Filterless: Dad's eulogy

As promised, here is the eulogy my sister and I wrote for my father's funeral. We originally wanted to have this as his obituary, but to quote my mother "this is an obituary not a roast." So she didn't let us use this.

Eugene “Doc” Haught was born on May 14, 1943, in Los Angeles County, CA, to Fred “Baldy” Haught and Daisy “Shorty” Haught. He was the last person you would think of being from LA. He was practical and hated excess (unless it was an excess of food). Doc was married for 41 years to Sue Haught, who luckily was not overly sensitive to smell, given his love of farting. He has two daughters, Megan and Tamsen. Megan inherited his love of bad humor and classic cars. Tamsen, he once left at a rest stop on I-95.

Doc grew up in Southern Illinois where he enjoyed fishing and riding his old Harley. He loved to ride off-road with his friend George, often through patches of poison ivy. Magically he never got a rash from it, however it always seemed to infect his mother who washed his clothes.

He proudly served in the Navy, which is ironic, since whenever he went camping he would always spend 45 minutes searching for the perfect canoe, only for it starting leaking 5 minutes after getting out on the water. You could also tell he served by the salty language he would use. Once Christmas Eve, when his oldest daughter Megan was 7 years old, she heard a noise coming from the living room. She drug her sister out to the landing of the stairs that overlooked the living room. Below, they saw their father putting together Barbie’s Dream House swearing loudly. This is how they both learned there was no Santa. He also referred to it as “that fucking dream house” for the remainder of his life.

He worked in construction prior to becoming an engineer. He loved any opportunity to build with wood, building quite a bit of the furniture in his home. At times, he got rather ambitious with his projects. In fact, when his daughters begged for a tree house, he built a 3 floor split level playhouse with a balcony, porch with a porch swing, and rope to climb down the tree. It wasn’t technically a tree house though because it was not attached to the tree. It was more tree adjacent.

He travelled most of the U.S., and quite a bit of the world, obsessively taking pictures everywhere he went. His pictures during his time in Japan were turned into an 8 hour slide show. However in later years, half the pictures he would take would be of the backs of his family as they walked in front of him. Once questioned by his daughter about all the pictures of her back, he replied “Just getting your best side.”

He could eat enough to fill 5 grown men, yet never managed to put on weight; a trait he selfishly did not pass on to his daughters. After getting married, his wife Sue would pack a lunch so large that it filled a large brown paper grocery bag. It included (every day), a dozen cookies which he would finish by 9 am. His family sometimes wondered if he loved food as much, or more than them. Once at a father daughter square dance, his daughter was talking to her best friend and her father, and they saw that people had started a line for the buffet (with chili, a favorite of Doc’s). When his daughter looked around to see where her dad went, she found him at the front of the line. By front, we mean the very first person in line. He had ditched his daughter for food.

Doc was incredibly proud of his 21 year career at the Space Center, though you could not always tell by the way he described his job. He described it by saying his job was to “piss on the shuttle to put the fire out.”

His great joy was coaching soccer. He had learned to play once his daughter Tamsen became interested at the age of 6. He would only coach girls though, because “they smell better and listen more, even if they don’t always follow instructions.” He was always supportive of the girls he coached and he wanted them to learn not just skills, but the ability to coach themselves, how to recognize what you did wrong, and how best to correct it.

Doc was a great believer in self sufficiency. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and he will stop bothering you for your fish. His daughter once asked him, “how come you can push start a car with a manual transmission but not an automatic”. His reply “you took physics, you should be able to figure it out yourself.” He often used this technique to force people to rely on themselves, though sometimes, his family wondered if he did this because he did not know the answer and did not want to admit it.

Doc loved to talk to everyone. A trip to Walmart that should take 5 minutes could end up taking an hour because he would wander around and “shoot the shit” with people. Growing up, his daughters did not have real names, they were just Doc’s daughters. When going to college, they thought that might change, but once there, he would meander the halls and chat to everyone from the facilities department (who he got to build a bookcase for his daughter Megan) to the registrar’s office to the main switchboard operator (Miss Peggy). If he could not get a hold of either of his daughters, he would contact Miss Peggy and she would track them down for him, often yelling down the hall at his daughters, “call your father.” So even in college they would be known as Doc’s daughters. And really, what better compliment could there be.