Wil’s hat reminded me of him today... the one he wore riding his horse across his land in Montana was stained with his sweat from riding and working to keep up a place as big as all outdoors.  An engineer, he was a man who knew how and why things work.  He knew how to design a house and build it. He knew when his barn needed a new roof before it began to leak and spoil the hay.  When Estelle’s garbage disposal began to growl and rumble, he knew how to take the old one out and put a new one in it’s place... with zero percent chance that the pipes and fittings that held it place would ever leak.  

In World War II, the big one that changed the world, Wil made his country safer by serving in the Navy on a mine sweeper.  He didn’t do something so he could brag about it but because it was the right thing to do.  To an engineer timing and good design are everything.  Even in his own death he got the timing right.  On Tuesday morning, July sixteenth, at age ninety-three, he coughed once around seven-thirty in the morning, closed his eyes and went peacefully to a final sleep.  In his very last breath he was still teaching us how to do something with dignity and grace.