Donald William Fork

1920 - 2006

The cemetery stone sums up a most wonderful man. Honest, logical, intelligent, fair, inquisitive, loving and loyal. He was a wonderful father to six children and a good a husband.

Don Fork had the advantage of growing up in an upper middle-class family. His father rose from office boy to vice president of a steel mill on the south side of Chicago, and his mother, educated in a German school in Chicago, was the archetypical German “haus frau.” The family was a rowdy bunch with 4 boys and 2 long suffering daughters. Bill Fork would often say of his children, “I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for another one, but I wouldn’t take a million dollars for one I have.” Three of the children were sent to Germany to visit relatives in 1936 when German transportation companies radically dropped their prices. Don, as a gangly 16-year-old, threw snow balls on glaciers in the Alps, visited his great-aunt and family in Konigsburg, Prussia, now Kalingrad Oblast of Russia, and did the standard tour of London and Paris.

He later went on to a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT made possible by his meeting and falling in love with Nancy McLaughlin (he had flunked freshman English twice, and her assistance got him through the third time.) His father, remembering Don’s many antics as a youngster (like blowing off his eyebrows investigating why a “dud’ firecracker had not exploded) is purported to have said to his son Donald at graduation “I never thought think you were going to make it.”

As he got his diploma in April of 1942, he was handed his papers to join the armed services to fight in WW II. Don had wanted to join the navy, but his need for glasses made that impossible. Despite his father-in-law arranging a lunch with the Secretary of the Navy (after which Don said he was so scared he went out and threw-up the entire lunch) it was into the army he went.

Stationed initial at Aberdeen Proving grounds, the newly married couple rented an apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was here that Nancy McLaughlin Fork realized she had not married the most outgoing of fellows. She had invited another couple to come for dinner, and Don read Life magazine the whole time they were there; this set the tone for social interactions for decades to come, the outgoing Nancy and the homebody Don.

Posted to Panama, Wife and eldest daughter Rolly joined him for 2 years; an interesting respite from Chicago winters and wartime rationing. After the war, the small family returned to Chicago where they greeted daughters Joyce, Gail and son D.G. In 1951, Don’s employer, Western Electric, transferred him to Indianapolis, Indiana, the city that was home to him for the rest of his life. As the third of six children himself, he had always wanted to have a large family of his own and daughter Connie and son David joined the family in their new home.

He was a funny drunk. Many of the kids remember one Indy 500 party at which he got a bit snockered and spent the late evening poking his toe through a hole in his sock, each time saying “Peek” in a slightly odd voice.

He was a fair man with a gentle soul. It was known that, after chastising daughter Gail (at age 4) for doing something naughty, he issued the mandate, “If you do that again, I will spank you.” She looked at him, he looked at her, she did it again…and got a swat. (This rather explains both of their personalities.)

Rolly remembers him lying on his side on the living room floor watching a football game while one, sometimes two, of the younger kids were bouncing up and down on him. With his 6’3” height and great stride, he seemed a giant to his children. They practiced trying to match their strides to his while others just climbed on his size 16 steel-tipped work shoes and walked backwards as he strode.

To his children, he was invincible. In the 1950’s, his eldest son, then quite young, was looking at the night sky as the moon was waxing, and marveled at the partial moon. He turned to his mother and said, “Look, the moon is broken. But don’t worry, Daddy will get a ladder and fix it.” A belief in his abilities to repair anything (at least half way) has remained with all of his children throughout life.

He was a loving husband and father. He made sure his wife and children could spend three months each summer at the Sims Ranch, despite the family having only one car. While the family was in Michigan, he rode his brother Allan’s old bicycle 5 miles to and from work in the Indiana heat until 1956, when the family could afford a second car, with nary a complaint.

As the family grew up and the children moved on, he and Nancy settled into a groove. She did many social activities, and he stayed home and watched TV. He reveled in the presence of his children, and after one vacation brought all 6 adult children to the Ranch on vacation with ripostes and puns flying, he was heard to remark, “I couldn’t really keep up, but I enjoyed watching”. After retirement, summers were spent at the Ranch and winters in Indianapolis. Then his wife of 50 years died…and he as alone for the first time in his life.

Being an engineer, he listed all the single women he knew and scratched out those would not be a good fit. Lo and behold, his 8th grade girlfriend from Flossmoor, IL had moved to Indianapolis and, not bothering to call, he simply went to her house. Within 3 months he and Doris Lloyd Orr had moved in together at the young age of 72. The seasonal move from Indianapolis to Michigan continued for almost 14 years. Doris dragged him travelling and many a journey was made with D.G. and Jeri Fork. They did a cruise through the Panama Canal where Don was miffed that he was no allowed off to visit his Wartime haunts. They went to Ireland – where the famous brassiere engineering discussion occurred- a riverboat on the Mississippi with a flooded stateroom - the Greek Isles cruise where he spent one stop at a picturesque island trying to figure out how the municipality got electricity to the island and ignored the view. On one cruise to Alaska, Doris chastised his overloaded breakfast tray remarking, “Donald, you should eat in moderation!” With a sheepish smile and twinkle in his eye, he responded, “I am. I am eating EVERYTHING in moderation”. And so, he spent the final years of his life.

His last Thanksgiving, all six children were in Indianapolis for his surgery for renal cancer. He never recovered, and there he died on December 8, 2006. The next summer, he was buried next to his beloved wife Nancy McLaughlin Fork and the family tribute was heartfelt. He loved the Ranch as much as his wife, and it is here that he always wanted to be.