Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
---Jane Kenyon

Esther Duvall Gasser passed away on November 19, 2015, in Lakewood, Colorado, of natural causes. She was predeceased by her beloved husband of nearly fifty years, Robert-Louis Gasser (6-22-1988) and beloved son, William Michael Gasser (9-29-2011).

In the fall of 1986, Esther Gasser sat with Robert-Louis in the Swissair VIP lounge at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Awaiting a flight to Geneva, she jotted the following note for a life writing class:

“Somehow, it seems fitting my . . . account should begin here. There is no way I can identify who these impeccably dressed gentlemen are who sit in the other lounge chairs, sipping their gratis drinks while writing or reviewing documents retrieved from their always present attaché cases. If not captains of industry, perhaps they occupy some other leadership roles, but quite obviously they are more important than we are. How did we get here? Why did it happen? Why do I feel quite at ease to be here, too?”

Ruth Esther Duvall was born in Washington, D.C. on April 25, 1918, to James Alva and Maud Chamberlain Duvall, originally of Illinois: devout, hard-working parents who began their own lives in poverty. Joining an elder brother, Roy Edgar (b. 1914), Esther was followed by sister Marjorie Helen (b.1920).

A few months into her life, Esther, along with her father, was stricken by the 1918 flu. Surviving that historic epidemic, she basked in a bucolic Washington. A lamplighter, as if out of R. L. Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” made evening rounds on her street. Father James biked down tree-lined avenues to his new government clerical position, or sat beneath a night study lamp pursuing his CPA degree. Mother Maud kept house and managed a tight budget. The children looked forward to the annual family streetcar excursion “far out into the countryside” to Glen Echo Amusement Park; New Year’s Day receptions in the White House, where Esther would shake hands with President Calvin Coolidge; Easter-egg rolling on White House lawns.

On May 8, 1924, six-year-old Esther dodged an assault as savage as the 1918 flu: at the last instant fleeing a kidnapper who, promising ice cream and candy, had lured her into an alley shed to “see a movie.” That evening’s “Washington Times” headlined Esther’s photo: “Darling Little [Girl] Nearly Attacked.” The rival “Washington Post” account opened as follows: “A band of 200 civilians in the southeast section joined with police and detectives in a search for [the perpetrator]. Many fathers and sons went without their dinners to join in the search.” James Alva Duvall headed their procession.

In 1925, James secured a position as comptroller for the Carolina Power and Light Company in Raleigh, North Carolina. Esther recalled the following three years as “a period of blissful happiness for our family”: James leading daily prayer and perusing the Bible in Hebrew and Greek; Maud teaching herself piano from the latest “Etude” magazine and playing for family singalongs; the family indulging in Saturday chocolate sodas on Main Street; Esther fashioning flower chains and playing blind man’s bluff.

In Raleigh, James bought the family’s first car. There followed summer evening drives, weekend jaunts to Carolina relatives, a 1927 road trip (only three flat tires) to cousins in Florida. Maud tossed away her wash board as the family sat before its first electric washing machine, Esther marveling at clothes “being dashed around without the help of anyone.” Esther and family drove out to the grassy airport field to shake hands with gangly, grinning Charles A. Lindbergh.

Esther celebrated the annual erupting of Raleigh into “riots” of springtime yellows, blues, lavenders, pinks, whites, soft greens. Her lifelong favorite colors.

On Easter Sunday, 1928, Esther and her siblings were upstairs dressing for church when Grandma Chamberlain, answering the doorbell, let out the scream which shattered their childhood: “Your papa’s dead! Your papa’s dead! Take off your new clothes!” Earlier that week, James, who was to begin teaching at Duke University the following autumn, had called Maud from work, suddenly gone blind. He died following brain surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out the family’s assets.

By that time, Maud Duvall had brought the children back to Washington, where she successfully studied to qualify for clerical work with the Public Health Service. In the evenings, she baked and sold cakes made from scratch. The family took in boarders, and the three children contributed whatever they could earn: Esther, from babysitting. Shortly before Christmas, 1935, Maud Duvall died of tuberculosis. Esther was 17.

Esther graduated from Grant Elementary School in 1931 and Central High School in 1935; insurance money allowed for a year at Wilson Teacher’s College, where she excelled in typing and shorthand before leaving to take clerical work. Throughout this period, she attended downtown Washington’s Calvary Baptist Church, drawn especially by its branch of the Baptist Young People’s Union of America. To the end of her life, Esther cherished friendships with members from that group, two of whom survive her: Thomas Moss, of Denver, Colorado and Alice Leake Lawless Lash, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

In the fall of 1938, Calvary’s BYPU, which drew up to two hundred participants in Sunday evening fellowship, attracted Robert-Louis Gasser, newly arrived from Denver, Colorado. He was soon elected Calvary BYPU president and amazed Esther by asking her out, an offer she declined out of faithfulness to her “college heart-throb.” Bob persisted. After her long-term college relationship collapsed months later, it was Esther who set up her first date with Bob. That June evening in 1939, Esther found her soulmate. On October 7, 1939, the two married. Robert-Louis Gasser died shortly before their 50th wedding anniversary; Esther’s devotion to his memory never ceased.

A U. S. government clerk when he married, Robert-Louis subsequently joined the National Symphony Orchestra as a trumpet player before being drafted by the U.S. Army. During World War II, he played stateside in the U.S. Army Band, and afterwards returned to the National Symphony Orchestra. Newlywed Esther aspired to be an excellent wife and mother. She took pride in putting good meals on the table. She regularly baked cookies, cakes, and pies: outdoing herself for birthdays and when her annual lineup of pumpkin, pecan, and mincemeat pies graced the Thanksgiving table. She sat at her Singer sewing machine, whipping up housedresses and maternity smocks for herself, dresses and Halloween costumes for Karen (the fairy queen creation won a first prize), outfits for Karen’s dolls. She crafted flowery embroidery.

Bob maintained that Esther could get more mileage out of a dollar than anyone he ever knew. Like Bob, she spent little on herself until late in life. Their disciplined partnership was sorely tested when the G.I. Bill spurred Bob to undertake graduate work in sociology. Leaving the National Symphony Orchestra, Bob gave private trumpet lessons in his basement for the ensuing five years, the monthly income fluctuating wildly. Esther, raising Karen and William, typed Bob’s papers against university deadlines, putting in all-night sessions in an era when each page of a thesis or dissertation was typed upon a stack of seven sheets of paper, each sheet layered with carbon paper, the whole aligned, then pushed through the Underwood’s roller: no erasures allowed. And then, a difference of opinion from a single member of the defense committee: Bob’s initial dissertation was failed. After deep prayer, Esther and Bob committed to a further year of seesawing finances, after which Bob successfully defended his revised dissertation. In June 1955, Bob was awarded his Ph.D.; Esther, her (“Putting Hubby Through”) Ph.T.

That summer, Esther, who grew up smitten with Zane Grey, happily helped relocate the family to Bob’s Colorado. There, Bob took on college teaching and became active in Denver’s Swiss community; Esther kept pace as faculty wife and honorary Swiss citizen. Bonds with Switzerland deepened when teenaged Silvia Romer, a relative from Uznach who has remained a cherished family member, lived for a year at the Gasser home in Lakewood and attended high school with William.

During 1966-68, Robert-Louis ran the Colorado Woman’s College Geneva Foreign Study Program; Esther accompanied him along with high-school senior William and nine-year-old James. In Switzerland, Esther managed family life abroad, mothered the CWC students in the program, and assisted Bob with his responsibilities as director: functions for the Swiss faculty, business matters in the Geneva community, interactions with the campus in Colorado.

Esther and Bob, who was orphaned in childhood, immersed themselves in the homeland of his Swiss parents. Esther expanded upon her high-school French and bought a set of cassette tapes to teach herself Swiss-German. She loved visiting Bob’s relatives and, during the summer of 1967, renting a chalet near his parents’ home villages, in Flüeli-Ranft – in whose graveyard she could trace ancestors back to Nicholas of Flüe, Switzerland’s patron saint and compatriot of Wilhelm Tell.

Upon the family’s return to Colorado, Robert-Louis resumed college teaching and was eventually appointed chair of his department. He co-founded Denver’s Swiss-American Friendship Society and, in 1970, began his 16-year service as Honorary Consul of Switzerland for Colorado and Wyoming. Esther stepped in as de facto Consulate receptionist and official co-hostess at Colorado Consular Corps and American Field Service events. On one momentous occasion, in the modest home she and Bob had bought in 1956, Esther put on the table a fine meal for the Swiss Ambassador to the U.S.

Bob’s position as Honorary Consul facilitated returns to Switzerland with Esther. He also accompanied her on a 1985 visit to Washington for her Central High School Alumni 50th Anniversary. Upon Bob’s death in 1988, Esther again returned to Switzerland to carry out his wish that she scatter his ashes in his beloved Berner Oberland. Arriving with no inkling how to fulfill this mission, she secured the perfect resting place for her Bob: a small, private alpine meadow with tiny cow shed, amidst steep forest slopes.

Beyond her Bob, Esther lived for her children and grandchildren, to each of whom she was loyal, generous, forgiving. Her first child, Robert Byron (1943), was stillborn. The birthing of Karen Marie (1944) at wartime Walter Reed Hospital was so grossly negligent, private-first-class Bob filed a formal complaint. Esther suffered a subsequent miscarriage, followed by the joyful births of sons William Michael (1949 -- named for Grandpa Chamberlain) and –after the family relocated to Denver -- James Duvall (1956). Esther was later thrilled to welcome Jaqueline Anne (1980), daughter of William and Sabrina Gasser, and Marc (1986), son of James and Susan Gasser.

Along with Bob, Esther prioritized enabling her children to attend college. She had no qualms bragging that all went on to earn a Ph.D. She took, if possible, further pride in her grandchildren: their childhood selves, their graduations, their marriages (about which she said, in each case, “It’s about time!”). She loved their spouses, Christopher and Amanda. During 2014-15, she saw to it that fellow residents of Brookdale Green Mountain’s skilled nursing facility knew of Jacqueline’s Fulbright teaching fellowship and award-winning work at the U.S. State Department; Marc’s 2015 Ph.D. from Harvard and appointment as Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at Boston University.

In granddaughter Jacqueline’s eyes you can still see the blue of Esther’s.

Esther stood out for her smile. Outgoing, friendly, she spent the decades after Bob’s death honoring connections she and Bob had shared. She remained a spirited member of the Episcopal Church (to which she and Bob had converted); the Swiss-American Friendship Society; Bob’s Denver Manual High School Swinging Thirties Club; the Republican Party; the National 1918 Club. Carrying on Bob’s devotion to the Lakewood community, she became a Neighborhood Block Captain and looked forward to monthly breakfast meetings of Lakewood’s Alameda Gateway Association, through which she kept abreast of local police, business, and political affairs.

Esther felt especially close to Bob when donning the navy cap and vest of Lakewood Police Department Volunteer. She took courses at the Lakewood Police Department’s Citizen Police Academy; answered phones and assisted with clerical work; patrolled neighborhoods, warning early-morning puffers, identifying speeders, and assuring handicap parking spaces; shopped for and delivered gifts for the Christmas Cheer for Children program. She loved Lakewood police officers as she did her own family and made sure to attend their annual awards ceremony.

Esther herself was twice saluted at this ceremony: in 2009, for ten years of service. In 2005, she stepped onstage to receive an award as Volunteer of the Year, including a Volunteer Service Award from the U. S. President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation. The presenter spotlighted a role-playing session during which Esther had charmed an officer trainee into failing to frisk her, sweet little lady that she was, after pulling over her car, thereby missing her concealed gun.

In her final years, Esther was assaulted by illness, physical and cognitive. She came to depend upon a cane, a walker, a wheelchair. She became, mercifully only her final week, bedridden. None of this diminished her innate generosity: you could not sit at her table or by her bed tray without being urged to share in the food on her plate, and she bemused one of her nurses, come to administer a dose of pills, by insisting “You have some, too.” Above all, as her body and mind declined there remained in full her deep-rooted love: for her parents, her siblings, her Bob, her children, her grandchildren and their spouses, her nieces and nephews, her friends, “her” Lakewood Police.

Esther was, deeply, a member of the “Greatest Generation”: forged out of the Great Depression and World War II, maintaining the values of those formative years as she went on to benefit from the mid-century boom in the U.S. economy. She is remembered as loyal, self-effacing, persevering; tough; a lady; a lovely, warm woman; a dear, dear friend; kind and sweet; inspirational. Her Bob would have said she had the right stuff. Her nephew Daniel Reeves perceptively remembers her for “a life well lived.”

Esther’s ashes will be interred on July 30, 2016 in the Columbarium garden of the Chapel of Our Saviour in Colorado Springs. In honor of Esther, donations may be made to “Columbarium-Campaign sidewalk” (which will provide easier access to the Columbarium for those who are elderly or infirm) at the Chapel Columbarium Association, Fourth and Polo Drive, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80906.


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