Free Lemonade Stand: Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived

He was Larry. In a place where people were Dr. So-and-so, he would say to all of us, even 22-year-old greenies like me, “Call me Larry.” He was a real hotshot, a list as long as your arm, they said, of publications. We’d wooed him from Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, another great Engineering school to a grant-supported job as Dean of Engineering. Chrysler Corporation helped the university recruit a top-drawer Dean by providing an endowment that was called the “Chrysler Chair”, a title given to Dr. Lawrence N. Canjar. There was a story that when the controller’s office assistant was given the request for his first check from the fund (a few thousand dollars) she looked at the purpose on the form that read “Chrysler Chair” and asked “Isn’t that a lot of money for a chair?” I don’t know how much it was, but it was a bargain.

Kathy and I were dating when we met Larry and Patsy at a party at their home on the Detroit Golf Club a mile from campus. It was a grand place, three stories and a fistful of bedrooms, with a huge family room that was often filled with their university family, which often included us. I remember Patsy’s welcoming smile as she showed us the house on our first visit. “Isn’t this great?” is the phrase I recall from her, again and again, not in pride but a kind of grateful disbelief. When we told her what a beautiful home they had, she said, “It’s not, ours, it’s yours too; the money comes from the university.” Our first visit there was an “Agape Supper” after the Easter Mass at the modest little university chapel, where Larry played the guitar and Patsy sang. Their son Mike would soon join with his guitar as well. He was brilliant, bringing home the College Physics textbook one summer during high school and learning the whole thing by himself, a feat that challenged college students in a three-course sequence over a year and a half.

Larry was huge. A Carnegie-Mellon 2004 newsletter describes him as “a 300 lb down-to-earth son of a Croat immigrant steelworker who went on an unplanned diet in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge.” The photo above shows him riding on the rear of a Karmann Ghia, a kind of mutated centaur, his academic regalia merging with the little VW’s fenders making him seem the Titan that he was, half god and half man. He was known for losing a hundred pounds on a yogurt diet, but gradually putting it back on again. Everything he did was big, not from a big ego, but a big spirit. The photo shows the Canjar-Ghia emerging from the central hallway of the Engineering building, driving under the canopy of raised surveyor sticks of the Civil Engineers. The “Chem E’s” would celebrate him with beer and go-go dancers names Polly & Esther (get it?) who donned dresses that covered more of them than they normally showed at the nearby bar. The M.E.’s had a car show and the Electricals had a hands-on display of electronics, including lasers that were just emerging then. The place was jumping.

Then the economy took a nosedive with the west coast aerospace industry leading the plunge, and photos of unemployed engineers in soup lines filled the papers, and suddenly Larry was scrambling to find students to fill his classrooms. I still see him walking briskly across campus to meeting after meeting, his charts under one arm, the charts he would use to illustrate the truth that it was then, when things looked worst for engineering jobs, that students should enroll in engineering, because by the time they graduated, they would be in short supply in a high-demand market. He was right, but he would not live to see it.

One morning a few weeks before he died, I was sitting in Larry’s office. As an advisor for the freshmen who would transfer to his faculty for their sophomore year advising, I used the excuse of planning to have the opportunity to sit with this man I admired so much. There above the door of his office was a sign that read “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” How like Larry, I thought, to challenge these engineers, faculty and students, to go beyond problem-solving, to probe more deeply into life and its meaning. I guess I wanted, too, to see how he was doing, to encourage him in light of the dismally small freshman class, with a dearth of engineers despite his tireless efforts. I remember vividly sitting there with this man who felt more like a father or a friend than a renowned researcher and educator. He called me Johnny. He told me that when Patsy finished her Ph.D in Psychology and hung out a shingle, that maybe he would quit engineering entirely and do something different. I had, in my shock, asked him how he could walk away from the field in which he had such renown. “I think we’re never as fully alive as when we’re trying something completely new; I think everybody should do that late in their career.”

While Larry had a perfect sense of the future for enrolling engineering students, I wonder if he had any sense of his own trajectory toward the greatest mystery of all. One morning soon time in his office, I came into work to find one of my colleagues weeping. Larry, she said, had died at home, a sudden heart attack. In characteristic fashion, he had just sent off a group of his students who had held their senior design class in that big family room, that room where we had shared the Agape Supper a couple of years earlier, where we celebrated what we knew, that life wins over death.

Forty years later, you can Google “Lawrence Canjar” and get more than a dozen hits. On the university campus, Michael the whiz kid has been on the faculty in mathematics for decades. The Dean of Engineering and Science, Leo Hannifin, was one of Larry’s students there. He walks briskly across campus form meeting to meeting, under his arm not charts but his laptop, promoting engineering. And when he returns to his office, he passes under a photo of Larry, his arm outstretched, his finger pointing into the distance, the quote about life being a mystery to be lived.

When Patsy closed her clinical psychology practice and moved from her home to a condo a few years before she herself died, she had asked Mike to give me the cross that had hung over Larry’s casket, a cross that Dave Donellon, then a Jesuit seminarian, had made for them. The corpus is suggested by “re-bar”, the metal rods that are wired together around which concrete is poured. The reinforcement bar shows a Christ who has one arm nailed to the cross and the other freed from it, a Christ who is simultaneously crucified and risen. I think of Larry’s last year with us like that, selling engineering when no one would buy it, looking beyond engineering at life, too, fully alive now that he is trying something completely new, living in those of us who can’t forget him.

photo courtesy 1969 Tower yearbook