Drennan, Robert Murray (Eulogy by Joseph Peter Drennan (15 February 2016))

RESCRIPT OF EULOGY GIVEN BY JOSEPH PETER DRENNAN
FOR ROBERT MURRAY DRENNAN
AT SAINT JOSEPH'S ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, MEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS,
ON MONDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2016
Reverend clergy, fellow members of the Drennan Family, both here in this parish church of Saint
Joseph's, those across the United States, in Panama and throughout the rest of Central America, and in
our ancestral home of the Emerald Isle of Ireland, and the citizens of Medford, other distinguished
guests and fellow citizens,
Today, we say good-bye to the second born son of Richard Patrick and Margaret Gertrude Drennan.
Born on Capitol Hill, in a small row house on Second Street, Southeast, in Washington, D.C., on the
18 th of January 1924, the early days of the Coolidge Administration, and in the midst of a prosperous
period of American History known as the Roaring Twenties, his name was Robert Murray Drennan.
Those of us who loved him, and who ache at his passing, knew him as brother, friend, uncle (he
leaves , including me, twelve nieces and nephews, and was predeceased by another nephew, my dearly
beloved brother, Michael Robert Drennan, more of whom about later) great uncle (he left thirty-six
great nieces and nephews, many of whom are here today), a great-great niece and three great-great
nephews.
Robert Murray Drennan was the proverbial Irish bachelor of the family who became its patriarch.
With no progeny of his own, he became a surrogate father to those of us who have lost our fathers, my
sisters, Mary Ann and Rosemary, and the Drennans of Pittsfield, Richard, Peter, Paul, John and Mary
Hanlon. He was also indefatigably devoted to his other niece and nephews, Meg, Andy, Don and Larry.
He took interest in, and was proud of, all thirteen of hie nieces and nephews, including, not least,
my dearly departed and only brother, Michael Robert Drennan, who was so cruelly taken from us in
1975, at the tender age of 18.
As his nieces and nephews had children, who came to number thirty-six, followed by a great-great
niece and three great-great nephews, he increasingly invested his attention and time upon them, happy
for their progress, available and anxious to mentor them and determined to be an example to us.
Why was he so devoted to us?
Born at a time when there was still some residual discrimination against the Irish, coming of age in
the era of the Great Depression, going to serve his country in World War II, as a member of what Tom
Brokaw called “the Greatest Generation” (incidentally, Robert didn't like that term), Robert saw and
experienced much as a child and young adult, perhaps more that any of us here in this church. He
learned his lessons well, and sought to share his wisdom with his nieces and nephews, whom he loved
in equal measure. This devotion to family was inspired, in part, by his Uncle, my Great Uncle, Pete
Murray, who was born in that same house, on Capitol Hill; isn't that ironic. And Pete didn't have any
children either. Robert loved, practically worshipped, Pete Murray; he knew that Pete was indefatigably
devoted to his nieces and nephews and perhaps that's where Robert took his cue.
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Like Pete, Robert was energetic, fun-loving, and possessed of a Lincolnesque, excuse me reverend
clergy, ribald, sense of humor. And, perhaps, at this stage, I might share one of those Robert stories that
can be told in this wonderful church.
It's a relatively recent story, and it happened right after I lost my mother in December of 2006. In
January of 2007, I was on Capitol Hill one day, when newly elected Senator Webb was opening his
office. It was a chilly day, not as cold as today, but as I left the Russell Building, I saw this older, rather
corpulent man, with a big gray mane, and I recognized him, your senator, your late senator, Ted
Kennedy, and I don't know what it was, but something possessed me to go up to Senator Kennedy and
to talk to him about Robert. I approached him, introduced myself, and I said: “Senator, your brother
Bob and my Uncle Bob, had something in common. They both were on the Harvard football team”, and
the Senator who was then probably ill with cancer, although it had yet to be diagnosed, looked up at
me, with a lilt in his eye, and he said: “Your Uncle Bob? So, your dad is the one who had more hair
than Robert”. And I said to him: “Senator, perhaps you would be pleased to know that today, in 2007,
Robert has no hair at all”, whereupon the Senator takes his hand and he runs it through this thick mane
of hair, and he says: “Well you be sure to tell him that that I have all of mine.” And I thought that that
was hilarious. I had to share that with Robert immediately, so I called Robert. I related the story to him.
Robert didn't see the humor in that. Robert said: “Did you tell him that he's fat and I'm thin?” And I
thought to myself, how funny this is. Two aging lions making fun of each other.
Back to the serious note, although spared from the ravages of poverty himself as a child, Robert
saw a good bit of it in this community as he came of age in the Great Depression, and I think it's fair
for all of us who knew him to observe that it haunted him throughout his life.
Nonetheless, he was a well-rounded boy, who studied hard and excelled on the gridiron. He was a
star on the Medford High School Football Team, and, thence, at his college alma mater, Harvard. He
worked, per force, hard to become an educated person, achieving a bachelor's degree in Engineering
and Applied Physics and a Masters Degree in Engineering.
As father remarked or alluded to at the outset of this Mass, one cannot overemphasize how much
Robert was at the forefront of history. Indeed, as a twenty-one year old medic in General Patton's
Army, he marched into the Buchenwald Concentration Camp on the 11 th of April 1945, where he
confronted the unspeakable evil that was Naziism. There, at that camp and the sub-camps, there were
upwards of 35,000 people who were killed by a regime because they were Jews, because they were
gypsies, because they were gay, because they were political dissidents, and because they were religious
dissidents, and, oh yes, there were whole ethnic groups that were deemed inferior and that was their
crime too. He helped to chronicle history. Because he spoke German, he was the one who was the
interlocutor, debriefing the inmates, the trustee prisoners, and the guards. He did the same thing at the
Dachau Concentration Camp, in Bavaria, where another 35,000 people had been killed in the camps
and sub-camps.
Decades later, in the 1980s and 90s, Robert gave interviews to the Jewish children of the Holocaust,
who derived great comfort by the witness he gave to the horrors that had been visited upon their
families and helped to ensure that we as a people never forget what happened there.
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Coming home from that terrible war and resuming his studies at Harvard was hardly a return to
normalcy for our beloved uncle, for he was soon to come to face with another form of evil, namely,
racism and Jim Crow. This second confrontation with evil took place on another significant date in our
history, and that was the eleventh of October 1947, for it was on that day when my Uncle Robert, and
the rest of the Harvard football team, which included other great Americans of that era, including
Robert Francis Kennedy and another person, who still lives, Professor Chester M. Pierce, the Emeritus
Professor of Education and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Professor Pierce is an African-
American and he played on the Harvard football team. On that day, Harvard was the first integrated
college football team to play south of the Mason-Dixon Line. They went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to
play UVA. No hotel would take Professor Pierce, so they put up Professor Pierce in a mansion, and the
rest of the team stayed in a nearby hotel. Robert related this story many times of how proud he was
that, although Professor Pierce was staying in a different location, they took their meals together. They
felt that that was the way to crack that barrier, but their hotel refused to allow Professor Pierce to come
through the front door and said: “we'll allow the (you know what) to come through the back door.”
And, you know something? That whole team, including Robert Drennan and Robert Kennedy, came
through the back door to take their meals.
Following the completion of his studies, he worked for a time at an aluminum plant in Alabama.
Then, he came back to Medford; served as a city councilman in the 1950s, and became a true pillar of
this community. Like my late father, they each followed their father, our grandfather, Richard Drennan,
into the oil industry. My dad went to Amoco. Robert went to work for Gulf, achieving success, but not
fulfillment, as a tax manager, in Springfield, Massachusetts, and, thence, in Philadelphia. The Fifties
were a happy time for Robert and Robert formed lifelong friendships during that era, among whom was
a doctor from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, named Bud Platt, who became Robert's lifelong friend. I
know so much about that friendship not just because I knew Doctor Platt personally, but because
Robert fostered a friendship between Bud's nephew Jeff Stein, of Newsweek Magazine, and me. In
2012, Robert came to Washington and we spent two days basically talking about the days in
Longmeadow and reminiscing about them. Although he cannot be here today, I can assure you that
Robert Drennan means as much or meant as much to Jeff Stein as he does to me and the rest of us.
When Robert came back from Philadelphia, he worked for a time with the Stone and Webster
Engineering Company, in Boston, and then, in 1973, having been bounced around the corporate world
a bit too much, he and my father forged their own business together, The Industrial and Commercial
Appraisal Company. They worked together for over twenty years and they were constant companions
through that period. It was during that time that I just became incredibly appreciative of Robert's
meticulous attention to detail. He was a very exacting person. He worked hard.
As I came of age, I also noticed how Robert developed an extraordinary interest in and concern for
the middle class in this country, which he saw as being increasingly stressed by deindustrialization, loss
of jobs and stagnant wages. He and my father spent countless hours talking about it. They were not
alone. At that same time, Professor Pierce was doing research over at Harvard about how economic
stress was causing medical problems for people.
Robert, although a private man, was always concerned about the public welfare. As a friend of the
Kennedys, Robert, like most Americans, was devastated by the assassination of John Kennedy, whom
he knew well and had worked in his campaign, here in Massachusetts, in 1960. He was even more
devastated when his friend Bobby was gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968.
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As Robert grew older, he grew wiser. As he tapered back on his appraisal work, he increased his
work on genealogy, not merely for his own edification, but, rather, to help us, his nieces and nephews,
understand better our family's heritage, both here and in Ireland.
He also managed well his investments and savings, not for himself, as he lived modestly, but,
rather, so as to leave a legacy to his nieces and nephews.
He often remarked to me that he lived modestly because material goods meant little to him but also
because he wanted to set an example to all of us, eschewing luxury and material goods inconsistent
with real want.
He also came to realize, after the near financial collapse of 2008, that, notwithstanding his own
modest success as an investor, that there was an increasingly disturbing concentration of wealth in this
country at the very, very top, the proverbial one percenters, on Wall Street, and that that money was not
earned fairly. Robert, in that regard, was prescient. Robert, in that regard, was clearheaded. Robert, in
that regard, was showing his concern for our society. In fact, Robert was so moved by what he had seen
and disturbed by what he had seen, he wrote an open letter to the Harvard Class of 1946 in 2011.
I read to you a very brief passage from that letter that addresses his concern that I just alluded to:
“Several months ago our country trembled on the rim of a fiscal black hole comparable
to the one schemed, or stumbled on, in 1929. Economic historians incline to nominate the
recent blow-up 'The Great Recession.' Self-dealing among mortgage brokers, rating agencies,
real estate promoters, contractors, short-sellers, dark pools, 'securitizers,' etc. became a way of
life and sundered already shredded strands of government regulation. (I'll insert parenthetically
here that, in my last conversation with Robert, I was telling him that he has to get to see “The
Big Short”, and, sadly, he didn't get to see it, but he knew about it, he knew more than we did
about it. Back to his passage here . . . ) Dangerous capital ratios were also a factor. Scammers
and trimmers along Wall Street and elsewhere demolished many 401K Plans and throttled modest
investments and savings. Coincidentally, Fair Harvard's endowment became less fair. Between
2007/2010, the University's $34 billion endowment took a $9 billion hit and fell to $25 billion.
Recent Wall Street Journal articles observed that between 2007/2010 , middle class net worth fell
34% while super rich net worth increased 18%.”
That's only accelerated since then, but my uncle saw it coming, and, as it was unfolding, was aware
of it, and this, of course, was years before the hashtag #feelthebern!
To paraphrase Ted Kennedy's eulogy of Bobby in 1968, like it or not we live in times of danger and
uncertainty, that is the way he lived, and that is what he leaves us. Uncle Robert need not be idealized,
nor enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, but that he be remembered as a simple and decent
man, and he was indeed a simple and decent man.
Prescient about economics and politics, though he was neither an economist nor a career politician,
no tribute to him would be complete without mention of reason, science and learning. As all of you
among his nieces and nephews and many of his great nieces and nephews know, he was always
promoting education, always encouraging us to strive, always encouraging us to work hard.
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Although I could give you a profusion of examples here that would require me to go on for longer
than anyone would like, I'll just give you one.
It was 1967; we were on a race to the moon. I was a little boy, in the sixth grade, in Dauphin,
Pennsylvania, and I was talking to Robert about rockets, and the Gemini program and the Apollo
program, and Robert said: “Joseph, I have some literature that I just brought with me, and I want to sit
down and explain it to you.” I was in the sixth grade; he talked to me about ion engines, and, you know
something? That's what we're talking about now to go to “Planet X” that's believed to be out there.
Robert was, in sum, a giant in my life, a giant in your lives.
Lastly, Robert was a man of profound sentiment and memory. He never forgot the loss of my
brother Michael, and, in my last conversation with him, was especially glad to hear that, someday,
circumstances permitting, I'll be able to do something in Michael's memory.
There's an old Jewish saying that no one can be ever said to have died until or unless people stop
talking about them. I just hope and pray, and believe, that people will never stop talking about Robert
Drennan, and, when they never stop talking about Robert Drennan, they'll never stop talking about his
dearly beloved parents up here on Terrace Road who made all of that greatness possible. Amen.
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