Living in The Shadow of Your Older Brother and a Revered Father
July 24, 2010
My wife's uncle, Haig [HIKE] Rushdoony, died late in the evening of July 22. He was the younger brother of the more famous Rushdoony and the son of Y. K. Rushdoony, who was an important eyewitness chronicler of the Armenian genocide of 1915.
He earned an Ed.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. He was professor of education at California State University at Stanislaus until he retired. He was the author of The Language of Maps, a guide for young students. By anyone's standards, he had a successful academic career.
He was an articulate man, which is a common trait of Armenians. They are talkers. They are famous story tellers. William Saroyan is the best-known American example.
The father had an amazing memory. Haig once told me a story about his father in his old age. He had his eyes closed, with a book in his lap. When he opened his eyes, Haig kidded him, "You were asleep, Pop." The old man said, "I was not asleep; I was thinking." Haig told me decades later: "It was the only time I ever told my father he was wrong. I again said he was asleep." The old man handed him the book, which had been open to a page. Haig said the old man began to recite the page verbatim. Late in his old age, the father began to lose his eyesight. To hide the loss, he memorized many of the psalms, which he would pretend to read after dinner. It took some time for his visiting sons to figure this out.
There is a great respect for scholarship in the Armenian community. Y. K. Rushdoony was a graduate of Edinburgh. What do you do if you are the heir of one man with this capacity, and the kid brother of a famous scholar and social commentator? You bide your time.
After his retirement, he and his wife started in a small ministry to the Balkans, Macedonian Outreach. It works mostly with refugees and orphans. It provides money for food to desperately poor people. Years ago, someone in the ministry overseas remarked that a better way to provide milk would be to buy the family a goat. This made sense. So, the ministry started supplying goats.
The ministry has grown considerably. What he founded as a retirement project will remain as his legacy. This has nothing to do with his educational achievement. For the recipients of the aid, who may not know his name, and whose children surely will not, he made a big difference.
His father wanted R. J. Rushdoony to earn a doctorate. In terms of brains, that would have been easy. He once wrote a graduate term paper in history, when he was getting an M.A. in education. He wrote it for Ernst Kantorovicz, one of the founders of medieval history. The paper was 300 pages, a history of concept of visible sovereignty in church-state relations in England from 1600 to 1930. But he never earned a doctorate. His father had wanted Haig to go into the ministry, something he told R. J., but not Haig. Haig earned a doctorate, but never had a ministry until three decades after his father's death.
So, fathers may not get what they want, but sons may achieve more.
Brothers may live in the shadow of their more famous siblings, yet achieve a great deal.
Footnotes are useful, but sometimes goats are better.