Sandy Price Eulogy by Edward Searl

Several months ago I suggested to Sandy that she make “a list of things few, if any, persons know about you.”  One of the common responses I hear after a memorial service is, “I wish I knew this or that about the deceased,” illustrating that, really, we know so little beneath the surface of those we think we know, even relatively well.  And then, Sandy had a particularly rich life and the details are fascinating.  She was also renowned for being a cornucopia of arcane facts, so it seems fitting to offer a few arcane facts of her 66 years.

Did you know that before she was born her designated name was Emily Kathleen, however when her mother saw she declared, “That’s no Emily Kathleen.”  So she was named Sandra Jean.   (Her birth announcement declared the arrival of a New Dictator.  What that meant no one now knows!)

Even as a girl she had a passion for reading.  No surprise here, because she remained an avid reader.  But did you know that in her childhood house her favorite place to read was the bathroom, particularly the downstairs closet-like bathroom in her family’s Upper Darby home?  Sister Judy says, “Sandy lived in the bathroom.”

Did you know that she once appeared on American Bandstand?  In high school, on a school canceled snow day, she took the train from Upper Darby to the WFIL studio in Philadelphia where American Bandstand was broadcast live from 4 to 6 in the afternoon.  And she danced the “spotlight” dance—“Sandy, from Upper Darby.”  (I lived in the Philadelphia orbit and wonder if I might have seen her on TV that snowy afternoon.)

Did you know she’d once been a Mormon?  When she was twelve her family joined the Church of the Latter Day Saints.  She was quite active in the local church’s youth group—a leader, no surprise again.

Did you know she ranked second in a high school graduating class of more than 800 students?

Did you know she declared in college, even after meeting Larry that she wanted to date 25 men before settling into a permanent relationship?

Did you know that she spent a year abroad as part of her Pomona College education?  She declared that it was in London, in a spare, even bleak room with a shilling burner, that she learned how to be lonely.

Did you know that when she lived in the Boston area after marriage, Cambridge, actually, she taught in the town of North Easton at Oliver Ames High School?  There she was labeled a hippie, even though she frequently wore here longish hair in a bun.  She was hardly a hippie.

Did you know that she was a union woman?  While teaching at Oak Park River Forest High School she helped organize a Teacher’s Union and served as its Secretary.

Did you know that she always had her Christmas presents bought and put away in a closet by the end of summer?  She favored museum stores and similar shops.  And here we must remember that she organized and sent out a prodigious number of Holiday cards, upward of a 150 each year.

Did you know that she claimed to have “rigid feet,” a phrase a doctor once used after examining her?  For that reason when Larry and Sandy were looking at rentals in France, any apartment with stone or tile floors was immediately eliminated.  She was particular about her shoes, too.  There was a favored brand/style that she often bought in s shop in Eugene, Oregon.

Did you know that she vowed, during her French/Swiss sojourn, that she would visit all 93 Departments of France?  (Departments are similar to what we know as States.)  She succeeded in visiting all but 20.

Did you know that Sandy didn’t drink coffee or wine, perhaps a remnant from her Mormon years?  (We all know Larry’s fondness for both.)  Though in more recent years Sandy would sip wine and grew knowledgeable about varieties and essences.

For me, and I would suspect for you, such details—learned for the first time—make a person’s life real, awakening our compassion for the deceased as well as for those who grieve for her.  And we are astonished about the person we thought we knew, but didn’t know as well.  Life lived is in the details.

Even Larry, who knew Sandy the best and most intimately, has been astonished by new insight.  As mentioned, Sandy and Larry met at Pomona College in the early 1960s, at one of the served dinners that was a monthly event.  They sat across from one another and subsequent events, cast in romantic and mythic glow of retrospection, suggest that they fell in love then.  Sandy soon announced herself to Larry, when he was trying out for a part in Othello and she was working up in the light deck, “Hello, Larry.” They dated some.  But remember Sandy’s resolution to date 25 men.  And Larry developed a relationship with a woman named Jane—they were sort of engaged.  It seems, though, that Sandy determined Larry was the one.  Sandy lived with several women and one, Ellen, remembers a pivotal Thanksgiving Dinner in a campaign or conspiracy, if you like, to bring Sandy and Larry together.  Sandy invited Larry, not expecting Jane to come with him.  However, Ellen says that Sandy managed to talk circles around Jane.  Then there followed a long, long telephone conversation in which Sandy pointedly asked Larry if he were going to marry Jane.  He said no.  Ellen remembers that when Sandy retired that night, from her bed she let out a big sigh and declared, “I think I did it.”  Indeed, she had.  In 1968 Sandy and Larry were married at First Parish Unitarian in Cambridge, MA.

After being told this recently by Ellen, Larry admits that he had no idea, through 40 years of marriage, how Sandy and the others had conspired.

In this anecdote about their on and off courtship, there are two qualities of Sandy that are noteworthy:  First, she was strong-willed and quietly in control of the course of her life.  In a fashion Sandy was always moving forward, in the lead.  (Larry jokes that in most of the photographs of their travels, Sandy is seen only from behind—paces ahead, as Larry pauses or lags behind.)  Second, Sandy loved community as her college housemates were part of the gentle conspiracy to lure Larry.

Community is the great truth, the unifying motif of Sandy’s life.  She created community and she enjoyed community.  Her upbringing in the 1950s influenced Sandy, the community that the Mormon Church engendered.  Her father was an influence here, too.  He invited diverse persons to Sunday evenings at the Wheat family home, an abiding lesson in hospitality and community of strangers-no-more.

When Sandy was a young mother of two sons, living in White Plains, NY, in the 1970s, she got involved in the local Neighborhood Association.  She was also something of a pied piper for neighborhood children, whom she took on trips to the local library and organized play activities in her home.

When the Prices moved to Oak Park, in the early 1980s, they shopped around for a suitable Church.  They had been liberal Congregationalists, so it wasn’t a stretch to settle on the Unitarian congregation at Third Unitarian Church on the Austin/Oak Park border.  When Sandy became Religious Education Director at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist congregation, the family eventually converged there.  Sandy took to Unitarian Universalism with enthusiasm.  You would have thought she’d been UU her whole life.  (That’s how she impressed me thirty years ago, when I first met her at a Mid Winter conference in Madison, WI.)  Sandy and Larry have made strong and broad connections here in Hinsdale, where they joined in 1990 after relocating in La Grange. 

Sandy created community as a high school history teacher at OPRF High School from 1984 through 2003.  We’ve heard of this from a colleague.  Even more significantly we’ve heard it from an early member of the Sc-Fi and Fantasy Club that Sandy sponsored.  Sandy had a particular fondness and pride in the Sci-fi Club, which provided a community for those Sandy called “quirky kids.”  Aptly, one of the Club’s activities was a card game named “magic: the gathering.” 

Sandy created community among the expatriates living in France with spouses who were working at the CERN project in Geneva, Switzerland.  The group had the acronym CREW for Cern, Relocated, English-speaking, Women.  It is good that we have a representative of the CREW to speak to us today.

Of course, family was the primary community that Sandy gathered.  The dedication and devotion of Larry, Matt, and Jeff this last year of diagnosis and illness is proof of Sandy’s life.  And so is the love and commitment of Sandy’s sister Judy during this time.  Sandy was instrumental in instituting a yearly gathering of her family of origin in Lancaster, PA, where family ties were not only made stronger, new relatives were found.  (Sandy was quite a genealogist and she traced ancestors, Ebys, Hersheys, and Wheats, to the early 1700s in America.) 

In talking about family, the recent birth of granddaughter Ella was a blessing in the midst of Sandy’s diminishing days, as was the marriage of Matt and Sarah.  (I hope you saw before the service the slide of Ella and Sandy gazing upon one another.)

Sandy reflected on several poems throughout her illness.  One was W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” in which the poet reflects that the world pays scant attention to everyday suffering and tragedy.  In every instance life goes on.  So it does.  Life goes on.

Sandy was also fond of a quotation from pioneering Universalist minister, one of the first to be ordained, Augusta Chapin.  “We shall survive in the memories of our friends as long as the remembrance will serve any good purpose, and then our work and thoughts and influence will mingle with the great ocean of human achievement, and the sum total of that will be something more, and something different from what it would have been without us.”

Life goes on yes, but our lives and our Common Life are richer for Sandy having lived.  She endures in memory animated by love.  The world is more and different because of her unique spirit, her focused will, and enthusiasm and love for all of life’s “dappled things.”