“My Dad and My Dandelions!”
A Tribute to Hank Kipp
A little over six years ago, on April 29th, 2012 to be precise, I quite spontaneously decided to weed a dense patch of dandelions in front of the townhouse complex where I’d been living for the previous two years.
The front of said complex—along the Yale Avenue East sidewalk—was at that time the disgrace of our lovely, mostly-residential neighborhood (Eastlake, here in Seattle), and my thought was simple, “If I don’t take care of this RIGHT NOW, with all these weeds completely gone to seed, I’ll NEVER be able to catch up with them!” That may have been a tad overdramatic but was essentially true.
My father, the late Hank Kipp, was for over thirty years a Forester and Natural Resources Specialist who worked for The Department of the Interior and The Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1975, during the first summer after our folks had purchased their first home (in Havre, Montana), Dad handed my sister Laurie Kipp and I a pair of great big hunting knives and cheerfully showed us how to kill dandelions at the root. We were then 12.5 and not-quite-11 years old, respectively.
My sister and I were both avid athletes, so of course we LOATHED every minute of said drudgery, and invented all sorts of excuses not to do it. I mean, weeding vs. playing baseball or basketball wasn’t a tough call! LOL
But under the careful tutelage and with the sunny encouragement of Hank, within a couple of years there ceased to be dandelions anywhere on our property!
Flash forward 36 years, to June 28th, 2009. On that Sunday I was in the midst of my monthly visit to see my folks in Olympia, where they’d retired, about 65 miles south of my Capitol Hill apartment in Seattle.
Every June there is a festival of Dixieland Jazz bands in Olympia, who mainly travel there from the South and the Midwest of America. And each year the area’s many churches take advantage of this sudden musical influx by having special services that incorporate said Dixieland bands. I’d never attended such services before, but in 2009 I specifically chose to come down on the appropriate weekend, and joined my parents at The United Churches of Olympia, the most progressive congregation in their area, which they’d joined upon their arrival in 1994.
Although I attended church with my parents on a weekly basis until I was 18.5 years old (typically either Methodist or Presbyterian, depending where we lived), right up until I left for college in 1981, and did so rather happily, for the most part, that June 2009 Dixieland service marked perhaps the 6th or 7th time I’d been to church during the intervening 28 years! I could tell how much Hank enjoyed having me there though, as we sang (badly, though that’s hardly the point) the many hymns on that day’s program, and soaked up the glorious music that he loved!
The next day (June 29th) I was back in Seattle, a typically warm summer Monday at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where I then worked. That evening, my folks went out to dinner (it was exactly a week since they’d celebrated their 47th wedding anniversary) and to get groceries. Once home, my dad went out to do some work in their huge yard before it got dark, the sort of thing he did virtually every day he could, year-round.
After a short time, my mom Elaine heard a noise out in the yard, so went to investigate. She saw that Hank had fallen back off a ladder (from which he’d been pruning a tree, and which had made the noise she’d just heard). As we later learned, he’d had a massive heart attack and had died immediately. He was 78 years old.
The icon photo I used on Facebook for many years is a lovely shot of my mom, my sister, and me, taken three weeks later, back at their home following Hank’s memorial service. By then some of the immediate shock had passed, but our very close-knit family had been forever altered.
The following February (of 2010), after Hank’s estate was settled, I suddenly came into a sizable chunk of money (which he’d inherited from his grandfather and his own parents), which I chose to put entirely toward the purchase of my first home. Without my father’s entirely unexpected death, that could never have occurred, and because the cost of losing him was so painfully high, I eventually determined that it might also be appropriate for me to put into use the training he’d provided us decades before. He’d set quite an example, after all.
As the “before and after” photos below make plain, it turns out I’m pretty good at “dandelion eradication”, as Hank might well have called it, forestry professional that he was! As the time stamps on these photos indicate, I commenced my attack at 12:53pm and concluded just over an hour later, at 1:59pm.
One thing slowly led to another, and now—six years later—I’ve “eradicated” nearly all the dandelions of my ENTIRE NEIGHBORHOOD, an area nearly one mile long and about a half-mile wide, stretching from I-5 to the shores of Lake Union. I measure my progress one crammed-full/stomped-down grocery bag at a time, and have kept a running tally, as an incentive. At the moment, the total stands at 383 full bags (!), each of which generally takes about two solid hours to fill.
Ultimately, particularly given the fact that I lack both the knowledge and temperament to plant and nurse along new trees, shrubs, flowers, and the like, I decided that the most-appropriate homage to Hank Kipp would be the elimination of an entire class of insidious weeds from where I reside. These days I can often walk for BLOCKS in every direction from home and not encounter a single dandelion! Which feels pretty damn good, I must admit.
Hank never went quite as crazy about this “dandelion killing” as I have (he was too busy planting and fertilizing in HIS OWN yard, for one thing!), but I feel certain that he’d be proud of what I’ve done, just as I’m immensely proud of what he spent his life doing—whether with plants and trees, with weeds, with our family, with his voluminous correspondence and remarkable talent for friendship, and with his career devoted to helping Native Americans in whatever ways he could, whether on a number of Montana and New Mexico Indian reservations (where he spent the bulk of said career) or at The Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C., where he topped it off from 1985 to 1994.
I had the honor of delivering his eulogy nine years ago, as I also did my mom’s in 2016, and because it was clear to me from early childhood that I had the most remarkable set of parents, I never want to stop sharing my thoughts and feelings about them. Or the glorious memories that remain.
Particularly on this day, the day we lost Hank, nine years ago.
I love you, Dad. <3 - Tom Kipp
