Going to Mark Twain’s funeral
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
When I started changing out of my causal clothes into a dressy outfit Saturday, my wife inquired, "where are you going?" I said to a Memorial Service for Mark Twain.
Knowing me well after 57 years of marriage, she didn’t question me further. Indeed that is exactly where I was going, a memorial service at the Umpqua Valley Arts Center for the late Dale Leroy Allred. As a writing instructor, I had Dale in my classes for several years. He was, in my opinion, a Mark Twain among us. If Mark Twain hadn’t already invented hyperbole, surely Dale would have.
I would get angry with him sometimes because I felt he didn’t recognize his own talent and when I would urge him to market his writing, he’d just give me a coy grin and say, "someday." His son, Michael, who gave the eulogy at the memorial, may have explained that "someday" reply, a typical Dale Allred comeback.
Michael said when his Dad was younger he enrolled in another writing class, in which the instructor said he’d have to paper a wall with rejection slips before he could call himself a successful writer. The Saturday Evening Post bought the first piece he submitted, a fact that didn’t surprise me, but Michael decided "he didn’t want to spoil his success by submitting anything else."
The world may be a sadder place because of it. He had a gift for making you laugh. Although I saw a lot of eyes dabbed as his life was summed up to the overflow crowd of mourners, the room was also filled with laughter. The words of Michael, himself, as he talked about his Dad, had a twinge of the Dale I knew especially when he told how his dad lost had his hand.
Dale did have a missing hand. Michael recounted the number of stories he had heard explaining the missing limb, from getting it caught in an airplane propeller to a fierce battle with a shark. Dale once told me he was thinking about writing a story about how he lost his hand but when he told me the accident occurred when couldn’t get the pin back into a grenade I knew we were in for a wild tale. Others said that he claimed an alligator snapped it off and still others were told he lost it in a bar fight.
A succession people recalled Dale’s multiple talents and brought laughter that far outweighed the sadness of the somber occasion. I only knew the writing side of Dale, but obviously he had greater talents, including art. But I will remember him for his uncanny ability to spin a yarn.
He was a retired psychologist at the VA. He was a pilot, a sky diver, a scuba diver and obviously a friend to a diverse number of people.
One of them, Judy Hoppe, also one of my former students, read from one of my favorite stories that Dale wrote in my class. Unfortunately, the word limit in this column won’t allow the full story be printed, but it was in typical Dale Leroy Allred style. I will just quote a few lines from his essay simply called, "Looks."
"I never liked my looks…My hair was yellow grass. I envied a classmate Alan’s wavy hair. One day I wet down my head, took some of my mother’s hairpins and tried to set my hair in waves. I left it that way to dry. I forgot about it when I had to go on an errand to a neighbor’s place. The neighbor took one look at me, guffawed and said, ‘By golly, yer turnin’ into a girl.’ That was the end of that experiment."
As Judy read the essay I could hear Dale reading it to his classmates in his masterful story telling ability. But it made those who came to Dale’s last reading laugh and that was Dale’s wonderful gift.
I would like to think that in that great beyond, the Twains have met.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)