How to sum up a life of 95 years? And such a complicated person! Neil Ray Hendricks was born August 24th, 1922 in Kiowa, Oklahoma, a rural community where he spent his boyhood. His father, James Franklin Hendricks, owned and operated a cotton gin, as had his grandfather, Noah Richardson Hendricks. His mother, née Ila Baxter, was a teacher. Her mother had been Nettie Brooks. From his mother, he and his brother, Robert Vincent, inherited their talent for drawing and a love for language and literature, which he passed onto his children. Neil was also musical. He played clarinet through college and later took up recorders and finally viola da gamba. His mother had encouraged Neil and Vince to take up wind instruments (Vince played the trumpet), in the belief that, should the US enter another war, being able to play in the marching band would keep them out of combat. Neil went off to college at Oklahoma A&M University in Stillwater in 1940 but, like many young men of his era, interrupted his studies to join the Navy when the US entered WWII.
Neil spent the war, not in the band, but as an Aviation Radio Technician's Mate on Kodiak island. It was thought to be a dangerous assignment, since the Aleutians seemed a logical landing point for Japanese invaders, but he said that he spent most of the war playing chess with another naval radio operator who was stationed elsewhere.
After his release from the Navy, at loose ends, he hitchhiked down to the border and spent some time in Brownsville, Tx. As Neil was beginning to run out of money, he met a truck driver at the hotel where he was staying and arranged to help him unload and load his truck in exchange for a ride back to Oklahoma. On the eve of the return trip to Oklahoma, having spent a backbreaking day unloading corn destined for a tortilla factory and loading crates of oranges and grapefruits that the driver was hauling back north (Neil, who happened to be suffering from an upper-respiratory infection that day, later described this as “the hardest day of work in my life!”), he wandered into a curio shop, looking for a souvenir. The young woman behind the counter, noting his khaki outfit and scruffy demeanour, assumed he was a hobo and began preparing herself in case he asked her to empty the cash register. But then he asked her about an onyx chess set and, as soon as he spoke, she realized he was a gentle person and that she needn’t have worried. He asked her if she knew how to play chess and when she said no, he offered to teach her. That night, he told the truck driver he had decided to stay in Brownsville for a while after all and the driver grudgingly gave him a few dollars as compensation for his labors.
Within a few months of their chance meeting, on October 21, 1946, Neil married Sylvia Treviño, the girl whom he had offered chess lessons. They were together 23 years and raised eight children, Tina (Burnette), Ila, Lisa, Ronald Vincent (who died in 1992 at the age of 39), Ruth, James, Nettie and Melanie (Pagette). They lived for a time in Stillwater, so that Neil could finish his studies. Their two eldest daughters were born there. He completed two separate bachelors degrees, one in Art and one in Industrial Engineering. The couple settled in Brownsville, where they had three more children. Neil worked as a recording engineer at the local radio station. In 1955, they moved to Austin, where Neil began working as an engineer for the language laboratories at the University of Texas. By the time he left in 1970, he was director of all of the university language labs. Through his work there, he befriended many international students and faculty. He was a beloved boss, colleague and friend.
The family had their last three children in Austin. Neil was a far more engaged father than most men of his generation. He took on the task of waking the children in the mornings and helping them get ready for school. He made a hot breakfast for the family every single morning, oatmeal, cracked wheat, grits or cornmeal during the week and pancakes or waffles or cornpone with eggs sunny side up on the weekends. From his eldest daughter, Tina:
“Merner
[our grandmother] told me that she regretted not having taught her sons
any domestic skills. She had assumed that they would grow up to have
wives who would take care of them. There was one thing Merner taught
Daddy, though. After he went off to college, she visited him in
Stillwater and showed him how to make cornmeal mush without lumps. She
was afraid he might starve to death if he didn’t know how to cook
anything at all. Everything else—from making pancakes to ironing the
puff sleeves on a child’s dress—he figured out on his own.”
He also drove the children to countless music lessons and to art and theater project and to swim at Deep Eddy and Barton Springs in the summer. Some of the events were no doubt partly for his own sanity: International Folk Dancing on Saturdays, Quaker Meeting on Sundays, countless plays and concerts and outdoor theater and cinema. Saturday mornings, the children would call him in when Bullwinkle came on. He especially loved Fractured Fairytales and the Boris and Natasha segments. And every evening, the children would pile up on the sofa with him and he would read aloud from Winnie the Pooh. He had animal nicknames for Sylvia and all of the children. Sylvia, with her raven hair, was the Panther and the children collectively were her kittens, but the kids also had other animal identities, chosen based upon each one’s personality as a baby or toddler.
An important thread that ran all through Neil’s adult life was his pacifism. Again, from Tina:
“He told us almost nothing about his wartime experiences, and he deeply regretted not having been a conscientious objector during WWII, even though it would have meant prison. He spent the rest of his life opposing war and promoting peace. He was a good writer, and he had a knack for getting letters to the editor published. He liked to think of himself as a spokesman for the pacifist community, and he had a following on the UT campus during the Vietnam War. I kept meeting people who admired him and envied me having Neil Hendricks for my father. I agree with Ila that you should mention Neil’s participation in the Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, in 1986. It was a milestone in his life.”
Also in the 1980s, Neil went to Nicaragua to participate in a humanitarian project, helping to build a school there.
Somehow in the midst of all of this, Neil found time for hobbies. He always played music and he always built things: boats, a six-sided bench around a tree, door chimes, boomerangs, additions to the house, musical instruments, a very fancy treehouse where he would also read aloud to the children. Once, he even built a clavichord from a kit. He used to say of the clavichord, “You have to believe it to hear it!” At the age of 48, he left his job at UT and his life in Austin. On May 11, 1970, he married Yoshiko Tezuka and began a whole new life in Reno, Nevada. At that point, he began building dulcimers and violas da gamba for a living and continued with this for the next 40 years. In this profession, he was able to combine his interests in music, visual aesthetics and solving engineering problems, as well as an appreciation for trees and exotic woods. He earned a reputation in particular for his bows.
"Mr. Hendricks made exactly what I was looking for. He even made me a bow out of Osage Orange, a wood that no American citizen had seen before Lewis & Clark ventured forth. The French name for Osage Orange is bois d'arc, or 'wood of the bow.' Of course, they were talking about a different sort of bow, but I like the connection."
—-Daniel Slosberg of Fiddling with History
Neil read widely, both fiction and non-fiction, and throughout his life remained interested in new ideas and in broadening his horizons. He was active with the Reno Society of Friends and in later years with Seniors Helping Seniors. He also played viol with an Early Music group there. He loved sailing on Lake Tahoe and skiing in the hills around Reno. After breaking his leg badly in a skiing accident in his 50s, he switched to cross-country skiing, a sport he practiced as often as possible, well into his 70s. Neil’s second wife, Yoshi, was fond of adopting stray animals and Neil enjoyed taking care of them. Their menagerie included many beloved dogs and cats. Every day, Neil and the dogs would drive up to the mountains for a run. Their dogs included Blackie, Deer-dog and Amber and many many cats, including the notorious Booful Cat (see cartoon below). Yoshi believed that Booful Cat’s psychotic tendencies were due to an unfortunate kittenhood but Neil felt it was “a clear case of demon possession.” Yoshi died in 2003 at the age of 65. Neil was 80.
At 88, Neil’s children persuaded him to move back to Austin, where his son James could look after him. He lived out his last seven years with James in his home. In November of 2017, he moved into an assisted living home and on January 7th, 2018, he died in the hospital, two of his daughters at his side. In addition to his children, Neil is survived by his stepdaughter, Angela Chadwick, his sisters- and brothers-in-law, Ada Duarte, Imelda and George Van Ecken, Philip and Rosanna Treviño and Flavio Treviño, his grandsons, Marcos Luján (Abby Lynn Alderate) and David Luján (Singer Mayberry) and his granddaughters, Christina and Caroline Pagette, as well as his great granddaughters (or “greatgrandkittens,” as he called them) Gwyneth and Ainhoa. His brother Robert Vincent Hendricks died in 2004 at the age of 79 and his first wife, Sylvia, died in 2007 at the age of 80. Neil will be remembered for his humanity, love of animals, willingness to help others, and his love for his children. Neil’s family will scatter his ashes at Laguna Gloria and various other locations that bear fond associations with him. A memorial service will be held at the Friends Meeting House at 3701 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, Austin, Texas on April 7th, 2018 at 11 am.
A poem by Lewis Hyde
This Error is the Sign of Love
"Man has to seek God in error and
forgetfulness and foolishness."
— Meister Eckhart
This error is the sign of love,
the crack in the ice where the otters breathe,
the tear that saves a man from power,
the puff of smoke blown down the chimney one morning, and the widower sighs and gives
up his loneliness,
the lines transposed in the will so the widow must scatter coins from the cliff instead of
ashes and she marries again, for love,
the speechlessness of lovers that forces them to leave it alone while it sends up its first pale
shoot like an onion sprouting in the pantry,
this error is the sign of love.
The leak in the nest, the hole in the coffin,
the crack in the picture plate a young girl fills with her secret life to survive the grade
school,
the retarded twins who wander house to house, eating, 'til the neighbors have become
neighbors.
The teacher's failings in which the students ripen,
Luther's fit in the choir, Darwin's dyspepsia, boy children stuttering in the gunshop,
boredom, shyness, bodily discomforts like long rows of white stones at the edge of the
highway,
blown head gaskets, darkened choir lofts, stolen kisses,
this error is the sign of love.
The nickel in the butter churn, the farthing in the cake,
the first reggae rhythms like seasonal cracks in a government building,
the rain-damaged instrument that taught us the melodies of black emotion and red and
yellow emotion,
the bubble of erotic energy escaped from a marriage and a week later the wife dreams of a
tiger,
the bee that flies into the guitar and hangs transfixed in the sound of sound 'til all his
wetness leaves him and he rides that high wind to the Galapagos,
this error is the sign of love.
The fault in the sea floor where the fish linger and mate,
the birthmark that sets the girl apart and years later she alone of the sisters finds her calling,
Whitman's idiot brother whom he fed like the rest of us,
those few seconds Bréton fell asleep and dreamed of a pit of sand with the water starting to
flow,
the earth's wobbling axis uncoiling seasons--seed that need six months of drought, flowers
shaped for the tongues of moths, summertime
and death's polarized light caught beneath the surface of Florentine oils,
this error is the sign of love.
The beggar buried in the cathedral,
the wisdom-hole in the façade of the library,
the hail storm in a South Dakota town that started the Farmers' Cooperative in 1933,
the Sargasso Sea that gives false hope to sailors and they sail on and find a new world,
the picnic basket that slips overboard and leads to the invention of the lobster trap,
the one slack line in a poem where the listener relaxes and suddenly the poem is in your
heart like a fruit wasp in an apple,
this error is the sign of love!
Reprinted with permission of the author. From the collection, This Error is the Sign of Love, published in 1988 by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now out of print; copies may be available from the Kenyon College Bookstore (contact Sue Dailey at 740.427.5633, or by e-mail at dailey@kenyon.edu).
