Earlier this month, Dick Mather’s rope parted. He quietly drifted to the next port-of-call. This news hit hard. Dick was the John R. Rogers Class of 1960 Valedictorian. I consider my knowing Dick to be a part of my education and even a bit of who I am. We never saw one-another face-to-face after graduation, but thanks to email, we were still having discussions as recently as June, 2004. At Rogers, Dick was just ahead of me in the male class-of-1960 surname order, so we sat next to one-another during home room during our four years at Rogers. We also sat next to each other in two years of advanced math in Mr. Raymond’s class. We were both nerds although we didn’t know that word.
At Rogers, we didn’t call him “Dick.” We, including Mr. Raymond, called him “Mather.” I must continue using that name when speaking of the Rogers memories.
When we need to reminisce, the annual is a help. A check of our 1960 Treasure Chest annual shows a page of child pictures of some folks. Mather’s child picture is among them. A 1959 Sadie Hawkins Dance picture shows the late Bonnie McMartin and Mather dressed as hillbillies for the dance.
I saw the actual rings of Saturn once. I got up at 2:30 am one morning and walked three miles to Mather’s house on Empire and Nevada. We aimed his telescope at Saturn about an hour before any hint of dawn. I can still see it in my mind’s eye. It kept drifting out of view due to Earth’s rotation, but was purely beautiful in glimpses.
When the sun rose, we went in the house. I met his mother. She and Mather were the entire family unit. She was what kids today, would call “cool.” She had let Mather paint an entire mural of the solar system on the wall of a front bedroom. She offered me hot chocolate and a doughnut. Then, as now, I liked to humorously mispronounce words that are spelled strangely, so I did a phonetic number on “doughnuts.” It came out as a part of canine anatomy. I was sorely embarrassed as I realized what how it sounded. Mather and his mother, both devout Christian Scientists, roared with laughter at my embarrassment. Each reminded me of it on later occasions.
The summer between junior and senior years, Mather and I drove up to Mt Spokane, with sleeping bags and that telescope, so that we could put some clear air between it and the heavens. Mt. Spokane at night? There was a campground about halfway up the mountain, but nobody was allowed to camp on the summit. Moreover, there was a fire lookout tower at the top “manned” by a 19-year-old female dish. Somehow, Mather persuaded both Ranger Dish and her grandfatherly boss that we were harmless. They gave us permission to spend the night on the mountain. They must have thought we were harmless, albeit eccentric. We were, but I could not fathom why permission was given.
We milled around the bottom of that tower flicking combs trying to attract bats. Geeks. Nerds. The two rangers stood at the rail of the tower and just stared. Later, the man drove away, leaving Ranger Dish, Mather, and me atop the mountain. I assume that the stairway to the tower was locked. We watched stars swim through the telescope field-of-vision until midnight. We retired to sleeping bags atop separate picnic tables at the tower base. We awoke in the morning to squirrels running across us and Ranger Dish staring down at us. We joked about being lucky that she didn’t empty her dishpan on us. My last memory of the adventure is us stopping the car at the first turn down the hill, to look at some kind of a plant, and stealing one last look at Ranger Dish watching us from the tower.
Classmate Bob Parry’s mother, Mary, was a substitute teacher. Mary’s full-time teaching career had been as a home economics teacher, not a math teacher. She tells an anecdote about substitute teaching Mather’s math class in his freshman or sophomore year. Mather’s scholastic reputation preceded him. “I was just trying to get through the day, when here comes Mather approaching the desk with a question. I was petrified, but by some fluke, I knew the answer. I was so proud of myself!”
Mather wasn’t only a math and science whiz. Rogers offered three foreign languages. Mather took four years of Latin and Spanish. Senora Pence, the Spanish teacher, called him Ricardo. Before she died last year, Dick used to take her on excursions from Marycliff, where she lived. She still called him Ricardo.
Sports? Mather played golf. He approached the game with mathematical precision. I’m not sure how good he was, but he did graduate with a 4.0 GPA, and that included PE grades.
I have several math and science books in my collection that are probably worth money. I bought them at the behest of Mather during our Rogers years. One of the books in a mathematics box-set goes on at length to prove that a machine will never play chess. I regret not discussing this with Dick recently, because every PC can play chess, and moreover, IBM has a machine that plays at the master level.
When we graduated, Mather headed to Harvard while I set out for Michigan State. I never saw him again in person. I had no idea how he was doing. Years later, Mary Parry sent me a full-page spread from the Spokesman Review about a Christian Science Healer named Richard Mather. A large picture of the healer gave no doubt that it was our Dick Mather.
Dick became an Army chaplain and then a kind of head chaplain. He traveled a great deal and saw a lot of the World. One of our classmates reported seeing him in Japan. I believe he was still a head chaplain recently, because I talked to him about Iraq. He said other chaplains were there, and that didn’t need to travel as much.
In the last three years I’ve traveled on four international trips for the United Methodist Church. Dick perked up when I told him this. He related that he trained as a Methodist preacher as part of his Christian Science Healer requirement.
I’m writing this in a hotel 200 yards from the gate at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. I recall Dick telling me about visiting that estate one Christmastime. It’s a bit mystical to imagine him here.