No one wants to be here.  Or maybe I should say, no one DESIRES to be here.  I’m sure dad wouldn’t wanna be here.  But here we are. 

Lots of people with dis-similar backgrounds, many from a small part of Macedonia, brought together because of the death - and life - of one man.  Nick Milosevich.  I was at a funeral years ago, it was really hot and miserable, or maybe it was really cold and miserable and I had to take time off from work, get dressed up and trek to the other side of town.  I was annoyed and when I got to the funeral home said to my friend Lou - what the heck?  I didn’t see this guy when he was alive for the last 20 years and now I gotta see him.  Lou had already lost both of his parents and responded - You’re not doing this for him, you’re doing it for the family.  I pondered that simple statement for a few seconds and the truth of it firmly engaged me and changed my perspective.

No one wants to be here.  Dad doesn’t wanna be here.   But here you are. 

Thru the heat, thru the traffic, thru the daily grind, thru your old age, thru yelling at the kids to get ready.   Maybe Nikola was your boss.  Maybe you knew him thru his restaurant, through me or Tommy or Tanya.  Many here are from the villages which they left long ago.  Or you’re a neighbor.  Or maybe you knew him from the Westwood Bakery days in Detroit.  How ever you knew him, know that we are grateful and humbled and appreciative of your attendance.

I said so many times to relatives and friends at the viewing, jeez, the last time I saw you was at so-and-so’s funeral a long time ago.  You think it’s been 2 years but it’s been 4 - or 5.  One second someone has tears in their eyes and the next few minutes we’re recounting some humorous event and cracking up - so while this occasion is centered on grief and mourning we can also spin it and use it to laugh and hug and reconnect.  Until the next time.

Since I work at a restaurant, my communication has devolved into shouting and swearing,  grunting and gesturing.  I’m not practiced or articulate in speech-giving so I’ve done a bit of borrowing from others who’ve nicely summarized many of my thoughts and inspired me.

From President Calvin Coolidge.

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

My dad knew this implicitly and was the epitome of persistence.  You might have seen the picture of dad in a tee shirt and white apron, the baker’s uniform, standing in front of the bench with the rolling pin.  What the picture doesn’t show you is the tens of thousands of hours standing in front of that piece of danish dough, no matter that it was 110 degrees in there or 0 degrees outside.  It doesn’t show you the enlarged and battered fingers that rolled, from my quick math, maybe 3.2 million 16oz balls of dough.  You don’t see him or mom running from the fridge to the bench to the mixers, back to the bench, tempering their fingers against the donuts coming out of the hot oil.  You don’t see that their day started at night at 11pm while the world slept.  You don’t see dad angry that one of the bakers didn’t show up or that the oven, the only oven, isn’t working.  You don’t see him pulling loaf after loaf after loaf of rye, then french, then pumpernickel then white bread out of the oven with the wooden paddle or the endless trays of danishes, dozens of different cookies and pastries and cake pans that now had to be fashioned and finished, or the 100# bags of flour and sugar that needed to be lifted and dumped.  You can’t smell the stinky block of yeast that he pulled from the refrigerator or feel the stickiness of the sugar that had to be drizzled over the danish.  You can’t hear the news on WJR because the old mixer is louder than the Hobart but not as loud as the big mixer.

Many were the times when I saw dad at that bench in the picture, rolling out the dough and falling asleep on his feet.  After a few bouts of nodding off he would get angry and smack the dough with the pin to rouse himself, finish and move on to the next monotonous task.  That is a difficult night in a laborious life and doing that incessantly for 30+ years is what is called persistence.

I can’t leave mom out of it because she was the other half of the bakery.  I know that during a Christmas holiday she worked 22 hours non-stop and then slept for about 4 hours on a table near the donut fryer and then woke up to work another shift.  This dedication of course carried over to when they decided to open the restaurant in 1989 and begin another 30 year endeavor of what’s simply known as HARD WORK.   Out of the hundreds and hundreds of employees that were impacted by my parents I know that many recognized those traits, of hard work and honesty, devotion and teamwork, and that they took those traits with them.

Whether it was at your bakery or at Ford Motor Company or the family restaurant, I’m sure all these impressions resonate with many in this room who know just what the word PERSISTENCE means.

If you saw dad in the picture you might have noticed the thatched roof on one of the barn buildings.  Many of those here, grew up in Vratnica, surrounded by livestock, certainly with no plumbing or electricity and most all dreamed of coming to this magic land. 

Dad arrived on an airplane, by himself (I might be wrong) at the age of 14 at Willow Run Airport.  This was the first time he saw his dad Kosta.  Perhaps being without a father in those formative years caused him to be reserved and stoic.  He was a quiet man, not a braggart, intelligent only though he only went to tenth grade at Cody High School and highly attentive and sensitive.  He squatted 350 pounds when no one knew what exercise even was.  He built his own bench out of wood and I remember after the pink vinyl finally wore out he somewhere found a sturdy brown faux-leather material and reupholstered it himself.  There was a bar in the garage on which he would do pullups, nearly daily, wide-grip and behind the neck.  That’s how you get the VEE shape to your back, he said.

He told me that in Vratnica, they would make slingshots out of rubber from tires from an airplane that crashed in the mountains above the village in World War 2.  If you search the word Vratnica and bomber you’ll find several accounts of a B24D American bomber that crashed after six German fighters had crippled the plane which had just done a bombing run on Romanian oilfields and was on its way back to Italy.

One of the bomber crewmembers was hiding in the woods and he recalled:  I called out “Amerikanski” in a low voice so as not to alarm them. They had me. I could not understand their language. One man who appeared to be a civilian spoke English. He had lived in Detroit Mich. He said the war was over for me, that I would go to prison, rest and read books. He was very wrong.  No, it wasn’t my dad but I wanted to mention it because many might not be aware this.

Dad was a hugh movie buff.  He always took us to movies when he could, on a Saturday night after he woke up.  He said he used to take a train down Michigan avenue as a kid and spend the day watching movies.  In later life, if the news wasn’t on TV it was AMC with old black and white dramas or cowboy movies.  He certainly appreciated the Three Stooges and Sanford and Son.  Anyone from Vratnica who was around in the 70s, even those that spoke little or no English, were big fans of Sanford and Son and the Stooges.

He instilled in us this desire to constantly better ourselves, but rarely with his words but through his actions.  Sometimes his advice was explicit yet all the time simple.  A friend of mine at my wedding asked dad, “Mr. Milosevich, how do you get sucessful?”  My dad coarsely replied, GIVE ME TWO STUPID GUYS.  My friend was puzzled so as dad was smiling I explained that dad needed just two simple hard-working guys with a strong work ethic to run the whole place.  They didn’t have to be educated or good-looking.  They just had to shut-up, show-up and do their job.  Simple.  He had a low tolerance for laziness but was always willing to be a mentor.  You didn’t have to listen to my dad, you simply watched what he did.

Nikola never complained about his condition - NOT ONCE in the 50+ years of my awareness.  There was no woe-is-me, my life is terrible, I hate my bakery job, I hate standing in front of this hot broiler, I don’t have time for this or for that, it’s too cold out.  Even in chemo and radiation, which destroyed his lungs and his ablity to visit the restautant, he never said a word.  There was absolutely no self-pity in this man.  He lived with the motto PRESS ON even though he was probably unaware of Calvin Collidge’s quote.

I might have been 7 or 8 years old and was up around 1030pm when he was about to leave.  I remember he was very ill and there he was, sitting on the couch lacing up his shoes.  There was no one to sub for him, no one to call.  If he didn’t go in, sick as he was, the place didn’t open.  Westwood Bakery never closed, he never complained.  Nikola’s never closed, he never complained.

I mentioned he wasn’t a braggart.  When he was 27 or so he decided to get married and go back to Vratnica to find a wife, that’s how it was done back then since not many Vratnicani were in the US.  Why he decided to take his convertible Buick in 1964 to a small village, I never asked.  There are many here who were probably witness to this event.  My cousin Dave described the reaction was like a UFO had landed in the middle of the village.  Someone told me last night that they were just a child but he saw that car and could die in it - an American car.  Dad’s brother in law, of course, borrowed the car and then proceeded to wedge it against a rock, destroying the tires.  So now, someone had to ship a Buick wheel to Vratnica.  Mom told me this story at the bakery.  Once they got the wheel they had to drive to Italy to catch a ferry back to the US.  She said he had his head down the whole way crying, knowing his parents would be disappointed about the car.  That was one of the longest times I ever laughed in my entire life.

Dad was quiet but his brother Alex wasn’t.  I wasn’t there but at St. Lazarus, Fr. Rade was giving a eulogy about an old man, saying the usual, He was a good man, he loved his family, he was an honest man - to which Uncle Alex loudl blurted out - DON’T LIE, HE USED TO STEAL YOUR CHICKENS DURING THE WAR.

Here are some of the snippets of dad wisdom which he occasionally verbalized.

YOU GOTTA BE ORGANIZED

SAVE YOUR MONEY

ONCE YOU SPEND IT, IT’S NOT COMING BACK.

ALL YOU NEED IS 4 exercizes, squat, bench, pullups and military press.  Can’t argue with that.

There are 2 songs that I cannot listen to without sobbing.  One is called the Ballad of Penny Evans, a song about a girl describing her love and losing her young husband in the Vietnam War.  There are many versions but if you are interested ask me later and I’ll tell you my favorite.

The other is Cats in the Cradle by Harry Chapin.  Instead of playing it I’d rather read the lyrics, hopefully I can get thru it.

My child arrived just the other day - He came to the world in the usual way
But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay - He learned to walk while I was away
And he was talking 'fore I knew it, and as he grew - He'd say, "I'm gonna be like you, dad, you know I'm gonna be like you"

My son turned ten just the other day - He said "Thanks for the ball dad, come on let's play, can you teach me to throw?" - I said "Not today, I got a lot to do", he said "That's okay"
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed and said
"I'm gonna be like him, yeah, you know I'm gonna be like him"

Well he came from college just the other day - So much like a man, I just had to say
"Son I'm proud of you, can you sit for a while?"
He shook his head, and he said with a smile - "What I'd really like dad, is to borrow the car keys" - "See you later, can I have them please?"

I've long since retired, my son's moved away - I called him up just the other day
I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind"
He said, "I'd love to, dad, if I could find the time"  "You see, my new job's a hassle and the kid's got the flu"  "But it's sure nice talking to you, dad
It's been sure nice talking to you"
And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me - He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

And the cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man in the moon
When you coming home,      son, I don't know when
But we'll get together then, dad - We're gonna have a good time then

I don’t know if my dad ever watched the film Act of Valor about the Navy SEALs.  In it one of the SEALs quotes the Indian warrior Tecumseh:

  Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life. Beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.