Dr. Marvin Lee Ogilvie, of Portage, died February 1, 2008, at the University Hospital in Ann Arbor, of complications from oral cancer. He was born in Pontiac, Michigan, on May 3, 1935, to Daniel M. and Doris Hempstead Ogilvie. After graduating from Cheboygan High School in 1953, he earned a B.S. from Michigan State University in 1957 and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin--Madison in 1962. In July 1963 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Agricultural Chemistry and Assistant Agricultural Chemist at the University of Nevada at Reno. In 1964 he joined the Agricultural Division of the Upjohn Company, from which he retired in 1996 after its merger with Pharmacia. For many years he was active as a volunteer for Boy Scout Troop 244 in Portage. He is survived by daughter Lynn Ogilvie of Ypsilanti, Mich.; son and daughter-in-law Brian Ogilvie and Jennifer Heuer of Hadley, Mass.; brother Danl Ogilvie and sister-in-law Mary Ogilvie of Webster, Fla.; and ex-wife Beverly Eby, of Kalamazoo. A memorial service will be held later in the spring. Memorial gifts may be made to the American Cancer Society. (This obituary was published in the Kalamazoo Gazette on February 11, 2008.)
Lynn and I organized a memorial at Schrier Park in Portage on Saturday, June 28, 2008. My remarks follow.
Brian Ogilvie, brianogilvie@mac.com
Friends and family: thank you for coming today to celebrate the life, and to mourn the death, of my father, Marvin Ogilvie. Though I now live in Massachusetts I had the immense good fortune to spend most of Marv's last six weeks with him in Kalamazoo and Ypsilanti. During that time we didn't talk much about what would happen after he died, especially since he had to communicate mostly by writing notes on whatever piece of paper happened to be to hand, but we did have a chance to talk about the final arrangements after his death. He told Lynn and me that we would need to decide what to do for a funeral or memorial, because, as he put it, he would be involved, but he wouldn't be aware of what was done. In the event we decided that we would do what was necessary back in February, but that we would be better prepared, after a few months of grieving, to celebrate his life this summer.
Beyond asking to be cremated, Marv didn't leave instructions for what to do after his death. He was not a religious man. As I understand it, after his mother Doris's death his father, my grandfather, turned away from organized religion and did not, even after his remarriage, participate in any church or affirm any creed. My dad followed in his footsteps. We thought that it was best to honor his memory by holding a secular memorial here in a park.
[Reading from "Song of Myself," by Walt Whitman, followed by music: "In Taberno Quando Sumus," from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.]
"When we are in the tavern," sang the wandering monks or students who wrote the Carmina Burana, "we don't care that we are made of dust. We hurry to the game, our real care," and drink to everyone's health. My dad enjoyed a good beer and a convivial hour in the tavern. He wouldn't have liked Carl Orff's music. But as he said--or rather, wrote--when we were discussing funeral arrangements in January, Lynn and I were the ones who would have to decide what we wanted: he would be there, but he wouldn't be involved in the proceedings.
He also commented on one of the cremation services I had been researching for him, "Seems too expensive. There ought to be something cheaper available." Even to the last, he was stingy with himself, despite the generosity that he showed to others.
As a father, Marv set me a great example of how to lead my life. He was seldom stern and only rarely angry, and then only when I really deserved it. He took a keen interest in what Lynn and I did but rarely tried to direct our interests. He loved the outdoors; on family camping trips in the 1970s, and then on hikes and backpacking trips with my Boy Scout troop in the 1980s, he shared with me pleasures like sitting around the campfire after a long day of physical exertion. He even came on some of our winter tent camping trips. He also worked as a volunteer leader of my troop, serving as chair of the Troop Committee and helping to organize many of our outings. He taught me to shoot a rifle and a bow, though I never took an interest in hunting. He taught me most of the practical skills I have at fixing things, though there are many things he could do that I never learned--and he taught me to trust in my ability to figure out how to fix something. As Lynn and I moved into our own houses, he enjoyed doing odd jobs for us--much more than he enjoyed doing them at his own house.
When Lynn and I were quite small, he once took us out squirrel hunting--probably to get us out of the house and give our mother some peace. Years later I asked him whether he expected to shoot any squirrels with two kids tagging along; he said no, he didn't. I suspect he hadn't even loaded the gun.
I got my interest in science, from a very early age, at least in part from his example as a research scientist, though as a child I had little idea exactly what that involved. He encouraged my interest by getting me a microscope--a real lab microscope, not a child's toy--and showing me how to use it and how to stain specimens. He also helped set up a basement room for chemical experiments. And after I developed a fascination with computers, he bought one for me. It would be years before he bought a computer for himself, though--in fact, I think it was when I went overseas in the 1990s and he bought a computer so that he could email me, and so that he would have something to do in his retirement. He never did much with the computer, though, other than write emails, look things up on the web, and play FreeCell--thousands of games of FreeCell!
When Jennifer and I got together, he welcomed her into the family. And I remember the toast he made at our wedding: he told the story of a co-worker, a young woman, who was leaving for a new job on the west coast. At the end of her send-off party, she said that everyone had told her to be careful, but no one had told her to have fun. So, Marv told us, have fun!
I'm not sure Dad ever fully understood what it is that historians do. From the first, though, he supported unconditionally my decision to become a historian. In 1988 I was thinking about changing my major from physics to history of science. When I told him, he asked whether I could find a job in history; when I told him yes, he seemed satisfied. If he had any misgivings, he did not raise them with me. In the summer of 1989 he drove me out to New York so I could spend a month in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History. He lent me money during grad school and then forgave the debt; he collected mail and paid bills while I was overseas for study or research; in short, he not only supported my decision but gave much support, moral and material, to my later career. As a token of gratitude, I would like to say a few words about him from a historian's perspective.
To write history, a historian needs an archive. Marv certainly left quite an extensive personal archive. Practically every room of his house had at least one bag or box of documents. He was not a hoarder, but he seems to never have thrown away a financial record in his life. The bills and financial documents were opened, paid or dealt with, and then returned to their envelopes and stowed away somewhere. The oldest ones were generally in the basement; newer ones upstairs--but "newer" meant anytime between the 1970s and the twenty-first century. And interspersed with the bills, pay stubs, bank statements, and the like were letters, cards, photographs, and other documents that showed me Marv in another light: not as my father, which is how I knew him, but as a man--a much younger man, in some cases--with other facets to his character. There's not enough time for me to recount his biography here, but to complement my memories, here are a few gleanings from his archives.
His report cards from kindergarten (called "Beginners' Grade) through high school show some striking consistencies: mostly good grades, except in penmanship, spelling, and orderliness. Madeline Flumerfelt, his first third-grade teacher, said he was a "very good pupil." He had a problem with quarreling at the beginning of fifth grade, but it seems to have been resolved, though the sixth-grade report card had a question mark next to "satisfactory" in the Obedience category. His good grades in high school, and a suggestion from his principal that he consider going to college, won him admission and a scholarship to Michigan State College. At the end of his first year his professor for the course "Introduction to Farm Management" wrote his parents that out of 145 students, "Marvin ranked second. It has been a pleasure to have him in the class and I know you must be proud of him." (These days a professor who wrote such a letter might be violating federal privacy law!) He did get an F his first quarter in "Beginning Swimming," but he passed the course with an A a couple years later. His other courses included "Meats 1," "Swine Production," and "Individual Tumbling." After graduating with high honor he went to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where his courses were mostly in animal husbandry and biochemistry.
In college and grad school, Marv was a frequent blood donor. But he never seemed to have used the same donor card more than a couple of times; we found half a dozen.
He enjoyed a good night out at the tavern. His check registers show recurring payments to the Hasty Tasty in Madison. And one of his grad school friends sent him a joke letter asking him to join on a temperance society lecture tour of Wisconsin, so that he could "appear with [the lecturer] at [his] lecturers and sit on the platform drooling at the mouth and staring through bleary, bloodshot eyes" to be pointed out "as an example of what drink would do."
In the summer of 1963 he moved to Reno, Nevada, where he took a job as Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Assistant Agricultural Chemist, for a salary of $8028. The only diary of his that I have found is one for the first two weeks in that job that he kept in a lab notebook. The first entry, for August 1, begins, "First day as Assistant Prof. (Big deal). Spent most of day sitting on my ass in an air-conditioned office reading over material on projects and future proposals." "Aug. 2. Sat on rump most of day reading again. Getting tired of this. Got to get started on some research of some kind." He said about the new dean of agriculture: "Keep a clean nose and he won't bother me." He also commented appreciatively on a couple of the young women who worked at the University. The last entry is dated August 12. When he started work at the Upjohn Company the following year he started to use a pocket diary--we have nearly a complete series--but only for appointments, phone numbers, and notes, not for recording his thoughts.
A professional curriculum vitae from around the time of his retirement in 1996, after 32 years at Upjohn, lists him as an author on 22 published scientific papers, 26 internal technical reports, and one patent. After he retired he toyed with the thought of retiring to North Carolina, where his friends Dave and Ginny Thompson had moved. In 1999 he wrote to them, "Wow, I have really gotten lazy since returning to MI. No get up and go at all. Have even slacked off on the walking. After walking around in the mountains down there, this concrete/asphalt surface and scenery sucks." But in fact he did walk a lot, until the last couple years made it harder. He enjoyed microbrewery and imported beer, though he counted calories too strictly to have too many. He went fishing with his cousin Ralph Van Waggoner and others from time to time, but he rarely golfed, though he had done so earlier. In one of his emails he noted, "Pathetic! Pathetic! My golf game sucks. Had what amounted to a double bogey round. Was the second time out in nine years. No wonder I play so often. Oh well, the walk was ok, I refused to ride in a cart."
I don't want to dwell on the last couple years of Marv's life, but I will say that he bore his increasingly poor health with more fortitude than most. His frustration at not being able to eat or talk rarely broke through, though I knew he felt it keenly.
In that as in most other things he was a model to me of loving kindness and generosity. He came a long way in life, the first in his family to go to college and to earn a graduate degree, but he remained down-to-earth and unpretentious. He was stingy when it came to himself, but incredibly generous with his time and money with family and friends. He would no doubt have been embarrassed to see you all here today in remembrance of him, but he would also have been secretly delighted that you were here.
The philosopher Douglas Hofstadter said, "You can imagine a soul as being a detailed, elaborate pattern that exists very clearly in one brain. When a person dies, the original is no longer around. But there are other versions of it in other people's brains. It's a less detailed copy, it's coarse-grained." Hofstadter offers a secular hope, not of immortality, but of the next best thing for materialists. As long as someone here ever says, "Marv would have enjoyed that," or something of the sort, his spirit will still be among us. For the rest of my life, I know I will think, from time to time, that "Dad would have loved that," or "Dad would have hated that," or even--to be honest, since Marv would have appreciated that--that "Dad would have had no idea why I care about that." That is, as long as some of us know what Marv was like, what he cared about, how he would have reacted to something, some part of the pattern of thinking and acting that was him will remain in the world.
With that in mind, we would like to invite you to offer your reminiscences of Marv, either here at the lectern or by writing in the guest books, to broaden our knowledge of the man that he was and to offer us the chance, in years to come, to reflect on how he played the hand that he was dealt by life.