Presented by: Tara Wakefield
It is an honor, and I’m humbled to have the privilege of being here today to offer some thoughts of remembrance for my dad, Ronald Wakefield. He was a devoted husband and father and lived his life the best way he knew how with honesty, integrity, and humility.
Before I run through the events of his life, I wanted to talk about his hobbies and things he enjoyed.
He was a pretty quiet man of relatively few words. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot going on inside his head, but he just didn’t talk that much. He still made sure to tell Mom, Wayne, and me that he loved us though, and made time for things like baseball and softball games, helping out with school projects and family time.
When he had his own time, he liked to sit in his o ice downstairs by himself with the door closed and listen to music while doing sudokus or crosswords or reading a book. Those hours alone seemed to recharge him.
Dad enjoyed planning the details of vacations, researching places to go and things to see and do months in advance. He definitely found joy in the details.
He also loved to sit and watch college and pro-basketball or football games downstairs.
Besides these things, Dad loved to sing. He sang with The Singing Hoosiers all 4 years of undergrad, with the St Luke’s UMC Choir for 45 years, and with the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir for a couple of years as well.
He played rolls in a few musicals as well at Footlight.
Dad’s favorite foods included gorgonzola-based pasta sauce, butter pecan ice cream, and, of course, doughnuts!
Highlights of His Life:
Ronald Wayne Wakefield was born in Linton, IN July 7th of 1938. It was clear that he had quite the intellect from a young age, and he once told me that when he aced everything in elementary school, his mom told his teacher to instead grade him, “against his potential.” This greatly exasperated him. He graduated from HS in 1957 and went to IU in Bloomington, majoring in mathematics.
After undergrad, Ron enlisted in the air force and served from ’61-66. He was stationed at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, TX for a bit and then went to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, MS. He couldn’t tell us or anyone what he did there during the Cold War, but he worked as a ground electronics o icer, and it just so happened that whenever Russia put up a spy satellite as part of their Zenit program, he would be confined to the base for 72h.
Towards the end of his service, while stationed at Fairchild AF Base in Spokane, he attended Manito Presbyterian Church and sang in the choir there. He and his two roomates wanted to check out the ladies, so they went to a dinner for college-age kids. Rick, Ray, and Ron went to the dinner, and Ron met Mary there.
Ron was on a mission. He and Mary dated for three whole weeks before he proposed. Her answer was along the lines of, “Uuuh, no. It’s too soon. I don’t know you well enough yet. I’ll still see you, but I don’t know about marriage.” He left to go work at TRW in El Segundo, CA, but she got his address and wrote him letters. They exchanged lots of letters over the next several months until he came back to Spokane over Labor Day weekend—and proposed again. This time, she said, Yes. They were married 3 months later in December on ’66.
TRW was known for aerospace and electronics, and served the Air Force for things like developing systems for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile development. They didn’t produce missile hardware, but designed electronics systems. He couldn’t talk about what he did there either. While in El Segundo, he got his master’s degree in computer science from USC.
Later in ‘77, Ron and Mary moved, now with their two children, Wayne and myself, to Indianapolis to be closer to his family and for his job at IN Bell. There, he served as the human computer to make sure that the massive supercomputers got the correct answers. At one point, his brother Don visited him there and found about 30-pages of hand-written calculus he’d done. He followed the first 3 pages or so before he decided he’d had enough.
After he retired, he ever-remained a numbers man, and worked seasonally at H and R Block doing tax prep .
This was my dad—the man who helped make me who I am by his character, example, and also his genes. Dad wasn’t diagnosed by anyone but me, because he was high-functioning, but he was on the autism spectrum. I didn’t even get diagnosed until my mid 40s. But, now Bianca, my older daughter, has the diagnosis as well, and we have another relative on the Wakefield side with Pervasive Developmental Disorder.
Our very own Sheldon Cooper had both strengths and weaknesses that made him unique, and we loved him.
He was unassuming and didn’t presume ill-intentions in others. Although he thrived on minutia in his work, he generally managed to not sweat the small stu in life. For example, he never really enjoyed the beach or swimming, but any family vacation, which he would have meticulously planned, would invariably involve both of these, because Mom, Wayne, and I love the water.
He would come down to the pool or the beach in a casual dress shirt, suitable for the o ice, long shorts, and either in sandals with white tube socks pulled all the way up or with his dress shoes suitable for work over said tube socks. He may as well not have owned a pair of jeans or sneakers, because he wore slacks, and o ice-worthy shoes with an o iceworthy shirt over an undershirt every day, even in the memory unit when Parkinson’s and dementia had taken their toll.
He didn’t really have the ability to give Wayne tough love and let him hit rock bottom when he struggled with addiction to drugs. Wayne would ask to stay with Mom and Dad, and he would say yes. In his defense, he found Wayne unconscious in the upstairs bathroom at one point with the needle still in his arm. They’d planned to get pizza, and Wayne said he was going to get ready to go get it. He went in the bathroom, and locked the door. When, he didn’t come out for a long time and didn’t respond to him through the door, he broke open the door to find him wedged between the toilet and the wall, uynconscious. He called 911, and he survived that time. My parents never knew if the time they were seeing him would be their last, and I’m sure they didn’t want to have to wonder if they could have helped him after the fact. The best thing was when we sent Wayne to California for treatment. He needed to get away from Mom and Dad.
Although Dad was a math genius, he couldn’t explain it to save his life. If I came to him with a pre-calculus problem when I was in high school and asked him to show me how to solve it, he wouldn’t look at how we were supposed to get the answer, but would just use calculus. He would solve the problem, but I wouldn’t have understood anything that he had just done.
He seemed to have an auditory processing disorder. If you told him something while he was working on something else, he would never remember. He had to read it. If he wrote it down or he read it, it was fine, but if you just told him . . . . He also misheard things in conversations and song lyrics even before his hearing noticeably deteriorated. At one point, Mom had cooked chicken for dinner, and there was a drumstick left if he wanted it. So, she said, “There’s still a drumstick.” That’s not what he heard. He then proceeded to get a deeply hurt look on his face, so my mom asked him what he thought she’d said. He said, “You’re still a dumb-shit.” She told him what she’d actually said and they both laughed about it.
The song ,”Hip to Be Square” by Huey Lewis and the News was another example. He thought it was, “Hit the B square.” Always thinking about math!
He learned not to take himself too seriously though, and could loosen up with his dry sense of humor. He always made room for the important things in life.
On that note, I’d like to end with this video tribute.
