Obituary of Herbert Michael Archer

Herbert Michael Archer. My father, my namesake, and my earliest friend. He was born the son of a plumber right here in Huntington. To understand him you must first understand these two things. They informed much of his life. He grew up watching his own father labor hard in his trade, with great pride. To listen to him retell it, his father was Paul Bunyan, lifting boilers and oil tanks above his head, protecting the local women and children from crime, and providing for he and his sister. The reality was likely different. He slept in a corner of the living room on a bed built into the wall. Vacations were few, and the expectations were high. He spent his time in quiet contemplation, trying to figure things out. He built rockets, radios, speakers, cameras and dark-rooms. He tinkered with everything, trying to make it all BETTER. As he got older, he worked side by side with his father where both the work and the atmosphere were hard. As he liked to tell me often - “if I did that, my father would’ve thrown a monkey wrench at my head.” His academic prowess allowed him a way out. The first in his family to attend college, he first ventured to Providence College, but soon returned home to attend C.W. Post. He returned to sleep in that corner of the living room during this time, and rose to the top of his class. He gained entrance to New York Medical College and moved into New York City. He performed clinical rotations at Metropolitan Hospital and thrived. Medicine fascinated him, and the possibilities for his own career were endless. He liked all of medicine and surgery, and was good at it all. He took an internship in internal medicine at Nassau Hospital in Mineola. It was there that he met my mom, and they became engaged within 3 weeks. They married and in 1971, my sister Katy was born. His medical training was interrupted by the receipt of his letter from the draft board in 1972. He never questioned it, never tried to run or finagle a deferment. Small favors found him and he was sent to Berlin rather than Vietnam. It was there that he crossed paths with history. This was the height of the Cold War, and he was the ranking physician. He was tasked with providing medical oversight for several covert operations, and was assigned as the American physician on the 4 state team responsible for caring for Rudolf Hess during his incarceration at Spandau. Those years in Berlin generated most of the captivating stories of my childhood. If Berlin came up, I dropped what I was doing and stopped to listen. He returned from Berlin to take up plumbing again - cardiology, that is. He again trained at Nassau Hospital in Mineola, and in 1976, I got to meet him there for the first time. It’s from this time on that I can speak of him as Dad. My earliest memories are of tormenting him - spraying him and his car with the hose as he pulled in from work every night. He gave me free reign over his library where I poured over his books and journals. He worked hard - in solo private practice for Internal Medicine and Cardiology for most of my youth, he was on call most nights. Those were the days of the Giants in medicine, and he would have to go to one of two hospitals many of those nights to care for all of his own patients - even those who came to the ED but didn’t need to stay (he could’ve used a good Hospitalist..). He would come home sometimes as I was awakening, humbly boasting of “another save,” and I couldn’t wait to hear all about it that night at the dinner table. His latest case of heart block, pericarditis, or his all time favorite - a case of Yaws diagnosed in his office. He was a Giant in my eyes - my own Paul Bunyan. And I never really dwelt on how hard he worked. To me, a kid, he was home when it mattered. He was home when I got up, home for dinner, home when I got home from school on Thursdays, and available to me every weekend. Sometimes that meant walking at his hip in the hospital while he made rounds for hours or sitting in a dictation booth while he finished his charts, but more vivid in memory were the all day trips to “research” the latest in audio, visual or camera technologies. These invariably followed a Thursday off when he had read everything there was to know about said technology. The trips were then something of a masterclass. He would find some unsuspecting salesman to show us an item slightly better than what he was looking for, knowing that he had all the comparative statistics filed away in his head that would lead us down to what he really wanted. We would make it down to what he was looking for and then say something ridiculous like, “Well, the dynamic headroom of this unit is 1 dB less than I was looking for, don’t you think that will affect my high end range?” The salesman would be petrified, we would walk out, and he would turn to me and say, “He doesn’t know his stuff, we can get him down another $100.” As kids, my sister and I wanted for nothing, and he never pushed us. He never yelled, and I can’t ever remember him telling me to do my homework or telling me I needed to be a better kid (Brian and Liam, are you paying attention)? He just supported and encouraged us, and I felt incredibly supported. I’ll never forget the only day I got sent to the principal’s office and my dad’s reaction. It was 4th grade and I was a pudgy little kid, a little bit more academic than my peers. But, I was bigger than them. It was my first year riding the bus from our new house, and I got picked on most days. Sometimes it was name calling, but other days the kids would hit me until I turned black and blue. My dad noticed. He hated bullies, but was never in a position to stand up to them. He gently told me one night, “You know, sometimes it’s ok to hit back.” So the next day I did. Clocked some kid right in his mouth. I got off the bus and went straight to the principal’s office. She was new to the school and assumed given my size, that I was the bully. I sat in the office while she called dad at work. She told him, “Dr. Archer, I need to let you know that your son hit a smaller boy on the bus this morning.” I could hear through the phone, “OH, THANK GOD!” She put the phone down, looked at me and said “I’m gonna have to call your mother.” He only twice gave me direct advice. The first was to ask Jim to be the best man at my wedding. “He’s a good guy, and he’ll back you up the rest of your life”. And, the second came in our garage during the darkest days of my graduate school. Joan and I were newly married and I had no idea how much longer my schooling would be. He came out while I was nervously sorting through old things and said, “You’ve gotta finish this no matter how hard it seems right now. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” Well, you were right on both, so if you’ve got any more advice, I’m listening. Of course, he had idiosynchrocies and made some decisions that left us questioning. But, as I lay down on the night of his death, a flood of memories from the past 40 years came warming over me. For a moment, I was 10 again, lying in his house, looking forward to playing catch with him that evening and hearing about his latest save. I felt safe, protected, supported, with a world of endless possibilities ahead. In the end, isn’t that the legacy of a great father?