paint and draw, and learning about the history of art; learning German, French, and Russian; pursuing his education through the doctoral level even though he was part of the first generation in his family to attend college; publishing articles and writing book chapters; leading an honors program at a university; leading an academic department at a university and learning about higher education administration; serving on the Board of the Virginia ACLU chapter; learning to play the recorder, the guitar, the banjo, and the piano; pursuing avocations such as stamp collecting, model airplanes, and model railroads; starting a congregation; designing his own home and overseeing its construction; learning how to do carpentry and woodworking; building a harpsichord and a doll house; taking up painting once again in his retirement years and constantly refining his technique; learning about financial investing so that he could manage his retirement savings; maintaining both a scholarly and a personal interest in national politics throughout his life and always keeping up with the latest news; and much more. He expected a lot of himself and those around him. Nevertheless, our world would be a better place if the principles and commitments that animated his life -- especially his abiding commitment to fair and inclusive political and economic systems -- were more widely practiced. He will be deeply missed.
By David Herndon
James Francis Herndon was born on August 11, 1929, in Indianapolis, Indiana. He died on November 4, 2021, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Survivors include his son, David Herndon, and daughter-in-law, Cindy Kirsch; his granddaughters Rachel Herndon and Meredith Herndon; his niece Hilary (Joe Tesoriero) Beall; and many other relatives. He was predeceased by his wife of more than sixty-seven years, Doris Arlene Beall Herndon, and by his parents, Francis Earl Herndon and Mary Agnes Demmer Herndon.
James was the only child of Francis Earl "Red" Herndon (March 2, 1908 -- July 10, 1952) and Mary Agnes "Toodie" (Demmer) Herndon (1903 -- 1956). Earl (whose parents were James Miller Herndon and Rosetta Pearl (Arnett) Herndon Erwin Attebury) worked in the movie industry as a distributor, connecting the Hollywood movie studios with local movie theaters. His work took the family from Indianapolis to St. Louis, Missouri, for a year, and also to Kansas City, Missouri, for a year, before they all returned to Indianapolis. Mary Agnes (whose parents were Joseph F. Demmer and Mary Beatrice "Bedie" (O'Geraghty) Demmer) worked in a downtown department store, playing popular songs on the piano so that potential customers could hear the new songs before purchasing the sheet music. She also volunteered for the local Democratic Party and as a result had an opportunity to work for many years in local government in Indianapolis.
James attended Little Flower Catholic School, St. Joan of Arc Catholic School, and Cathedral High School, graduating in 1948. As a child, James lived with his parents in their home on DeQuincy Street. He began working at an early age. Aside from delivering newspapers while riding his bike, he worked as an usher in a local movie theater, as an assistant to a sign painter, as a gas station attendant, and as a maker of milkshakes and sundaes at a local drugstore. He also worked at the downtown Vonnegut Hardware Store, although he never met the writer Kurt Vonnegut, whose family owned and managed that store as well as several other hardware stores in the Indianapolis area. James also managed to find time to completely disassemble and reassemble a Ford automobile, which was a popular thing to do among his high school classmates.
After his graduation from high school, James attended the John Herron Art Institute, which was located in Indianapolis. After a year of study there, he transferred to Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana, where he studied Studio Art and Art History. He received his undergraduate degree in 1952. During one of his college summers, James traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, with one of his college buddies. They stayed in New Orleans for several weeks, enjoying the traditional jazz music of that city.
After his graduation from college, James enlisted in the United States Army. He completed basic training at Fort Riley in northeastern Kansas. James became part of the Counter Intelligence Corps and was stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, for a year. His assignment was to observe the process whereby political parties were organizing themselves in post-war Germany.
Upon returning to the United States, James shifted his academic focus to Political Science and enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he received his M.A. Subsequently, he enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he received his Ph.D. During the 1959 -- 1960 academic year, James as an assistant professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. From 1960 to 1967, he was a member of the political science department at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he also directed the Honors Program. In the summer of 1965, he worked at the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., as part of a professional development program. In 1967, James joined the political science department at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. For several years, he directed a professional education program called Mathematical Applications in Political Science (MAPS). This intensive summer program was attended by political scientists from all over the United States. At his retirement ceremony in 1994, he was given the designation of Professor Emeritus, and a classroom was named in his honor.
While at Indiana University, James became acquainted with Doris Arlene Beall, a music student and French horn major. They met in the student union cafeteria where James was working as a cashier. They were married on Christmas Eve in 1952 in Baltimore, Maryland, by an army chaplain while James was on leave from his military service in Germany. After graduating from Indiana University in the spring of 1953, Arlene traveled to Europe and stayed with James in an apartment in Stuttgart, Germany. They had a memorable holiday traveling through Switzerland to Italy, where they visited Venice and Florence. Arlene returned to the United States after six months. Their son David was born on February 18, 1955.
James and Arlene lived in Pontiac, Michigan, while he was a student at Wayne State University. In Ann Arbor, while James was a student at the University of Michigan, the family lived in married graduate student housing. In Des Moines, the family lived in a second-floor apartment and then in the first floor of a house. In Grand Forks, the family lived in married faculty housing on State Street and then in a two-story apartment on Fourth Avenue South before becoming first-time homeowners and moving into a two-story home at 1002 Belmont Avenue. In Blacksburg, the family lived in a second-floor apartment on Tom's Creek Road for a year and then James and Arlene bought an undeveloped lot where they designed and built their own home overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains. They lived in this home at the corner of East Roanoke Street and Harding Avenue from 1967 until 2015.
The next section is adapted from the obituary of Doris Arlene Beall Herndon, which can be found at www.dorisarlenememorial.com.
The 1960s were revolutionary years in the United States. In 1960, when the decade opened, James was thirty-one and Arlene was twenty-nine, and as young adults, they participated in this remarkable time of progressive change in their own way.
Musically, James and Arlene took part in the folk music revival that swept through the United States. Arlene learned to play the guitar, while James took up both guitar and banjo. They sang and played songs brought to public awareness by well-known artists such as Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. When the family lived in North Dakota, James and Arlene would regularly get together with their friends to sing these songs late into the night, paging through their songs books that provided the words and music. James was especially interested in labor songs. James and Arlene also learned to play recorders.
Politically, James and Arlene were inspired by the movements for political change that were taking place in the United States. They participated in a civil rights march that began on the campus of the University of North Dakota. They also traveled to the International Peace Garden, which sits on the border between the United States and Canada, for a demonstration against the use of nuclear weapons. They also visited a nearby Indian reservation on multiple occasions, partly out of curiosity and partly out of a sense of solidarity.
Religiously, James and Arlene stepped away from the religious traditions of their younger years, which was Roman Catholic for James and Baptist and Methodist for Arlene. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, they had started attending the local Unitarian Church. Not finding anything comparable in Grand Forks, they resolved to start their own Unitarian Church from scratch. They gathered various friends and acquaintances together, and, with guidance from the Unitarian Universalist Association, a new congregation was born. This religious community offered Sunday services for the adults and religious education for the children. Arlene was a religious education teacher, while James was in charge of setting up the reel-to-reel tape player that played reel-to-reel recordings of sermons from larger congregations that were sent along by the Unitarian Universalist Association.
In Blacksburg, James and Arlene began to enjoy a more settled life. One reason was that the 1970s were a less revolutionary decade than the 1960s. Another reason was that they had increased professional responsibilities: Arlene was quite busy with the opportunities and demands of her career teaching elementary school music, while James became Chair of the Political Science Department at Virginia Tech in the early 1970s, and, as mentioned above, he created and coordinated a series of summer training institutes called “Mathematical Applications in Political Science.”
Outside of his professional life, James developed several different avocational interests for which he developed several different kinds of practical expertise. In the 1960s, he became interested in stamp collecting, model airplanes, and model railroads, and he learned a great deal about each of these avocations. During his first years in the new house in Blacksburg, he learned about carpentry so that he could finish the unfinished basement. In the 1970s, he learned about woodworking, and he built several musical instruments, including a harpsichord, as well as a doll house. In the 1980s, he started taking piano lessons. And in the 1990s, he took up painting once again. (Several of his paintings can be seen in the "Paintings" section of this website.) He continued all of these avocations (except model railroads) throughout his retirement years in Blacksburg.
In the fall of 2014, James experienced a series of medical challenges, and the decision was made that he and Arlene would move to Pittsburgh to be closer to family. He arrived in Pittsburgh on March 10, 2015. James and Arlene lived at Schenley Gardens, an assisted-living facility in the Oakland area that was close to David's workplace and Cindy's workplace. Arlene died from Covid-19 on July 25, 2020. James moved to the skilled nursing residence at Longwood at Oakmont in January 2021. He passed away peacefully on the morning of November 4, 2021.
A member of the so-called Silent Generation who lived through the dispiriting challenges of the Great Depression and the Second World War, James lived a life characterized by resistance to political ideologies of greed and oppression that brought needless destruction and deprivation to tens of millions as well as personal philosophies of life that were thoughtless, excessive, and lacking in worthy results. He half-jokingly -- actually, not jokingly at all -- described himself as an "old-fashioned, New Deal, tax-and-spend Democrat," and perhaps this self-description reflects President Roosevelt's statement that "The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are: equality of opportunity for youth and others; jobs for those who can work; security for those who need it; the ending of special privilege for the few; the preservation of civil liberties for all." Having witnessed the tremendousness destructiveness brought about by the misguided passions and loyalties that ignited the Second World War, he insisted that emotion be accompanied by thought and guided by reason, and although he experienced deep emotions, they tended to be either internalized or else expressed indirectly through his devotion to his work, his family, his civic participation, and his painting. He measured himself by what he accomplished and what he learned, and the list is long: holding many different jobs as a young person; learning how disassemble and reassemble a car; learning how to paint and draw, and learning about the history of art; learning German, French, and Russian; pursuing his education through the doctoral level even though he was part of the first generation in his family to attend college; publishing articles and writing book chapters; leading an honors program at a university; leading an academic department at a university and learning about higher education administration; serving on the Board of the Virginia ACLU chapter; learning to play the recorder, the guitar, the banjo, and the piano; pursuing avocations such as stamp collecting, model airplanes, and model railroads; starting a congregation; designing his own home and overseeing its construction; learning how to do carpentry and woodworking; building a harpsichord and a doll house; taking up painting once again in his retirement years and constantly refining his technique; learning about financial investing so that he could manage his retirement savings; maintaining both a scholarly and a personal interest in national politics throughout his life and always keeping up with the latest news; and much more. He expected a lot of himself and those around him. Nevertheless, our world would be a better place if the principles and commitments that animated his life -- especially his abiding commitment to fair and inclusive political and economic systems -- were more widely practiced. He will be deeply missed.
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