John P Verel

April 2, 2020

So my dad died this morning. He was 72, which sometimes seems like it might be old, but really isn’t when you consider all of the amazing things he would have accomplished had he been given at least another 5 to 10 years on this green earth.

For starters, he would have celebrated his fifth decade married to his soul mate, my mother, at a party in June with 50 or so of his friends and family. He would have joined me at Yankee Stadium, where we’d been going at least once a year, as my gift for his birthday. He would have constructed another crossword puzzle for his oldest granddaughter, Eliza. He would have reveled in the delight on the faces of his grandsons Isaac and Henry as they rode on the Essex Steam train, a trip that had not yet been planned but was definitely going to happen. 

He would have delighted in the hours and days he’d been spending helping to care for his youngest grandchild, two year-old Amelia. He would have finally enjoyed a full retirement, after working for the last several years for the Analytics Brigade, a firm he founded as part of his never-ending ability to transform from one career to another.  He might have even continued to serve, as he did off and on for the last three decades, for his community, most recently for the Norwalk Planning and Zoning commission.

I could go on and on, but let’s face it, dwelling on the “what could have beens” is a recipe for grief and sadness, and I’ve already got more of that than I know what to do with right now. And in the larger picture, his lost opportunities make him less, not more unique in the world right now. As I write this, hundreds of thousands of future plans are being snuffed out.

John Patrick Verel, a native of Buffalo, New York was:

-A stellar husband.

He and Mary Pache met in high school, married on June 13, 1970, and were inseparable from then until March 19, the day he entered the Norwalk Hospital with a high fever. They had their rocky patches, as any marriage that spans five decades might, but by the time I came to the conclusion, in 2010, that I should also join into matrimony with one Kelly Williams, it was clear that I had no better role model for how to be a husband than my father. And yes, I still tell stories about how my siblings and I once stared, slack-jawed at mom and dad as they argued at the dinner table over the proper way to cut off a slab of butter. Mom and dad were the very definition of ying and yang, in both their temperaments and their interests. But they adored each other and drew strength from each other. I will carry that vision of love with me for as long as I breath.

-A doting father.

As with marriage, I learned to appreciate him, and the sacrifices he made for the three of us, so much more once Kelly and I welcomed Eliza and Henry into this world. He commuted into Manhattan every day before we woke up in the morning, and only returned in the evening in time to have dinner with us. Like many suburbanites, he was the sole bread winner, and, in many ways, primarily a weekend dad. He confessed to me recently that, now that he’d been able to witness the growth of his grandchildren, he regretted in some ways that he’d missed many of our own milestones. 

It wasn’t quite Harry Chapin reciting Cat’s in the cradle,” but it was there. I thank the maker that we had that conversation, because I was able to tell him that he had nothing to apologize for. I do not pretend to speak for Amy and Dan, but I never felt like we were deprived. We ran races together, we skied together, we went to Yankee games together, we sailed together, and when I barely graduated from high school and then foundered for the first two years of college, he accompanied me to St. John’s University, to convince them to let me transfer into its journalism program, where I finally

found my stride.

Mind you, it’s fair to say that he didn’t have his own mentor to show him the way. Dad’s own father, Alfonse Verel, died accidentally when my father was 21. Through no fault of his own, his father could never be there for him and his sisters the way my dad’s been there for me, Amy and Dan when we’ve inevitably hit our own roadblocks.

In the last week, my mind has played backward like a slide show that’s been thrown up in the air, trying to pick up slides with moments that stick out. Dad and me standing at the top of Castle Rock Mountain, trying to figure out the best way to get down the mountain, dad asking me to hang off the mast of our sailboat Cufuffle to tilt it enough to get it off a sand bar near Shelter Island, dad letting us choose which Billy Joel tape to play on the eight hour ride to Buffalo, and on, and on and on…. I am far from a perfect father, but what I do well, I do well because of the lessons I learned from him and my mother.

-A hustler

My parents moved to New York City from Buffalo so my dad could to work on Wall Street, and he did, first from Staten Island, where his new boss thought for some reason it would be similar to Buffalo (It wasn’t). He did that for a time, in insurance, as well as investment banking. 

He bounced around a lot from job to job, but he never went long without picking up something else to hang up his hat. In 2005, he left Wall Street altogether, got a master’s degree in computer science from Pace University, and at age 57, embarked on a completely new career. In 2017, when most people his age are pondering the prospect of sipping margaritas at retirement communities in Florida, he co-founded Analytics Brigade, a company that organizes manages and governs data, and business intelligence.

When I was a child, my teacher once asked the class to tell everyone what their daddy did for a living. I apparently answered: “My daddy shuffles papers.” And while it’s true that I rarely understood what he did (he had a head for math, I do not), I knew that whatever he did, he did it well. Even though he worked in a very volatile industry, he rarely went for very long stretches without work.

-A man who remembered his roots

Although mom and dad were drawn to the bright lights of the Big Apple, they never forgot where they came from. Verel Avenue, after all, is located in Lackawanna, New York, not Fairfield County, and recently, dad eagerly shared with us passages of the book Italians of Lackawanna, that detailed his families’ history. (Verel was originally Verrelli) He also maintained a rock-solid bond with his sisters Gene, Patricia and Maria, as well as the rest of his extended clan in Western New York.

-A gifted musician

We grew up listening to the likes of Billy Joel, Dire Straits, and Level 42, but dad soon segued into classical music. We all took piano lessons across the river in Darien, but he was the only one who got so good that he reached a point where he’d need to quit his job if he wanted to continue any further. Instead, he embraced singing, most prominently with the New York Grand Opera. His 2001 performance, in the chorus of the company’s production celebrating the 100th anniversary ofthe death of Giuseppe Verdi, at Carnegie Hall, was awe inspiring. He continued to sing through the years, as a cantor at St. Joseph’s Church in South Norwalk, and in choirs at St. John’s Church in Darien and St. Paul’s Church in Norwalk.

-A terrific athlete

My dad once ran the New York marathon in 3:29:22, which I only really came to appreciate once I did it myself in 2001, and finishing roughly 25 seconds behind him (go figure). He ran regularly with a group of runners called the Westport Athletic Club, and it was through a friend of his that I learned about the Leatherman’s Loop, an extreme cross country 10k race that I ran half a dozen times, and where I discovered pure joy within the trees, hills, mud and trails. I ran my first race, in 1984, after watching him lace up for the 2.2-mile-long Rowayton Fun Run. I think I ran it in 25 minutes. Even now, several years removed from any sort of racing, I still turn to running as a balm for my soul. How I treasure that now.

Skiing was also a passion of his, and he made a point to gather his clan together in the hills of Vermont as often as possible. Ever the analytical, logic-driven mind, he would perch on the precipice of a double diamond trail, ideally at either Sugar Bush or Mad River Glen’s Castle Rock mountain, and plot his course down the slope, like a mathematician mapping out an equation on graph paper. My technique has always been more willy, nilly, white knuckle to the bottom, but I treasured the few years when our abilities overlapped, the weather cooperated, and the timing was just right.

A committed citizen

One of my earliest memories is of attending a political fundraiser for some sort of function affiliated with the Democratic party of Norwalk. I might have been four or five, and there was a live auction. When the MC asked “Do I hear $300?” I yelled out “Three hundred!” Everyone roared with laughter, and I, of course, thought they were laughing at me, not with me. Only very later in life did I understand why we were there in the first place. Mom and dad, it turned out, have always wanted to make the world a better place. 

Dad did that in many capacities: Head of the Rowayton Civic Association, treasurer of Norwalk’s; Sixth Taxing District (AKA Rowayton), and most recently, positions on the City of Norwalk’s Conservation Commission. I have no idea why he did these things; we never talked about them. They were just things that needed to be done. In this regard, he was no different from my mother; she currently devotes a good deal of her free time to her church and the Norwalk Land Trust.

When you get to the 1,600-word mark, it’s usually a good time to pack it in. But really, there are so many more things to say. Because dad was such a restless force of creativity and energy, his interests really spanned the gamut. I could go on and on about some of the hobbies he dabbled in, be they sailing (we had three boats-a 20-foot sailboat called Red Herring, a 33-foot sailboat called Cuffuffle, and an un-named wood skiff), or the dark room he built in our garage but never finished, but it’s perhaps more apropos to focus on his most recent interest, crossword puzzles. 

After decades of working on the New York Times crossword puzzle on the train ride to his beloved Grand Central Terminal, he officially became a cruciverbalist in 2013 when a puzzle that he created with partner Jeff Chen appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Always smitten with his grandchildren, in January, he sent unsolicited, a custom-made puzzle to our seven-year-old daughter Eliza, his oldest grandchild. She got most of it right, and we were looking forward to getting another puzzle from “Pop Pop Verel.” They had also begun corresponding as “pen pals,” via snail mail.

I have a masters degree in urban studies and yet I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never finished The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s gigantic tome about Robert Moses’ influence on New York City. When I finally decided in January that, as a New Yorker, I needed to read all 1,336 pages, I didn’t have to turn far. I grabbed my dad’s battered paper back copy. I’m about two thirds of the way done, and I’m not surprised that dad actually finished the whole thing. It’s fascinating, challenging, and wholly committed to revealing the truths of a complex organism, in this case New York City, whose orbit this Buffalo boy spend the bulk of his life orbiting.

I feel like I’m not worthy to walk in the footprints you’ve left behind, dad. I will try to anyway, as best I can.

Love,

Patrick