Thank you all for organizing the wonderful memorial service. The stories I was going to add were not necessary, but will share them now. Like Alice Porter, I benefited from working as a more junior editor to Joel in my early days in Washington at National Journal. (I gotta go back and look for all those redundancies Alice mentioned in the last thing I wrote!)
Teresa spoke sweetly about Joel's relative naivete about parenting at that time--before he had three children of his own. My last day at NJ was the day I delivered my son. As my contractions started at the end of that workday--my actual due date--I realized my watch did not have a sweep second hand to time them. (This was back before smart phones, of course.) So I walked over to Joel's desk and asked if his watch could time seconds. He manfully ripped it off his wrist and handed it to me. I thought to myself, "Joel is being SO cool. He knows what's happening, but he's not making a big deal of it." He had not yet been part of a delivery--and later admitted that he had had no clue what was going on or why I wanted his watch.
Joel was "the Commissioner," who managed NJ's coed softball team and, as noted by others, would run a pool on anything he could dream up--including the details of my baby's expected arrival. My husband won the pool, and Joel's report of the results holds a framed place on the walls of my son's house.
Around 1978, National Journal won a National Magazine Award for a big package on the flow of federal funds to the states, and an analysis of the "winners" and "losers." While those of us who had had some small part in preparing the issue got to go to New York and experience the excitement when we won the award, it was really Joel's knowledge of the budget and his analytical abilities that were responsible for the magazine winning the award. It was really ground-breaking work, and later adopted by the Commerce Department, and, of course, something that has become an issue in recent political campaigns.
We were privileged to be invited to the signing of Joel's book, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. That connection became even more important to us when my husband was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease three years later. Joel did so much to help persons with PD and their caregivers understand the nature of PD, and to face the challenges with grace and courage. (I have recommended his book to so many people after they receive a diagnosis.) Both he and Judy were an inspiration to so many of us.
About six or seven years ago, I asked Joel if he had ever thought of updating his book, and volunteered to help him if that would make a difference. He said that JHUP would have liked to reissue it, but that he knew he no longer was capable of the kind of focus it would have taken. The understanding of the disease and its treatments have evolved since Joel published his book in 2002, but the emotions that go with it have not. The love and devotion that Joel expressed in his book are something that will remain and that all of us, particularly his family members, can continue to treasure.
In the first years I knew Joel, he was a pretty good golfer. My father-in-law had played golf on a collegiate team, and when he came to visit, we sometimes recruited Joel and a couple of other golfing friends to come play with us. In a display of both his ethics and his mathematical brain, Joel quietly shared later that my father-in-law had been shaving strokes.
When Joel was still trying to do everything he could after he had had his Deep Brain Surgery, he came down with Will and one of Will's friends to play golf at a course my husband had a hand in developing. He could no longer play the way he once had, but he still made the most of his time with his family and friends.
After Joel died, I pulled out his book again. I laughed when I reread the inscription he had written because it was so typical of his sense of humor. "Sara and Walt," he wrote. "No wonder I'm a lousy putter."
He left us all with a smile on our faces, as your gathering did as well.