My Dad: Scientist, Soldier, and Songsmith

Frank Faux

Today is my Dad's 83rd birthday.

He has Parkinson's motor disorder, but he is NOT too sick because he still plays the piano prelude music at Church each Sunday. During the week, he practices for hours and hours to be ready for the 15 or 20 minutes he will play on Sunday.

He is NOT too sick, because when he is not playing the piano, he still walks for hours in the warm weather of southern California. His walk is slow (very slow), but that just gives him time to say hello to all the neighbors, which he loves to do.

He is NOT too sick because he still likes to argue science, and he loves to catch some fallacy in Sunday School. If he does, he may very well point it out. When these things stop – piano playing, walking, and arguing, then we will get worried and say he is sick.

He was (is) a heroic son who helped his widowed mother. His father Eugene died in 1930 at the beginning of the great depression. My father was five years old at the time.

At age 19 he was a soldier/photographer who assisted in the invasion of Europe shortly after D-day. His mother insisted that he was the personal photographer of General Eisenhower. He was not, but he did help photographically document the victims of German concentration camps.

When our family lived in southern Utah, my Dad made sure we were exposed to Mormon history. He took us to all the important sites -- such as Jacob Hamblin's home, Brigham Young's summer home, the MMM site, Silver Reef, Kolob of the Three Fingers, Zion's, Bryce, and many, many more.

In the early 1960s he took our family to Louisiana to live for two summers. We were exposed to the Mississippi River, shanties, the effects of real poverty on the underprivileged, and racial segregation. My Dad made sure we understood the nature of social injustices.

He was a teacher of chemistry in High School and College. As a scientist, he was a true "Show Me" Missourian. He has never liked claims without data.

For many years he worked for the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control District. Daily, and he would drive from one of the distant suburbs to downtown L.A. The effort was heroic. As a chemist he was better at the bench-top than most automated Perkin-Elmer photospectometers. Sometimes they calibrated the machines by his bench-top results using test tubes and graduated cylinders.

He has always been a lover of classical music. His love of music must be expressed. When his Parkinson's medication was not working well, his fingers could not move. So, to express himself musically, he typed out songs note by note on a computer until a melody could be produced in Midi format. He has a website where one can easily listen to the songs he typed in little note by little note. He was a dedicated songsmith.

For many years my Dad (well into his retirement) was in charge of the printed Church program for Sacrament meeting. He produced some of the most unique program covers in Church history. The covers sometimes included pictures of galaxies depicting "God's universe."

One Sunday he clearly went a little too far in his scientific enthusiasm. It was a Fast Sunday and the program cover consisted of a diagram of the sex organs of a plant. The diagram was labeled "God's handiwork." After the program had been distributed, he began to feel guilty and realized that maybe a picture of Jesus would have worked better. During the testimony portion of the meeting he went to the podium and apologized for turning the program into something X-rated for plants. The Ward loved my Dad and knew he was just struggling to get it right. (I am not sure, though, how visitors may have reacted).

My Dad is just a typical Faux. We are independent minded. We think, and we study. We can be at times challenging. But, in the final analysis there is a strong love for people. After all, it is people who make music and make science. Or, he might say, it really all boils down to God's handiwork.

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Copyright 2008 S.Faux (Email: foxgoku54 [at] gmail [d0t] com; URL: http://mormoninsights.blogspot.com). Readers may distribute this post for noncommercial purposes provided such distributing is of the entire post, including author's copyright and contact information. All other rights reserved.




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