September 7th, 2012
As the children of Clinton Hendershot the three of us would like to apologize to everyone here for not having the privilege of calling him father. We are not sure what we did to earn such an honor but we can assure you we do not take it for granted. We were so taken by the man as children that we would race to be the ones to take off his stinky work boots when he came home and laugh like crazy when he smacked us in the face with his rolled up sweaty socks. This probably is not normal. And no matter how tired he was after those long days at work he always had the energy to go swing at the school house down the street or shoot hoops in the back yard or even do push-ups with us on his back. this may have something to do with him being a very young father though he was kinda a superman.
Even at the age of fifteen he was excited to be a dad and we always knew that when he said family comes first he meant it. He lived it. From those early days in the back yard burning trash and eating candy corn to later trips to the dump eating candy corn he made it a family affair. This is not an attempt to sound as redneck as possible, though it kinda does, but he made even the smallest mundane chore a nostalgic memory. There were lots of little things we will think of over the years and really for the rest of our lives that will remind us of dad. The one thing that has always cracked us up was his need to dole out things in groups of ten, especially m&ms. It started out probably because he couldn’t afford to buy us each a bag and ten was a nice round number and it left more than a few for him but eventually it just became what he did. Ten grapes, ten peanuts, ten whatever. So as a gift to you from him there are bags of his favorite candy that will be handed out as you leave today.
When we were young he decided we needed a fireplace and not just a small stove, but a massive fireplace. He probably told everyone it was for economical reasons but in fact it was more likely because he wanted a mantel to hang the Christmas stockings on or because he had watched one too many episodes of little house on the prairie and thought he was Charles Ingalls. Whatever the reason winter time centered around that fire. It would be so hot when we went to bed that we would put clothes under the door to block the heat which of course meant that when we woke up the hard wood floors were icicles and we could almost see our breath but as soon as we opened the door the warmth of the fire he had risen so early to stoke up would pour in as would the smell of oatmeal or cream of wheat bubbling on the stove. His breakfasts were always the best and it was not until much later that we realized it was because he put in a cup of sugar on the oatmeal and a pound of butter on the toast. “it will stick to your ribs” he would say. Indeed it would as it was probably 700 calories. A proper healthy Midwest breakfast.
And on those rare occasions we did not just leap out of bed in the morning our father had one of two ways of waking us up. Bobbi Jo and Joshua remember him at times gently rubbing their backs to peacefully awaken them from slumber. Kathryn remembers no such thing. She only recalls the other method. This method involves only a piece of string and must have been invented in medieval times as a method of torture. He would simply place the string right in front of one of the sleeper’s nostrils so that the gentle dreamer would breath in the said string until the deepest caverns of their sinuses were tickled awake. We can assure you that there is nothing better than to be awoken by hitting yourself square in the nose and hearing the uncontrollable laughter from the man who was supposed to protect you from such tortures. He may be an angel now, but Clinton Lee could be a little…shall we say ornery. We urge you to try this on your loved ones at home in memory of him and let us know how well that goes over.
Stoking that fire for the first time each year also meant one thing, Christmas was coming. Dad loved Christmas. He turned into a little boy every year, even more than he was every other day of the year. He went all out. The first Saturday in December was the second best day of the year and a close second to Christmas itself. Early in the morning on that day he would pull each of us aside and list off the chores we had done and give us our annual allowance bonus. Each of us remembers thinking at one time or another “I don’t think I actually mowed the lawn 15 times last summer and I certainly did not dust those stairs more than once.” But we would take the cash, pile in the car, and head to the metropolis that is Wichita. Our first stop was always our aunt Deborah and uncle Larry’s house where we would eat powdered donuts and look at the sale ads in the newspaper even though we always went to the same handful of stores. The rest of the day became a game of hide the gifts slash try to peek at what was being bought. It was a day of pure magic. We would return to Hutchinson with twelve cents and Target sacks with our names on them. One year Joshua had only managed to
spend a third of his funds and after bragging about it dad responded, “oh good, you can buy us supper.” Which josh did.
The belief that giving was better than receiving was an easy lesson to learn in our house as our father lived it daily. He was a perfect example of selfless giving. The one thing he would selfishly accept though were homemade gifts. And we gave him some doozies. But every time he opened that box to find either an unfinished cork board or a sanding block or a paper mache butler he reacted as if he had built him the Taj Mahal, though Kathryn probably tried to make him one of those too out of toothpicks. And his appreciation of them all was sincere because he knew there was love behind it. And we certainly felt that in all the gifts he gave us. It is hard to beat a handmade heirloom piece of furniture that we received every year at Christmas.
He would stay up every night in the month of December and sometimes all night Christmas eve to finish them. We each have households full of them. Did we mention how lucky we are?
Not only was he a master woodworker but he could do anything or at least anything that required ingenuity and manual labor. He was also a master teacher. It was never an issue that two of us were girls. If he needed a board cut on the table saw to six and 5/8th we learned quickly how to read a tape measure to six and 5/8ths. He let us try our hand at everything. We could use the power tools to build things and he would let us help when he was doing things like tiling the bathroom or plumbing the sink or building a deck. Of course he also didn’t mind letting us “try” to scrape the house until our hands fell off. He taught us how to do a good days work whether we wanted to or not and we thank him for that daily. Sometimes we would ask him how he knew how to do a certain thing and he would say, “I don’t know how I know, I just know.”
And he took this ingenuity with him everywhere. When Kathryn was in the Peace corps in West Africa he and mom came to visit and he had wanted to make a basketball goal for her village. He asked that she take him to a welder in the market town and when she asked if he wanted her to translate for him, he said, “I have a pencil and a paper, I will be fine.” She and mom went shopping for a couple hours and when they returned not only did he have a basketball hoop made out of the rim of a bicycle tire but he also had made 15 friends without speaking a word of the language. There was also 15 gum wrappers on the ground too.
We are sure there are gum wrappers all over the world just as there are other examples of his ingenuity but we kids didn’t see a lot of that. We were left at home. Those work and witness trips building churches, schools and hospitals all over the world were for mom and him to do together and perhaps, though we don’t want to admit it, maybe a bit of a vacation from us. His constant desire to help others and give of himself was a character trait that everyone in this room has either witnessed but probably more accurately been the recipient of. It will be part of his legacy that all three of us will strive to duplicate and we hope you all will too.
Other than helping others our father had many loves. The first was certainly his wife. Watching them hold hands in public or catching them kissing in the kitchen was an embarrassment when we were kids but we knew it was a rare thing of beauty as we aged and tried the relationship thing for ourselves. Dad was a romantic and knew he wanted to be with our mom at the age of thirteen, which may be a bit weird for those of you with teenagers and maybe it is a bit weird, but reading his junior high love letters to her you could see even then the sincerity in his affection, even promising to not race cars after they were married if she didn’t want him to. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
He also loved his Midwest upbringing. He could hunt and fish with the best of them, especially if his brothers were there running trot lines or setting up deer stands or camping at Kanapolis. He loved old cars and had dreamed of redoing his 41 chevy truck with Joshua someday. They talked about it during every phone call. He loved playing the guitar and hanging out with people who played the guitar, even those who would stay at the house until 3 in the morning on a Tuesday when he had to get up at 6 to go to work the next day. You know who you are, Jack. He loved his old movies, westerns particularly, though he could not for the life of him make it past the opening credits for most of them. Good Sam was his favorite. It is an old movie with Gary Cooper and we guarantee if you watch that movie you will think of dad the entire time, except perhaps the end when he gets rip roaring drunk.
He loved helping his fellow man. He was particularly drawn to those who had, shall we say, a spotted past. When he owned C& C he would come home some nights and mention he had hired a new guy and instead of asking what their name was, we would ask “what were they in for?” He was certainly let down a time or two, and he bailed out more than a few of them from jail, but he never lost faith in the goodness of humanity and the potential of
every single person. Though we also knew that if we ever got into trouble there was no way he was bailing us out.
He loved to rock in his rocking chair and most babies that came to our house were treated to a good rocking or two. He loved his Sunday afternoon football games and true to his nature always rooted for the underdog. He also loved his Sunday afternoon naps. We did not so much enjoy our Sunday afternoon required naps even up into high school and our cousins who would often come over between church services especially did not like those required afternoon Sunday naps, though we bet they would not mind them so much these days. He loved a good joke even up to the end. After his surgery last week Bobbi and mom walked into his room to find him unresponsive so they both went to grab one of his hands to gently wake him, Kathryn would have tried the string, but right when they reached for him he yelled “Boo.” You can imagine how loud they yelled.
He also loved his dogs. His dog Annie had been a constant companion and did more for his spirits over the last 6 years then any pill could have done. Our first dog was named Bruno, a big german shepherd that lived outside his entire life and only came in on the rare occasion. If there are dogs in heaven dad is right now trying to explain to Bruno why Annie not only gets to come in the house, but also has her own chair. We wish him luck with that because there isn’t much he can justify there.
But above all of this dad loved his God. He loved the church and everything that went with the church. He loved the singing, the preaching, he even loved the tithing. His faith was down to his core and no one on this planet could ever doubt or question that. When we were kids dad had a stutter like you wouldn’t believe but instead of hiding and just not talking he turned into a preacher. Watching him over the years overcome his fear of speaking because of his stutter into someone who could inspire a congregation was a thing of beauty to behold. He lived what he believed and his life has spoken louder than any fire and brimstone evangelist could. His faith was so strong in fact that he placed a verse spouting the fact on the front of our house without first spell checking the form he had made and pressing it into the wet cement. The back of your funeral bulletin will show you the result of his endeavors and we won’t tell you how many years it took before anyone noticed the mistake. And we won’t tell you how many times we had to tell the funeral home that we indeed wanted a misspelled word on their handout.
Our father was a one of a kind man and I don’t think anyone here would disagree with that statement. He has touched each of you with his kindness, thoughtfulness, selflessness and perhaps a bit of his pranksterness. We want to thank each of you for coming to join us today to celebrate his life and though he was fond of saying how “blessed” he was by each of us, we all know it was in knowing him that has blessed us all. We are all better people by his existence and though he was taken from us too soon we hope his life and faith will be an inspiration to you and like us you will try to live in such a way to make his legacy of thinking of others first a reality. May you love your fellow man unconditionally, may you know a hard day’s work, may you find what you believe in and live your life accordingly, and when all else fails ask yourself “what would Clint do?” and the right answer will not be far
away. And seriously try to wake up someone you love with a piece of string.
– Kathryn, Bobbi, Joshua….. mostly Kathryn
