A final goodbye
Walter Edmond Stewart was born in Bakersfield on March 29, 1927 — which, contrary to what he liked to say, was not before Abraham Lincoln or George Washington’s time. He passed away after a short illness in his hometown nearly 92 years later, on February 14, 2019.
He’s survived by his wife of 64 years, Betty Jean (Carr) Stewart; son, Mark Stewart, and daughter-in-law, Brenda (Ely) Stewart; daughter, Carol (Stewart) Goldman, and son-in-law, David Goldman; grandchildren, Melissa (Stewart) Wilford, and her husband, Corey Wilford, Austin Stewart, Samuel Goldman, Emma Goldman, and Benjamin Goldman; as well as his great-grandchildren, Olivia Wilford and Ainslee Wilford.
Walter was the younger of two brothers and, by his early teenage years, showed remarkable artistic ability, especially with paint and brush. At 17, he joined the Navy and shipped out to Guam as the Second World War reached its climax. Then came art school up in Oakland and a series of jobs, including art teacher and roughneck on Central Valley oil derricks. He had the good fortune of living at Standard Oil Co.’s 11–C camp in Taft, where, one night in the cookhouse, he spied Betty Carr, a lovely Arkansan whom he soon married. In 1955, they had Mark and, a couple years later, Carol. Not long after that, the family moved into the house where they’d spend decades and become the focal point of all Stewart holidays and gatherings. Five grandkids arrived in the 1980s and ’90s, plus two great-grandkids this decade. Walter served Kern County for 30 years and retired in 1992 as an architectural engineer and drafting technologist. He was active in his Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter and wrote scores of letters to the editor steeped in history and opinion. Most remarkable, perhaps, was the museum’s worth of sketches and paintings he completed, many of which were unbelievably life-like. He was a numismatist as well as the guy who would know what “numismatist” meant. No Thanksgiving could go by without — once everyone had too much food in their mouth to speak — Walter admonishing, “Don’t everyone talk at once!”
No obituary does justice to the complex, nuanced person it memorializes. It’s only one incomplete perspective — colored by the memories and relationship of the person endeavoring to paint a faithful picture. The man I knew called his grandkids “prune cakes,” let us eat the sugary cereal on Christmas morning before Mom and Dad were up, spoke wistfully of the Golden Age of radio, and thought we ought to carry bricks on our heads to rein in our teenage growth. The temper I had heard about never reared its head around us; rather, even a lament about the state of the country would be quickly followed up by a joke. “I’m sick with a cold,” I said the last time I spoke with him. “Well,” he told me, “who said you were allowed to have one?”
After all the stresses around losing your grandparent are laid to rest, after it hits you that you won’t see them again, that person is reborn as the sum of all these pleasant memories. Nonetheless, we’ll miss you, Grandpa.
