Obituary of Alan Gedney Hagen

Allan Gedney Hagen: 1932-2013 I didn't know that my father had ever been arrested until last summer. I was visiting Dad with my aunt Gordia. One morning, Gordia asked Dad to tell us about the time he was arrested, so he did. He said that he was out one night with some of his friends; he said their names and Gordia remembered all of them, of course. He said that they had decided to go eeling and they needed a light and it had to be the right kind of light, bright but diffuse, not like a flashlight. They found a suitable light at a road construction site and they took the light. That was their mistake. A local constable saw the boys with the light and arrested them all. Dad mentioned the name of the constable and made a comment about his generally fair but inflexible character. Gordia remembered both the constable and his character; this would have occurred in the late forties and in a small town in upstate New York. The charges were dropped when the case went to trial because the constable failed to appear. What I especially enjoyed about this story was the details of Dad's memories: that he and his buddies were going eeling, that they needed a lamp to do that, and it had to be a particular kind of light. Those were the kinds of things that he would know, that he would assume everyone knew. I enjoyed watching him and Gordia share their memories of people from so long ago. His telling of the story was so clear, his memory so exact, you wouldn't know he had been suffering from Alzheimer's for the past three years, and that it had been getting relentlessly worse recently. We had no way to know that he'd be gone in two weeks. Allan Gedney Hagen was born in 1932 in South Bethlehem, New York; the son of Ethel Margorie Hagen and E. A. (Red) Hagen. He had an older half-brother, Art, and half-sister, Shirley, and a younger sister, Gordia. Allan joined the Air Force in 1950 and married my mother, Rose Martha Bridge in 1953. They had four sons: Darrell, Dana, Dale, and Douglas while he was stationed in Texas and Alabama. Allan became an officer in 1958 and stayed in the Air Force until 1972. Most of his career he was at bases in the South: Waco, and Harlingen, Texas, Selma, Alabama, and Altus, Oklahoma, but he was stationed at Clark Air Base in the Philippines from 1966 to '69. He was a navigator, back when navigation meant using the stars, not GPS; when maps were on paper, not an I-pad. He went through some initial testing to be one of the Mercury astronauts. When we lived in the Philippines, he worked for a small group that had him travelling widely throughout SouthEast Asia, including Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. He was in Saigon, trapped in Saigon, during Christmas 1968. He retired from the Air Force in 1972 and we moved to Shreveport, LA. He went to work for Scott Hydraulics, then the Weston Company for the next 25 years. Allan and Rose got divorced in 1983 and, in 1986, Allan married Pauline "Polly" Cannon. They lived in Bossier City for the rest of his life, except for five years when they moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. I've been thinking about some of the important things I learned from Dad. How to ride a bike, how to hammer a nail, how to dig a ditch and a post-hole, how to drive, how to drive a manual transmission, how to load a dishwasher, the constellation that Alpheca is the center of, and that you could figure out anything if you worked at it. He sure could. His mind was always active, and ingenious, and orderly. He built a grandmother clock, from lumber. It's still beautiful. It's still running and chiming in the living room in Bossier City. Doug and I spent some time this summer sorting through the stuff in his workshop and attic. It was a marvel to see to all the tools and nails and screws and contraptions labeled and stored exactly where they belonged. We found a couple of, um, doohickeys that he'd made to perform very specific functions; Doug figured out what the functions were. They were perfection; they were works of genius. Dad also loved to share his delight with things: Roger Miller and Foghorn Leghorn, Thorne Smith and a good joke ("Heck yeah, they threw us out of the Piggly Wiggly, too.") It delighted him to solve a problem, to make something work smoother, faster, easier, quieter. He loved to share a cup of coffee in the morning or a can of beer on a hot afternoon. He loved square-dancing with Polly. He loved to be able to spoil his grandchildren. All of this started to change three or four years ago. There started to be things that he couldn't figure out. Then he started to have trouble doing things that used to be easy; reading, balancing the checkbook, e-mail. We tried not to believe that it was happening, but Alzheimer's gradually, relentlessly took away this active, ingenious mind. Don't get me wrong. He was still in there. From time to time, the father, brother, husband that we knew would be there, behind his eyes. Not every day, and not all day long. He was in there enough so that we'll always remember him at his best. Allan is survived by his beloved wife, Polly, his sons and daughters-in-law, his six grandchildren and his sister, Gordia. We love him and miss him, a lot.