Man on the Moon | Dave's Place

Robert McCutcheon 1921-2021

The thing I will most remember about my Uncle Bob is the way he took care of my mother—his sister—when she had dementia. Her second husband, my stepfather, had died just before she turned 90, and it took some time for us to realize that he had been her memory in recent years and she wasn’t following things well. We put her in an assisted living facility—eventually with full-time care—but every Sunday a driver showed up and took her to church, and after the service my uncle went out to lunch with her and drove her home. On the weekends I came to visit my mother, every three or four months, I would stay for that luncheon, and it was no easy thing to sit there with a woman who had severe dementia, but Uncle Bob did so week after week with a perfectly straight face, as if everything were fine.

That’s what my father used to call “being a brother.” Uncle Bob was a brother to his sister.

My first memory of Uncle Bob was when I was visiting my grandparents, at the house on Lang Avenue in Pittsburgh where he had grown up, and he drove up in that old car of his (a 1950 Plymouth, according to my brother) with his wife at the wheel. He was teaching her to drive. The idea that a grown woman wouldn’t know how to drive was new to me, and fascinating. I suppose that’s why I remember that day.

My most prominent memory is one I mentioned almost every time in recent years that I saw him, it was so etched in my mind. We had a next-door neighbor whose company had a box at Forbes Field, what this man claimed was the best seat in the park to watch a ballgame, in the second tier directly behind first base. There were metal folding chairs in the boxes in those days, four in the front row and four one step up. They were truly great seats; the only problem was that my father had a fear of heights, and even now, as I think back on those low railings and flimsy little chairs, I, with my own fear of heights, feel myself cringe. I’m not sure I could sit there right now (Forbes Field is long gone, of course), and my father must have been on edge the whole time.[1]

On this particular occasion I think the Pirates were playing the Phillies. The year would have been ’57 or ’58. Roberto Clemente hit a scorching line drive up toward the second tier, but not quite reaching it, tailing off at the end (Clemente was known, eventually, for those wicked foul balls).[2] And Uncle Bob, who apparently did not have a fear of heights, made a grab for it. My memory is that he had a pack of cigarettes in his right hand to cushion the blow. He leaned way out of the box, reaching down for the ball. My father had a conniption, yelled “Bob!” and may have tried to grab his other arm, if he hadn’t recoiled too much.

Uncle Bob didn’t get the ball, but what a man for trying.

He was a short squat man at the time, good looking and always with a smile when he met us. He’d been a weightlifter and bodybuilder when he was young, and had eaten extraordinary amounts of food, my father used to tell us (once he ate so much pot roast, showing how much he could put down, that he got sick). In the late fifties he started putting on weight, and apparently was smoking cigarettes around the time of that ballgame. But when he got older he became an exercise and health fanatic, way before his time; he lifted weights and jogged, and his fitness routine always came up at family dinners. He loved physical activity, and passed that love on to his children.

I was a fat kid myself in those days. I turned ten in 1958. A year or two later, I began to get interested in bodybuilding magazines like Strength and Health, entranced by the thought of transforming my blubbery little body into sheer muscle (that never happened). My father was skeptical, holding the belief (common in those days) that weightlifting made you musclebound and unable to compete in sports, but Uncle Bob took me seriously, told me how he had lifted weights when he was young, and eventually brought me his original barbells, which he still had. He said at the time that he hoped to start exercising again someday; he had bursitis in his shoulders, but once that was gone and the doctor gave him the okay he was going to start lifting again. I didn’t believe him, because I didn’t know any adults who exercised, other than playing golf. But eventually he did just that, and made exercise a huge part of his life.

He had been a part of the Greatest Generation and went off to fight their war. He came back afterwards and—I have this vague impression from somewhere; maybe my mother told me—would like to have studied music[3]. But that was a practical era, when men had just fought a terrible war and wanted to get back to normal, so he studied engineering (at Carnegie Tech, which has since become Carnegie Mellon) and got a job with the phone company, where he worked for his entire career. I never knew exactly what he did (the jobs of men in the fifties and sixties were all vague; he “went to the office” every day), but I know that eventually he made presentations on a regular basis, because he told me how hard he worked on them. He worked hard in general, long hours every day at the office and coming home to work out in his basement gym. He was one of those absent fathers in those days because he had to be; he was working to take care of his family.

Sometime in the sixties or early seventies he became a clothes horse. Until then he had dressed the way other men did—blue or gray suits—but suddenly he branched out into a more colorful wardrobe, also a much larger one wild colors, plaids, different cuts. He took a lot of pride in his clothes and wore a different outfit every time I saw him. I believe it was in those days that he grew his moustache and goatee, which he wore the rest of his life.

My memory is that he took early retirement from the telephone company, but my cousin Bob said in retired at 65, in 1986. That means he was retired for thirty-five years, an astonishing fact (my father only lived 47 years). He seemed to handle his retirement fine.

For years he volunteered at the church, doing their books. He later told me he had computerized everything, which would have been a huge job. All his life he had traveled from Fox Chapel, where he lived, to our church in East Liberty, at least a twenty-minute trip. He only started going to a church closer to home in his nineties.

One memorable time I spent with Uncle Bob was in 1992, when my brother had had surgery for prostate cancer (at the young age of 46) and I came to Pittsburgh to take care of him for a week. Bill wanted to spend time with me but didn’t actually want me in the house (who can blame him?), so the McCutcheons offered to let me stay out there. I went into town in the morning and stayed through dinnertime (a meal which I cooked); after that I headed out to Uncle Bob’s. We had a nightcap in the evening, a habit I’ve never had before or since; he mixed a drink and I’d have a beer. In those evenings around the kitchen nook, he kept offering me some “cholesterol free Fig Newtons,” a snack which went surprising well with beer. I guess that wouldn’t be a good habit for a lifetime, but I really enjoyed those evening conversations in the breakfast nook.

After Aunt Alice died Uncle Bob began keeping company, then living with, a woman named Kai McLure, whose husband had died some time before. My uncle and aunt had invited her to join them in their pew in church. Once Aunt Alice died Kai stayed in Uncle Bob’s pew and eventually moved into his house. There was a mild irony in that, because living together was a big issue back in the sixties and seventies, and I’m not sure which side Uncle Bob had been on—he was conservative politically—but there was no reason to marry at that point. Kai was a beautiful woman. She probably saved his life, because he had a serious stroke after she moved in but she heard him fall when it happened and got him to the hospital in time. I heard recently that Uncle Bob had also had bypass surgery at some point in his life, so his hundred years weren’t without their medical issues. But he soldiered on.

His ninetieth birthday was a memorable occasion. My mother had died just months before. He had been such a help with her that I wanted to be sure to attend his party, though I probably would have anyway. What do you give to a man who turns ninety? As I said to him when I presented the gift, I wanted to give him something he would use, so I want to a bar in Pittsburgh and asked what was the best vodka in the world (that had become his beverage of choice). The bartender gave me a name and I went to the State Store and bought that brand. My brother-in-law Don[4] was also at the party, and he has been known to take a drink or two. So the two of them—and maybe one other guy at the party—put quite a dent in the bottle. At one point I said to Uncle Bob, “You’re the youngest looking 90-year-old I’ve ever seen,” and he said, “And pretty soon I’m going to be the drunkest.” For once I had chosen a good birthday present.

Toward the end of the evening some child or other (somebody’s great grandchild, I assume) was taking a bath and managed to pull the knob off the faucet, spraying water all over the place, so they had to turn off the water at the source. The cake had been served and Uncle Bob was having a second helping, with chocolate frosting all over his hands, licking it off. There was no way to rinse them. At that point he definitely was the drunkest 90-year-old I’d ever seen. I retired from the party discretely.

A couple of years later I was in town for the funeral of my friend Creston in Fox Chapel, and went to visit Kai and Uncle Bob. She said, “Is he the first of your friends to go?”—meaning, in adulthood—and I said yes. Uncle Bob told me that at that point he had long since lived past all his friends. Even all his golf buddies, whom he’d known so well, and some of them had been quite a bit younger. He had no friends left.

The way things ended with Kai was rather sad. He had a bad fall, falling down the cellar steps backwards—he’d been down there lifting weights, naturally—and had to go to the hospital, then to rehab. She was left alone, and was in her nineties; she couldn’t take care of herself, and certainly couldn’t have cared for him when he got out, so she had to move in with her daughter, and never lived with him again. He eventually moved back to his house, but she died apart from him. They had been a couple for years.

In recent years Bob’s son Andy had moved back in with him, along with his wife Mugiko and their two children. It was a perfect synchronicity, because they’d been living in a small apartment in New York and needed more space, and Bob needed some help with day-to-day life. Mugiko was a wonderful caretaker for him in his last years. My wife and I often visited Pittsburgh in the summer, and we had several dinners out there, with my brother and his wife; my cousin Bob came up from West Virginia. Uncle Bob was not terribly mobile at that point, but mentally was sharp as ever, ate and drank with good appetite.

We had hoped to throw a big 100^th birthday party for him, but the pandemic, and his failing health, prevented that.

My mother liked to repeat a statement that her mother made just before the first moon landing, around the time she died. “If there’s any man that should go to the moon, it’s Bob McCutcheon.” I think she was referring to his self-sufficiency, his ability to be alone, but she knew him better than anyone, and that statement has always had an air of mystery to it. I like it that way.

[1] I can’t help wanting to inject another memory here. On another occasion when we were sitting at that box, I went off to go to the bathroom. This was in the days when a ten-year-old kid could go to the ballpark bathroom by himself and no one was afraid he’d be abducted or raped. But as I was coming back, two of the ballpark vendors called me over to a corner. “Hey kid,” they said, “You want some of these peanuts?” They had abandoned two large bags containing those individual bags of ballpark peanuts. “You can have as many as you want. They’re all full of worms.” I looked over at the bags in wonder. “Another thing kid, you know those hot dogs they serve. They’re full of worms too. They’re all full of worms.” I’ve never eaten ball park peanuts since without a slightly queasy feeling.

[2] I didn’t remember it was Clemente who hit the ball, but my brother Bill supplied that detail in a wonderful talk he gave at our uncle’s memorial service. Bill remembers my father asking how Bob expected to catch the ball barehanded, and Bob showed him the cigarette pack. My memory is that our father thought he was nuts for even trying.

[3] My brother has a different story, that he actually wanted to study medicine. I’m fascinated by the way we remember things differently

[4] My sister had died by that time; she died a few months before my mother. After Sally’s second husband died, as she was suffering from cancer, Don moved back in with her, and cared for her until she died. He had always been my favorite brother-in-law, even when he wasn’t married to my sister. I heard him tell somebody once, “We didn’t talk over old times, we didn’t try to figure out what went wrong. I just moved back in as if I’d never left.”