In Memory Of Our Father
William Vance Thayer
April 17, 1942 - November 20, 2024
Children:
Edward, Kim, Clint, Lucy, Ely
Grandchildren:
Jonathan, Wesley, Bailee, Andrew, Peter, Benjamin, Josiah, Eleanor, Maverick, Nathaniel, Theodore, Charles, Olivia
Great-Grandchildren:
Blaise, Marie, Shiloh, Gene, Josie, Canyon, Frances, McClain
REFLECTION FROM ELY:
As I reflect on the passing of Dad, a distinct image can’t help but come to mind.
A river.
A river with a rocky bottom, tree limbs hanging over the water, maybe even an entire tree laid across the surface. The ripples and waves that these obstacles create as the water tries to pass through and around. Large boulders that force the water to rush around the sides, just to meet again on the other end. The meandering creeks that shoot off, only to rejoin the river again. The branches of the river that take their own journey, creating their own bottoms, their own tree limbs, their own ripples, waves, creeks, and more branches.
When I think about our family, we truly are a massive network of rivers. All beautiful, all unique, and all personal to our experiences.
Reflecting on my relationship with my dad, it is certainly a river that has its rocks, boulders, sticks, and trees. At times, some of those boulders felt as though the river would be damned. At times the river flowed easy and strong. But when I look back now and view the river as a whole, it’s wonderful. It has taught me so many invaluable things.
Dad taught me how to be persistent. Whether it was taking piano lessons with Aunt Jing (not a family member, just a sweet older woman who wanted to go by that), or counting the number of catches I could get with 5 juggling balls, he always encouraged a specific goal.
He helped me become resilient. He always continued to push us to finish what we started, to not give up, and to be relentless in what we decided we wanted to do no matter the adversity.
He showed me how to be an advocate. He stood up for what he believed and eagerly worked in communities that he felt could use a friend.
He implored me to always want to grow and learn. He would always take the time to help with solving a problem. Never solving it for me, but showing me how to find a solution.
He reminded me to speak clearly and confidently. This is largely just because his hearing wasn’t so great…
I remember him always saying… Treat others the way you would want to be treated. Something I argued many times saying, “I wouldn’t care if Lucy hit me with nunchucks.” (After I hit Lucy with nunchucks and getting them taken away within five minutes of getting them. I thought it was a good argument for getting them back. He did not.)
Zooming out and imagining how all our family's life journeys have intersected with Dad, I just can’t help but think that he would be in such awe of what our family's rivers look like today. Each of us, with our unique paths and experiences, have been shaped by his influence and love.
I find happiness knowing that as many times I look back at my river, that no single time will be like the first. There is always another rock to find, a wave I didn’t notice, and a new perspective that I didn’t get to see the last time.
Thank you Dad.
REFLECTION FROM LUCY:
My Dad…
I know we shared a special bond, one that didn’t unfold the way either of us imagined. I remember him in fragments, moments, photographs, clips - each one etched in my heart. They are mine to hold, never fully understood by anyone else, yet treasured deeply by me.
We were both explorers, always asking questions and seeking understanding through trial and experimentation. Growing up, I was his assistant. Whenever I asked a question, he didn’t just give me an answer - he gave me a book. We’d set up experiments to see how quickly coffee cooled, using temperature probes, graphs, and timers. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but those hands-on lessons shaped the person I would become. Today, as a Laboratory Scientist, I can trace my path back to those childhood moments of discovery.
He had a gift for turning any situation into a learning opportunity, always pushing me to be better, smarter, and stronger. Though he could be tough on the outside, beneath it all was a heart full of love, a heart that always wanted to help.
He supported me in everything, from my dance recitals to family travels (mostly for juggling conventions), and even taught me how to read a map by making whatever turn I told him to make (sorry, Clint, for that extra two-hour detour to Madison, WI). He introduced me to new foods and cultures, and when I found myself in trouble, he greeted it with a laugh and a “finally.”
Beyond supporting me and our family, he stood up for what he believed in. He helped those who couldn’t help themselves, worked to bring our community together in Meacham Park, and taught anyone who crossed his path how to juggle.
These fragments of memories, these photographs, clips, and moments, will live on in me and be passed down.
Thank you, Dad.
REFLECTION FROM KIM:
I was four year old. It was 1970. My father, along with a handful of other white men, had accepted one-and two-year teaching appointments at Barber-Scotia - a historically black college in North Carolina - to pull up freshman writing and math scores. It was a formative time for everyone. Nationally, our country was boiling with racial issues. Within the Concord community, whites ostracized the new professors, wreaking havoc in my parent’s lives, silently preventing us from securing housing. We lived in a tent in the state park for months before settling into a rental home on the black side of town. In this volatile climate, within walking distance of the library, books were the medium that transmitted parental love.
My family lived a nomadic life, chasing employment opportunities and perhaps happiness. After the year in North Carolina, another in Utah, and two summers at grandparents’ homes in Ohio, we moved to a private boarding school outside Sedona, Arizona. I was six and enrolled in public school. Daily I got off the bus and headed straight to my Dad’s math classroom - a white stucco structure with a thick wooden door. I would have entered without knocking. Crayons and a thick, hardback, blank book sat on the corner of my father’s desk. Mine for the taking. Sprawled on the floor, I would create while listening to him teach. There was never a right or wrong to my scribbles and attempts at writing - they were probably never even evaluated by an adult. My parents’ had a sporadic and unpredictable parenting style, which allowed me to seek literacy opportunities of my own liking. In Arizona, my personal pursuit of literacy found me more often at my father’s side than my mother’s.
Some days, instead of riding the bus back to campus, my father picked me up from elementary school. We would spend hours flying about the Arizona mesas in a red and white rented Cessna 150. As co-pilot, my job was to read the laborious pre-flight checklist from his silver clipboard.
”Remove control lock,” I’d announce out the first maneuver importantly.
“Check,” he’d respond.
Ignition off, check, Master on, check. Lower flaps, check. Fuel gauges, check. And on we’d work through the list. My actual reading ability didn’t matter. Dad knew the list by memory and would supply words I couldn’t sound out. Very quickly, I too had the list memorized.
Dad’s unique job environments, interests, and willingness to let me tag along to just about everything he did allowed for my easy exploration into the practical purposes of reading. I was pulled into a variety of escapades regardless of my personal skill. Literacy meant running around the boarding school campus looking for snakes that matched the rattlers in the science department’s field guides. It meant writing notes to other faculty children on classroom chalkboards. It meant doodling on the student's’ homework after a communal meal in the cafeteria. Literacy meant participating as a child extra in the high school plays. It meant being loud in the school library, and being ignorant that most first graders’ experienced reading and writing very differently. At my father’s side, I was immersed in an academic community of high school students, staff, faculty, headmaster and families pursuing excellence together. There was no line of separation between my abilities and what we experienced collectively. Yet despite knowing stage directions for performing Hamlet and how to co-pilot a small aircraft, I was deemed ill prepared for the rigors of second grade when my parents divorced, and I started a new school in Ohio.
Years later, spread out on the large wall-to-wall bed at the rear of our grandparents’ Winnebago, my brother and I were headed to Colorado for the summer. The objective of the three months: meet my father in the mountains, survey the forty-acres owned by a new boarding school, and further the development plans for transforming a partially completed structure into a classroom.
Once we arrived, I was positioned at the survey pole end of the chain; my father worked the tripod and transit at the other. Our relationship, centered again on reading and writing, was reminiscent of our flying in Arizona. . He recorded numbers and words in thick, black, hardbound books - books similar to the ones I had used for coloring years before. He wrote our last name with a thick black Sharpie on the page edges opposite the spine. He smiled at me after he wrote it.
“That’s us,” he said. “We’re authors.”
REFLECTION FROM ED:
Dad filled my childhood with an endless stream of hidden opportunities to see what was hidden in plain sight. Our first instruments were spirographs, legos, rectorsets, prisms, microscopes, slide rulers, telescopes, mandolins, banjos, electronic jaw harps, topographical maps, roadside abandoned mica mines, smokey quartz crystals dug up at 14,200 ft (we never made to Mt Antero’s peak because we stopped for crystals), computers, and books upon books upon books waiting to be cracked open. The tools for self discovery, exploration, wonder, never stopped “showing up”.
As we grew up, everything became more abstract, the mysteries more deeply encoded in complex symbols, the paths to discovery ever more elaborate, nuanced, ornery. He taught me about Tesseracts and Mobius strips at 8; trigonometry, Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov at 13; and fractals a decade before they were commonplace. As I followed him into abstract math, our conversations became ever more subtle. Years into my graduate school training, I’d find he had already been there years before. Had the full set of Bourbaki’s texts and sent me Dieudonne’s “English versions for mortals” for my 27th birthday.
Moving forward, my life journey felt random, chaotic at times. His pedagogical love made me want to teach high school math, then college math, a professional researcher at 29, a computational biologist (when this didn’t exist) at 34. At 60, I am happiest when I’m learning something new and sharing those insights with others. I know he showed me that joy above all else. Looking backwards, the path feels more like one he might have seen coming.
He inspired me to fill my life with knowledge, meaningful time well spent, to laugh easily, to attempt hard work, be physical, own my mistakes, and learn who I am from my imperfections.
When Bill looked at the St. Louis Arch, he saw past stacked steel triangles to an upside down hanging chain. He couldn’t stop himself if he tried. I can only imagine what he saw when he looked out at all his students, but am so grateful he counted me as one of them even when the river wasn’t always easy to ride.
Photo Essay by Clint
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