This past weekend, I attended a memorial service for my friend Bill. I had the privilege of working with him for five years and got to know him as an upstanding human being, but I still found out more about him at the service. Bill was never rich, but he was one of the most successful people I know. I hope you will indulge me while I tell you why.
Bill was almost 70 when I started working with him at a bookstore. He was primarily responsible for maintaining our magazine section. If you have seen a typical Barnes & Noble magazine section, ours was -- I am not kidding -- twice that size. When our weekly shipment came in, he would get right on it, flinging the magazine totes like they were empty. (Magazine totes actually weigh about twice as much as a full book tote.)
He also did various tasks around the store as needed, and kept up at least 30 hours a week until the store closed, and pretty much never called out sick. A couple of years before the store closed, he developed cancer, and not for the first time. He would let us know when he had to go for chemo treatments, and we scheduled him off those days, but the next day he came back in like nothing was wrong. (He was bald since before I knew him, so any hair loss wasn't evident to us.)
Bill had a lovely wife, and a grown son who lived far away, with a family of his own. During his eulogy, Bill's son told how he had been a homeless four-year-old in New York when Bill and Mrs. Bill adopted him off the street. The young man grew up, went to college, and, as the son said, "married above his station," which he said he was prepared for because his parents had encouraged him to learn. He also mentioned that Bill always chose to forego taking the bus or a taxi to work so that he would have money for his family.
There were at least 100 people at the service, and I couldn't help noticing that it was a very diverse group -- white people black people, and one of the speakers was Hispanic. There were several of us from the bookstore, a number from the church, several from the pipe and drum corps in which he had been the drum major. (Yes, even into his mid-70s, Bill spent ALL of St. Patrick's Day marching in 2-3 parades and at least a dozen performances at Scottish/Irish/English pubs.)
Yes, Bill served our country, too, serving in the Army in the explosives division. He was also a parking enforcement specialist for the local police department, past president of the lawn bowling club, and for ten years was a volunteer at the international tennis event in town.
In the end, he survived cancer six times, always keeping a positive attitude, until a brain tumor finally took him.
No, Bill was not rich. He was not famous. He didn't go traveling the world, hold political office, or have a university building named after him. Yet I submit that Bill was tremendously successful, and I suspect the crowd here will recognize why: Because he was good at life