Eulogy

Patrick and Thomas,

Writing a eulogy for someone you love is daunting, but it is a gift to be able to honor them with your words when it seems like there is nothing that you can do for them. It is also comforting to be forced to think about, and put into words, how they lived their life, and how they enriched yours, rather than dwelling on their final days and the loss that you feel.

I hope that someday you will say a few words about me, and feel better when you do!

Love,

Dad

Donald Eugene Sullivan

September 30, 1934 – May 4, 2025

I’m Tim, Don’s son.

I want to thank you all for the role you played in my dad’s life, and for being here today to honor him and to support my mom and our family. 

I want to especially thank Father Dornbos and Deacon Cameron for the service, our friend Jill Murray for the lovely flowers, and my cousins Rene and Cheryl for the beautiful music. My dad always loved hearing you sing.

I’m honored to be here to talk about my father. It’s easy to do, because he told so many great stories about his life. But it’s also hard to do, for obvious reasons, of course, but also because I won’t tell the stories as well as he did, and because there are too many gems to choose between. As an English teacher and a lover of poetry, he valued good writing and speaking, had no patience for floweriness, and most of all valued brevity, especially when something was standing between him and a meal. I’ll do my best to live up to his expectations.

He was born in Butte in 1934, during the Great Depression, and those early years affected him for the rest of his life. He hated to waste anything, was thankful for and satisfied with whatever he had, and was always more interested in stability and certainty in a job than advancement. He spent as little money as he could on himself, but was generous with everyone else, especially my mom and me. 

Butte was very Irish in those days, as was his family. His grandparents were all born in Ireland, his father and mother were first generation Irish Americans, and he had 3 brothers and one sister. His father was a miner, and then a mine foreman, until there was a strike. He would not cross the picket line, was black balled by the Company, and never worked in the mines again. He and my grandmother started a grocery store in their home, and the miners supported it to help them get by. My dad saw, at an early age, the importance of integrity and the power and value of community.

The Catholic Church was a large part of their lives. They lived close to Saint Patrick’s, and my dad and his brothers were altar boys there. They also attended Catholic schools. 

He started working to help his family, first in the family store, then as a paperboy. In those days, paperboys bought the papers themselves and resold them to try to make a profit. He often didn’t break even, which turned him permanently against careers in sales and commerce. His father was elected, thanks to the miners, as county commissioner. He was able to get my dad a job working for the city, despite the fact that he was under age. My dad helped to build the Butte Civic Center, though helped might be too strong a word. After they had carefully lifted a set of huge rafter beams, each with a cantilever section intended to hold up a roof extension, my dad sawed off the cantilever sections, thinking that the beams were just too long. Seeing his lack of carpentry skills, they told him and an older man to drive the construction waste to the dump in a two-ton truck. The older man said he didn’t drive, and my dad had never driven either, but said he was willing to try. He drove all the way to the dump and back with the truck in first gear.

He graduated from Butte Central, and joined the Army during the Korean war. He was stationed in Alaska, where the forced marches and camping in frigid weather instilled in him a lifelong hate for sleeping outdoors. 

When he returned home from the Army, he hoped to go to college. He had sent his pay home to his parents to save for his tuition, but they had needed to spend it, so he got a job as a Butte policeman to put himself through school. He still had no drivers license, even though driving was part of the job. Eventually he took the driving test, in uniform, in the squad car, with his partner in the back seat. Even if he had driven badly, the examiner probably would have been wise enough to pass him. 

Most of the police officers were Irish, and one of my dad’s favorite stories was about two old-country Irishmen he worked with. They got a report of a dead horse on Porphyry Street. They drove there, and sure enough, found a dead horse. They started to do the paperwork, but couldn’t spell Porphyry, so they used the squad car to drag the horse to Gold Street. My dad swore that one was true.

My mom met my dad just after he had joined the police force, when she was a Junior in high school, because her friend was dating my dad’s best friend. They hit it off immediately, dated for three years, and then married. I was born four years later. 

During those years, my dad used the money from his job, and the GI Bill, to start attending college. It wasn’t a smooth journey. He tried MSU, and U of M, and several majors, before he finally obtained his degree at Western Montana College, where his love of poetry and language led him to an English major and a career teaching. 

There are periods in a life where you can see, in retrospect, a person’s most important convictions and characteristics forming. I think that period for my dad was when he had his first teaching job, in Ennis. It was the turbulent 60s, in a small, conservative ranching town, where many of the students were feeling the winds of cultural change. They were eager for new things, and open to the beauty of language and the power of learning that he, a young, idealistic teacher, introduced them to. They loved him.  

He taught English, composition, history, and drama, was the advisor for the annual, and coached the cheerleaders. No evidence remains for the depth of his  talent coaching cheerleaders, but I assume it was limited. 

But the sentimental, language-centric mission of the annual was perfect for him. One he helped to produce contained the poem he wrote that is printed in the program we handed out today, and it makes clear how deeply he cared about those students. On the cover of that annual, he printed a quotation from the Bible, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” I think he took that as his mission as a teacher, and that he always deeply believed it.

One of my best memories of those years, when I was 6 or 7, is of walking past the teachers’ lounge with my mom, who also worked at the high school. My dad was there in his tweed jacket and turtleneck, pipe in hand, debating some topic with his colleagues, his passion and conviction clear from the volume of his voice. He made me feel that ideas mattered, that truth was important, and that I had a lot to learn.

Teachers only get paid for nine months, so to make ends meet, my dad had many interesting summer jobs over the years: in the forest service, at a fish hatchery, driving an enormous dump truck at the Pit, and operating a hydraulic blasting system, also at the Pit. In that last role he made a mistake that wasted tens of thousands of dollars of expensive hydraulic fluid, and he definitely would have been fired if Rene and Cheryl’s dad had not been his boss.

We moved back to Butte in 1972, when my mom’s father died, and my dad taught at Butte High until his retirement in 1997, and then for a few more years at Montana Tech. He loved his students, and over the years he has received dozens of letters, calls, and invitations to class reunions from people wanting to thank him for the difference he made in their lives. Several of them became writers, and credited him with inspiring them to write. 

After retiring, he devoted himself to things that gave him joy. He played all the golf he could, always in the company of close friends like Dan Sullivan and John Mack.  He also loved to read, to organize his collection of golf clubs, and to shop for treasures for his grandsons in second hand stores, as the poem by Thomas in the program describes. He constantly listened to music, and spent countless hours optimizing and organizing his collection while listening, and converting the music from one format to another.

My dad always hoped to die at home, and god granted him that wish. We watched a movie together in which a teacher helps people in need and makes a difference in their lives, and afterward Dad said that he loves to see an underdog do the right thing and succeed. He, my mom, and I then said good night and that we loved each other, and he passed away when trying to get out of bed the next morning. 

I think that the language, stories, jokes, poetry, and music that my dad loved all fed his deep desire for emotional truth that makes it absolutely clear to us how to live.  What else could explain him reading aloud, every Christmas Eve at the dinner table, what must be the saddest poem in the English language. It is about a penniless, hungry family in a poor house in Victorian England on Christmas Eve. He could never make it through the whole poem without crying and needing to stop. But it served its purpose nonetheless, letting us appreciate how lucky we are, and encouraging us to help those less fortunate.

Thank you, Dad, for all that you did for me, and for being such a great teacher for all of us.

I’ll end there, because I can feel him saying “Enough already, partner, people want to get on with their day!”