Yesterday, along with cousins and friends, I struggled through rain and mud to serve as a pall bearer for my uncle, Fred Hudson. The husband for 64 years of my Aunt Inez, my father’s oldest sibling, he was actually my uncle by marriage, of course, but you would never have known that; he treated all of us—my brothers, my cousins, and me— like his children. I grew up in Uncle Fred’s shadow. For the first twenty years or so of my life, I could see his house from my own, and he was as much a part of my life as breathing. When my brothers and I were old enough to occasionally stay at home alone, one of our parents’ backup emergency instructions was always, “Call Uncle Fred.” I don’t think we ever did, but we knew from a lifetime of experience that he was the kind of man who could fix problems and make things happen.

Fred Carlton Hudson was born in 1927. This was in the Coolidge years, in the midst of the great economic boom that followed the First World War, but that boom was mostly an urban phenomenon. Times were tough in the countryside in the twenties, and they were about to get tough everywhere. I have never heard him speak of his childhood, but he was only three when the Great Depression arrived at every home, and I can only assume that his family suffered through it like most others did. I have often wondered what it was like growing up in those years, with the wolf always at the door. From my decades of knowing him and watching his work ethic, I suspect Uncle Fred was working like a man from a young age; work was part of who he was.

By the time Uncle Fred was 12, the Depression was subsiding, but the world-order was going up in flames. The violence sweeping the globe by 1939 finally found its way to the United States just before Christmas in 1941. I imagine him, at 14, and in the years that followed, wondering how long the war would last, watching older friends and acquaintances go away to fight, wondering if they would return, and whether the war would end before it was his turn to go.

Just nine days before Uncle Fred turned 18, in May 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allied Powers, and the war in the west ended. This brought only limited comfort to the American people, however, since, as President Truman warned them that very day, the war in the east raged on. I have no idea whether Uncle Fred was eager to go or afraid to go to the Pacific in the spring of 1945. I wish I had asked him. What I know now, that almost no one knew then, is that the Allied invasion of the Japanese homeland was tentatively scheduled for November of that year, and that a million Americans—more than twice the number that had already died in the entire war—were expected to die in the house-to-house fighting for Japan, where young boys and girls were training to kill Americans and their allies with sharpened bamboo poles. That August, the bombs that exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the killing. Fathom what this news must have meant to a fit, single, eighteen-year-old farm boy. The invasion of Japan never came; the war was over. Perhaps the adventurer in him wanted to go; at some level, though, it must have felt like a reprieve.

Five years later, now a grown man, Uncle Fred went to Asia after all. The Cold War turned hot when Soviet-sponsored North Korea invaded South Korea, a key US ally. President Truman had declared that Communism was to be “contained,” so the United States, as part of a United Nations “police action,” went to drive the North back across the 38th parallel. Just as it appeared the United Nations would prevail, hundreds of thousands of Communist Chinese poured across the frontier, and the war took on a new and deadly scale. Having narrowly avoided the danger of losing his life in Japan in 1945, now Uncle Fred nearly lost it in Korea. For my entire life, I have heard the story of how he contracted Korean hemorrhagic fever, became insensible, ended up in a field hospital, and was even believed dead. I wish I remembered more details. Finally he regained consciousness and began to recover. He had cheated death again.

Uncle Fred came home and married my Aunt Inez. In the mid fifties, they had two sons, my cousins Randy and Danny. Because his brother, Howard, married Aunt Inez’s sister, my Aunt Dayle, the Brewer and Hudson families became tightly entwined. I grew up surrounded by older cousins, all of them Brewers or Hudsons, and not one of them more than a couple of miles away (other, younger cousins would come later).

To me, Uncle Fred was the tough, no-nonsense “go-to” man who lived up the road. Professionally, he worked for the state highway department. In private life, he could hunt, fish, raise cattle, raise peanuts, use a chainsaw, drive a tractor, and do all kinds of other things that I found interesting. When I was very small, he would sometimes let me ride back on the farm with him to check on the cattle, which seemed like a real adventure. He once let me bottle feed a calf. Another time, he took time out from roasting peanuts to “roast” a marble for me. This involved taking an ordinary glass marble and putting it in a hot oven. Eventually the glass deep inside the marble shattered, but the outer glass remained intact. It was beautiful and looked different from any other marble. He was one of the snappiest dressers of his age, and even in his work clothes always looked like he had been put together by a team of professionals. This added to his bearing; Uncle Fred was one of the few men I ever knew who could remain humble while exuding so much dignity. In his later years, his life revolved around Aunt Inez (as ever), his five grandchildren, and his great-granddaughters. Just a day before he died, his first great-grandson was born. He never got to see him, but how happy he would have been.

As was stated in the funeral by my brother Greg and both of Uncle Fred’s sons, he was a low-key, content man who knew who he was and where he stood. He had few insecurities that anyone knew about, because he based his life on a set of principles, rather than on fads, acquisitiveness, or jealousy. He weathered some of the modern age’s most terrible crises, and emerged unscathed—on the surface, at least—with a philosophy that stood the test of time: love God; love and provide for your family; love and defend your country; do your share of the work; and, if necessary, be prepared to do the other fellow’s share too. Last night, a line occurred to me: He was “the kind of man the twentieth century needed.” Now, after 90 full, full years, we have laid him to rest, to face eternity exactly as he would have chosen: a good man who finished the race with calloused hands and an un-calloused heart.

K.T.B