Category: Family Matters
Farewell Pappy
Hail and farewell to a unique personality, my father, David Paul Chappell, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 95 from causes not related to Covid-19. He was a renowned rocket scientist who worked on all of the Apollo missions, an aeronautical engineer who designed the Osprey aircraft, and an award-winning member of the American Helicopter Society. He was also a sports car collector and mechanic. He played multiple musical instruments, focusing in his youth on violin (Beethoven) and piano (boogie-woogie), in mid-life on classical guitar, and in later years on bagpipes. He traveled widely and studied the French, German, and Italian languages. He was the father of four and the grandfather of three, and he remarried after the passing of my mother, with both marriages lasting over 30 years. Self-sufficient by nature, he did a lot of thinking outside of the box and rarely saw things the way most others did. This world will be different without him.
Copied from Jeffrey Chappell’s Facebook
Wasted Effort
The Chappell Family Website was created circa. 2002. The domain was set up to utilize what was at the time a new Google feature that’s now called Workspaces. Everybody in the family was assigned their own “@chappells.us” account which they could log into for email (on the Gmail platform) and other features, as well as logins to this blog so they could post and share information, stories, pictures, and whatever with the family. I was interested in what the others were doing, for one thing, and also thought it would help to bond familial relationships which were, at the time, strained in certain respects. This was before the advent of Facebook. As time went by, the website’s creator was essentially the only contributor or visitor. When Facebook came along family members hopped onto it with their own pages. The Chappell Family Website creator briefly considered creating a family Facebook page to complement the family website, but the notion was easily dispatched as having no more potential for interest than the website.
One of these days I’ll be gone. Within a year after that happens the website’s hosting account will expire for want of anybody interested in renewing it, the domain registration will likewise expire, and the Chappell Family Website will be history. I suppose it may be preserved to some extent on the Internet Wayback Machine, should anybody ever care to look for it. So, one might ask, has it been a wasted effort? Nah. I’ll save it on a CD or something before I die and give it to the kids, along with the old-fashioned family photo albums. Then I’ll die and it will all be of no further interest to me. Maybe it was never anything more than a personal project of interest only to me. If so, I found the effort, and the product of it, to be personally very satisfying. Especially gratifying have been those occasions when “distant” relatives found the website and contacted me, especially since they nearly all reached out from the United Kingdom, whence my grandfather emigrated to the USA in 1895. He kept virtually all knowledge of his British roots and family to himself and, with the exception of a few letters, photos and clippings that I found more than 50 years after his death, took it to the grave with him.
As I find myself approaching the end of life, I take a kind of comfort in having learned what I could about the family and its history, and in having attempted to preserve and share it on this website, however futile the effort may have been. It occurs to me that the way the internet, technology, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) are developing, anything that has been on the web will, unless humanity destroys itself, remain there and probably become more accessible, rather than less. Descendants of my grandfather’s ancestors who might be curious about such things may well find find this website in the Internet Archives and enjoy, as much as I have, learning about the Chappell Family. I do regret, though, that I never visited England, never hiked about Hillesley, never met any of the U.K. relatives in person, never shared tea with anyone there. Well, who knows? Perhaps the next time ’round.
Retirement
February 13, 2022
Family Matters, Life, News
Comments Off on Retirement
John Chappell
Trying hard to become retired but neither clients nor judges nor fate is cooperating much. Days tick off relentlessly as the Feb. 28 deadline to vacate the office looms like a grizzly awakened from hibernation who has spied his first meal of spring. Deadlines imposed by indifferent authorities creep forward relentlessly, competing for time against financial challenges and puzzles that for years were content to lie dormant but have chosen this time to turn urgent and threaten dire consequences. Not to mention other obligations ranging from those spawned by dad’s demise to the grind of simply dealing with life’s mundane daily challenges. I take little breaks when possible to read books, a recent one of which took an analytical look at the saying, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. The author noted that such things could leave you disabled or otherwise in a condition other than stronger, however much someone might argue about strength of character. So, I’d just as soon skip a third heart attack, thank you very much. Wish me luck. And, if anybody wants some impressive-looking law books to decorate their walls, I have quite a lot for the taking, as well as a few desks, chairs, etc.