A Tribute to my Father, Don Balty

January 12, 2009

So many thoughts flood my mind this morning as I try to authentically portray the life of a man – a man who let me call him Pa. Perhaps the best way to characterize my father is to tell you that when I made phone calls on Thursday to tell people about Dad’s passing, several grown men and ladies began sobbing when they heard the news. If Dad had heard them, he probably would have cried too, because he had a heart for people, and he could feel their sorrow. After Dad passed, a dear friend asked me what I would like if I could have anything that had belonged to Dad. At the moment I couldn’t think of anything, so I said, “How about his BMW?” But now I know the true answer: what I most want is what my father has already given to me.

First, he gave me a treasure house of wonderful memories. Dad loved to travel, and some of my earliest memories are of his taking us to Scottsbluff National Monument or to a local auditorium where we would watch travelogue presentations hosted by people who had traveled, photographed, and had returned to take us to exotic and mysterious faraway places. Many years later – two summers after Amy and I married – Dad pretended to be shocked to learn that Amy had never been out west. Within twenty-four hours, Dad had everything loaded and we blasted off for several days to the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains.

This past summer, as we were beginning to see the darkening clouds on the horizon of Dad’s health, we decided to take one more road trip. As we followed the Oregon Trail toward the sunset, I was reminded of Francis Parkman’s journal entry wherein he followed the Oregon Trail to where it crossed the Platt River. Parkman was amazed to see huge pieces of furniture and other heirlooms stacked beside the river. He noted in his journal that many westward sojourners, realizing they had to choose between crossing the river or keeping their treasures, tossed aside items they once would have considered irreplaceable. As Dad prepared to cross the deepest river of his life, I was blessed to spend some precious hours with him. We talked, sometimes even laughed, well into the night. I came to realize that Dad had nothing to lay aside, nothing to hinder his fording death’s icy current and passing into the eternal summer land of the soul. When Mom called to say I needed to come home, I rushed back to Illinois, but only to get to talk to Dad, certainly not because he and I had any fences to mend. I can assure you that I have NO deep-seated disappointments about my father and NO bad memories.

Another gift my father gave to me was the way he treated my mother. You may have observed that when Mom enters a building, she pauses before going through the door, and she never opens her own car door – habits cultivated from years of living with a gentleman. So many times I’ve heard him say, “Let me carry that, Glenda.” Even when dad was just a few weeks from passing away, he was planning, from his hospital bed, the gifts that he wanted us to purchase for Mom’s birthday and for Christmas. He said that after he was gone, he didn’t want Mom to have to go out into the cold to start her own car, so he directed us to buy a remote starter for her car. Just another of his tokens of love. When I told Mom about Dad’s choice of casket colors, she said that he chose blue because it was her favorite color.

One night in November, I called his hospital room and asked how he was feeling. He said he was about the same. I asked how Mom was holding up. The line went silent. I thought maybe he had fallen asleep, because sometimes I have that effect on people. But he wasn’t asleep; he was crying. Finally, in a broken voice he said, “I’m just afraid that I’ll get so caught up in my own illness that I won’t even know how your mom is feeling.” Dad loved Mom, and he gave me the priceless gift of letting me watch him honor her.

Finally, Dad gifted me with a sense of my spiritual heritage. He spoke often about the churches that his father had pastored, churches whose salary usually had to be supplemented by my grandfather’s outside work. Yet my grandfather, Raymond, remained faithful to the task to which God had called him. Dad told me about his Granddad, Alonzo Balty, a shop keeper and farmer whom people affectionately called “Lon.” Lon was a deeply generous man who eventually lost his hardware store because he refused to collect debts from customers who were struggling during the Great Depression. It was Granddad Lon who gave my father the money to go to youth camp where, at age 15, Dad gave his heart to Christ.

But the story doesn’t begin there. According to the cryptic notes in my grandmother’s family Bible genealogy, a man named John Balty was born in Lille, France, in 1849. Grandma describes him as a “weaver and farmer” who died of “heart failure” in 1933, four years before Dad was even born. Yet John was so much more than can be implied by his occupation, because he was a man of faith. Dad told me that John hid for his life in France because of religious persecution. When John immigrated to America and became a Nebraska homesteader, he did so to slake his insatiable thirst for religious freedom.

And God handsomely rewarded the desires of John’s heart, because Grandma’s record shows that John’s son, Granddad Lon, gave his heart to Christ on August 26, 1901. Then Lon’s son, my Grandfather Raymond, was saved in February, 1923. Dad followed in the summer of 1952 when, during youth camp, he knelt at an alter in the administration building of Miltonvale Wesleyan College. Could John have known how his choices would impact my father? Never. Could Granddad Lon have known that his generosity might influence my father to show mercy to customers who were struggling to make their car payments? Impossible. Could Raymond have known that today I would be extolling his faithful years of ministry? What these generations of men knew is that although you can’t change your ancestry, you can bless your descendents by living a life of devotion to Christ and by honoring those within your scope of influence.

Therefore, I knew what my dad meant during our last face-to-face exchange. I knew what he meant on December 27, at 5:30 a.m. when I woke him and said that Amy and I were packed and ready to leave. I knew what he meant when he whispered, hoarsely, “Travel safely.” And as I turned away, he said, more quietly, “Travel safely, son.” He was not just referring to our trip to Georgia.

In about 48 hours, a gray hearse will somberly pull away from Melby Mortuary in Mankato, Kansas. The procession will head west on U. S. Highway 36 for a few miles, then turn north on Highway 128 toward Burr Oak, Kansas. A few minutes later we will drive between two white gateposts and enter Burr Oak Cemetery. After circling past the tall, stark flag pole, we will pass a grove of Russian Olive trees – silent sentinels brooding over hundreds of polished granite markers. On the south side of the cemetery, a small tent will be staked next to monuments that bear the names, “Isaac and Rachel Bender,” and “Raymond and Amie Balty.” A few moments later, Reverend Paul Eversole will commit my father’s body to the earth, his soul to God. And as the waves of sadness threaten to capsize our family, I am going to anchor my mind in this thought: the thing I most needed from my father, I have already received. He taught me how to travel safely.

David Balty