A life of kindness and a lesson in neighborliness

Living across the street from Bill Yackey for the better part of 25 years meant that I got to know first-hand what it was like to live in the world of Norman Rockwell.

In the words of my 3-year-old son, “it was awesome!”

Unfortunately little Huzhao will never get to know what a special person Bill Yackey was — because Maj. Wilfred A. “Bill” Yackey III, U.S. Army ret., died late Tuesday night at the age of 91.

I got the call just after midnight Wednesday from Bill’s oldest child, Judy, who along with Bill had greeted me back in 1988 when I first moved into my house on Fourth Avenue East North. The Yackeys had the biggest house on the block — and the biggest hearts — and every night when I got off work from the Inter Lake, they invited me to come over and shoot the breeze on the porch swing they had dangling in front of their ramshackle Victorian near-mansion.

Bill and his wife, Betty, and Judy (who was living at home as the result of a medical disability) made a perfect picture of post-war America, and on their porch swing they would have been ideal models for one of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.

Of course, Rockwell hadn’t painted one of those since 1963, 25 years before I met the Yackeys, but time seemed to stand still on the Yackey porch, and you could enter a simpler, gentler time when neighbors had time to stop for a glass of punch or lemonade and to forge the bonds of friendship through the gift of laughter.

I’ll carry other memories of Bill with me through the years as well, and will always see his rugged and wizened features as a living example of Rockwell’s paintings that proclaimed the beauty of the American character. Bill had that combination of countrified cockiness, intelligence, and kindness that had made our nation great, and he wore it with humility.

He’d served in World War II as a draftee, but decided to make the most of it, and ended up going to officer candidate school before the war was over. He stayed in the Army Reserve, and got called up to join the fight in Korea a few years later as a first lieutenant in an artillery unit where he saw heavy action on the front lines. He also served in Panama and in a nuclear missile battalion in Germany, where he and Betty adopted a son.

The Inter Lake wrote a story in November 1956 about the naturalization of new citizens, and noted that 8-year-old Paul Carl Yackey had led the group in the Pledge of Allegiance. That was just a year after then-Capt. Yackey had been assigned as artillery adviser to the 639th Field Artillery Battalion in Kalispell. His assignment was to last for two years, but Bill — who retired as a major— fell in love with Kalispell, and never again left willingly.

Through the 25 years after I met them in 1988, there were some high points and some low marks. The family lost Betty in the late 1990s to chronic ill health, and Bill and Judy both had their share of medical misfortunes as well. Eventually, Bill and Judy got caught up in the economic crisis after the recession of 2008 and lost their beloved home to foreclosure, forcing them to make the move to Darby, where Bill finally met his end.

But all the while, Bill had stayed busy. A spry 65 when I first met him, he never gave up his love of tinkering and invention. He built his own computer and taught himself various programming languages, and it seemed like he could keep anything mechanical running longer than its manufacturer had ever intended.

In his eighties, Bill got a new snowblower for Christmas, and thereafter was predictably a fixture in the middle of each and every snowstorm clearing the sidewalks on both sides of the block. Bill stubbornly hunched over that snowblower, pushing through a foot of snow, with his parka, hat, and eyebrows encased in snow and ice, is one more of the indelible pictures I will take with me always.

Bill and Judy had also taken great pleasure in making their home over into a “haunted house” for Halloween. My children Carmen and Meredith always made the Yackey place their first stop when trick-or-treating, and they were generously rewarded with handfuls of candy and a chance to model for a photo to show off their costumes.

When my wife Yuzhao arrived from China in 2008, the Yackeys greeted her with gifts and kind words. They were overjoyed when they heard that Yuzhao was pregnant with our new son, and they considered all of us part of their extended family — and quite a large family they had. Although many of his children had settled far afield, there were often children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews visiting. It was sometimes hard to tell who was having more fun, Bill or the youngsters.

But Bill also had a somber side. He’d seen plenty of sorrow, including the death of an infant daughter, his combat experience in Korea, and the death of his namesake, his uncle Wilfred A. Yackey Jr.

Yackey Jr. had been a World War I flying ace and had settled with his family in the Chicago area a few years after the war and started the Yackey Aircraft Corporation. Bill Yackey III was just 4 years old when his uncle died in a plane crash testing one of his own aircraft as part of his policy of flying every plane he sold to make sure it was safe. No doubt that event had an emotional impact on the youngster, but his uncle’s legacy also seemed to inspire young Bill to himself become a master of everything mechanical and practical.

I have a copy of a page from the Inter Lake in 1973 that showed Bill as a Flathead County deputy sheriff monitoring the Law Enforcement Teletype System machine, which was the predecessor of today’s computerized national crime database. And in 2007, we featured Bill’s practical advice for how to avoid heat prostration based on the training he received in the Mojave Desert as a first-year soldier in 1943.

In fact, the more you talked to Bill, the more encyclopedic his knowledge seemed. You would be hard-pressed to find any topic of practical application that he had not mastered, or at least studied in earnest, and he loved to share his enthusiasm with anyone who would stop and talk.

When Judy called Wednesday morning to tell my family the bad news, I was a bit shaken. We had never had a chance to travel to Darby to see Bill and Judy since they had moved away, and now I regretted the decision to procrastinate and put off what we would never have another chance to do. “Don’t take anything for granted,” I could hear Bill saying.

I tried to find some words to comfort Judy and told her what I knew to be true — that she had been lucky to have such a remarkable man as her father.

“You lost your Dad, too,” Judy said.

He was a good one, and he will most certainly be missed. Thanks, Judy, for sharing him with me. If I live to be 91 myself, I will never meet another one quite like him. Nor do I ever hope to be so good a man myself.

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana.