Alvin Ray Meyerdirk

Obituary Alvin Ray Meyerdirk Was born in Medicine Lake, Montana, perhaps on January 11, 1915. Uncertainty about the actual date, a source of humor in Al's family for years, owes partly to primitive record keeping in a community that was not much more than frontier farmland at the time, and partly to the nomadic life of his parents. What's clear is that he was the third child and eldest son of a laboring couple from Iowa, Perry and Orleana (Jackson) Meyerdirk, who managed to have six children between 1913 and 1920 without putting down roots. Their travels led them to Tacoma, where Perry hoped to become a portrait painter but instead took a job as a dock worker during World War I. For a time the family lived in a small house on a site where the Tacoma Dome now stands. Soon afterward their home was a tent in the Yakima hop fields. Then, in 1920, Orleana died and Perry scattered their children. The three youngest boys he gave to acquaintances in the Yakima Valley, where they acquired new surnames and disappeared from family history for thirty years. The eldest three he deposited with relatives in his hometown, Spencer, Iowa: the girls at his sister's, and Al, aged five, at a brother's farm. Then he went ice fishing. Al skipped childhood completely. He spent the next six years working, slopping hogs, attending a one-room school, being hauled to Chautauqua tent revivals and Ku Klux Klan rallies, and fretting under the displeasure of an aunt who resented his presence. This Dickensian existence was softened by the mentoring of his uncle, Ben, who discovered in a nephew an aptitude for mechanical things that his own son lacked. The Meyerdirk men were all mechanics in those days. In maturity, Al often said that if he had had his life to live over, he would have been a machinist. But events pushed him elsewhere. When he was eleven, his father reappeared, collected him and his two sisters and took them to North Dakota, where he had purchased a small farm on the Missouri River. Al worked there for five years, until his father, then a widower of forty-five, married a neighbor girl about Al's own age and began a second family. The two teenagers did not get along. On his father's advice, Al left home. Throughout the worst years of the Great Depression, he worked as a hired hand for local farmers for not much more than room and board. In February 1936, with no other prospects in view and armed with eight years of formal schooling and a knack for fixing things, Al presented himself at the gates of Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, for enlistment in the U.S. Army, then about the size of the police force of New York City. Salary: twenty-five dollars a month. He was lucky to arrive at a watershed moment. With the forces of fascism and militarism preparing a frontal assault on civilization, a twenty-one-year-old whose salient character traits were self-discipline, loyalty and perseverance stood a fair chance to make good in the Army. And he did. In a military career lasting twenty-nine years, Al became a champion machine gun and pistol marksman, for a time an aide to Dwight Eisenhower when Ike was a battalion commander at Fort Lewis. Al helped form the cadre that founded the 81st Division, became First Sergeant of an infantry company in the Pacific, won a bronze star in combat against the Japanese in the Palau and Philippine Islands, served with distinction in the Korean War, as well as in lengthy tours in Japan, Germany and Korea (twice) and at posts all over the US. In a Fort Lewis chapel two months after Pearl Harbor, Al married a North Dakota farmer's daughter, Viola Perius, whom he had met three years earlier while she was working at a Bismarck bank. In nearly seven decades together, they raised six children and traveled the world. When Al left active duty in 1964 as one of the highest-ranking Warrant Officers in the Army, his life was barely half over. The forty-five years he spent in "retirement" were less dramatic than the first fifty, but nearly as active, and no less rewarding. He and Vi started three businesses, the most successful of which was an office machine and appliance repair shop at 6th and Union in Tacoma, which they ran for seventeen years, before retiring for good in 1987. During that time all their children grew to responsible adulthood, married and settled nearby. For the next 21 years Al and Vi lived quietly among friends and family. For the last five of those years, when Vi's health began to fail, Al became her full-time caregiver, until Vi died in 2008. In the following two years Al, still vigorous and self-reliant but living alone for the first time, continued to take care of his own needs, as always. He did errands, driving his own car, took walks, worked puzzles, played cards, drank an ounce of scotch a day, wrote checks to any charity that would send an envelope, and visited the cemetery. Mostly, he relished visitors. On June 2, without prior illness but with enough notice for his children and grandchildren to gather round him, he died. He was 95. These are the bare bones of a long life but they do not describe the man. Much about Al Meyerdirk was puzzling, even contradictory. He came from a shattered family but founded a tightly knit one. Raised by people who hated Catholics, he became a Catholic. A natural mechanic, he spent most of his career as an administrator. He loved the Army, but once out of it he rarely spoke of it and kept no ties. A decorated warrior, he had no interest in war. He was a commander of men who let his children choose for themselves, a marksman who didn't own a gun, a patriot who waved no flag, a life-long conservative in a house full of liberals with no political wrangling. He followed a fifty-year road trip with a forty-five-year home stand and found them both good. Self-disciplined yet tolerant, both frugal and generous, stern as a young man, humorous and even courtly as an old one, he kept his balance to the end. Al was preceded in death by Viola, his beloved wife of 66 years, by two sisters, Mabel and Helen, and two brothers, Roy and Robert Malzahn. He is survived by six children and their spouses: James (Teryl), John (Cyd), Michael (Geraldine), David (Vicky), Patricia (Steve) Clements, and Cynthia (Bob) Christofferson; by grandchildren: Joshua, Micah, Tyler (Jessica), Lauren, Matthew, Michael (Kate), Chris (Lisa), Zachary (Cathy), Jeffrey and Bruno, by brother Henry Grimes, and by many nieces, nephews and in-laws. Rosary and viewing, 7:00-8:00 PM, Sunday, June 6, at Gaffney Funeral Home, 1002 S. Yakima Ave., Tacoma 98405. Leave on-line condolences at www.GaffneyCares.com Funeral service, 11:00 AM-noon, Monday, June 7, at St. Charles Borromeo Church, 7112 S 12th St., Tacoma 98465. One-hour reception following. Burial, 2:15 PM at Tahoma National Cemetery, 18600 SE 240th St., Kent WA. In lieu of flowers, donations to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.