Family Docs Page 
Eulogy for Bill Cashill (1941-2009)
I have come to the conclusion that as people grow older they become more like they naturally are:
Cranky people get crankier. Dotty people get dottier. On the plus side, sweet people get sweeter. Kind people get kinder.
My brother Bill’s nature—Billy to us—was to be wise, and the older he got the wiser he got.
One major part of his wisdom was to see the world as it was and to respond accordingly. Billy was one of the few people I have known about whom I did not hear myself saying at least on occasion, “Do you really believe that?” If he said something, he believed it, and if he believed it, you could bet it was true.
Case in point. Do you know what his final words were? “Notre Dame has to fire its coach.” Even when semi-conscious, Billy made more sense than some people do on their best days.
Some of that wisdom derives from the day and year of his birth: March 17, 1941. March 17, of course, is St. Patrick’s Day, a charmed and blessed day for anyone to be born, let alone someone who bore the name, Cashill, the site where Saint Patrick baptized King Aengus and turned Ireland to Christianity.
1941 mattered as well. This was the year WW II started. Before he turned three our father would ship off to the Pacific, and Billy, the first born, became the man of the house, a responsibility I am sure he took seriously.
From early on, my parents trusted his judgment. When he was about six or seven, they gave him some money, put him on a train by himself, and sent him to visit his grandma—In St. Petersburg, as in Florida. No cell phones. No ipods. No whining.
Some people are content to be passively wise. Not Billy. He was actively wise. He had the confidence to project his wisdom, which would make him the best natural leader I have ever seen up close.
It was entirely fitting that he would become a high school principal, but he could just as easily have been a CEO, or a general, or the football coach at Notre Dame, and a better one, I might add, than Charlie Weis.
If Billy were the general, Bob and I and Maureen were the raw recruits on which he practiced his leadership skills. There was some rough working out to do. Once, in fact, I challenged him to a fight. At the time he was a 250-pound high school football star, and I a cocky 93-pounder. The fight did not last long. He punched me once in the arm and walked away. Several hours later, when I regained use of that arm, we shook and made up. I decided then and there that Billy was not someone to be messed with, which made him, by the way, an excellent big brother to navigate the streets of Newark with.
-We have not fought since. In fact, we have not had a cross word among the four of us in the last 40 plus years, a further tribute to Billy’s leadership.
Two examples of how Billy projected his wisdom, one trivial but telling, the other substantial.
In 1993, the night my mother died, Bob, Maureen, and I were all nearby in Union County. In calling around, we talked to our Uncle Andy, who asked that the funeral be put off until Monday because the Community Theater play he was starring in premiered on Saturday in Houston. That sounded reasonable to the three of us, although Saturday would have been the preferable day for the funeral.
We resolved then and there that no matter what Billy wanted we would stick with Monday. Monday it would be. Monday. When Billy came down the next morning, we told him our plan and the reason behind it. Monday. Yes, Monday. “Monday makes no sense,” he said authoritatively. “It has to be Saturday.” The three of us looked at each other, shrugged, and smiled in resignation. “Ok, Saturday,” we said, “but you have to call Uncle Andy.” He just said, “Give me the phone.”
In 1965, when I was 17, I decided as a summer job I would make big money selling encyclopedias. Billy had offered me a job as a counselor at the camp where he would be director, but I did not want to spend the summer as the director’s little brother and all that entailed.
However, after one hour on the encyclopedia front, when multiple homeowners told me where exactly I could stick said encyclopedia, I decided camp did not sound so bad after all.
It turned out to be the best summer of my life, probably the best ever summer for everyone who was there. Even though just 24, Billy was so good at what he did that I thrived in his reflected glory.
The following summer, Billy and I worked elsewhere, but I had two weeks to kill at summer’s end, and the camp had need for a counselor. So I went back. Same camp, most of the same staff, most of the same campers, Billy’s number two guy had taken over as number one, but It was not the same, not even close. In fact, it was like Lord of the Flies, chaotic, anarchic, un-fun.
I learned what the students and teachers at Hackettstown High learned over the years: yes, one person could make that much difference.
If one part of wisdom is to see the world as it is, a second and necessary part is to appreciate that world. This Billy was a little slower in learning. Up until about twenty years ago, Billy’s life was, frankly, rushed and compressed. I could not remember him, even when he was a teenager, not working all the time. As an adult, he was raising four daughters, presiding over the fate of Hackettstown High, finishing his masters, teaching college courses, and worrying about the fate of his wayward siblings. I refer here, of course, to Maureen and Bob.
With a major assist from the awesome Maybel, Billy learned to decompress and absorb the world around him.
He moved to their home in the country and began to appreciate the everyday wonders he saw through their windows. Remember, this was a kid who did not live below the third floor until he was about fifteen. Back in Newark, our idea of wild life had been pigeons—and mice.
When I visited, Billy would talk about the deer, the foxes, the raccoons, the birds, the occasional bear like this was his own personal wild kingdom and he was Marlon Perkins. Towards the end, when he could not leave the house, he took great solace in still being able to see the simple glory around him.
Bill learned to appreciate the lovely part of the world in which he and many of you live. We would take rides throughout Warren County and beyond. He would proudly show me the little things he had learned to love—the parks, the reservoir, the Appalachian trail, the camps we attended as kids, the Belvidere library, the diner on Route 46, this church.
He had always appreciated the people, and now he had time to appreciate them more. Wherever we went—a high school wrestling match, the Y, the world’s first WaWa—we ran into someone he knew and every person he met lit up to see him. Like a kid back at camp, I got to shine in the reflected glory once more.
Bill always appreciated his country, and as a student of history he learned to appreciate it more deeply, particularly the armed forces who served it, more personally those in his own family.
Bill grew in his appreciation of a growing family that he now served as patriarch. Always an excellent big brother, he became a model one. Always a good and responsible father to his daughters, he became a loving one.
If he was always confident in his ability to see the world, he grew more confident in his ability to appreciate it and now projected this newfound wisdom as well. This would make him arguably the world’s best and wisest grandfather. As Conor will soon confirm, I do not exaggerate.
And no one, of course, did he appreciate more than Maybel. It was she in her quietly formidable way who opened so many of these doors to him.
The most important of these doors were the doors you all walked through today. In the last third of his life Billy learned to appreciate his faith. There is no wisdom without it. This is something that he wanted you all to know and remember, especially his family. And now that he has had first hand experience with what happens next, he would want me to share with you one final thought: there is indeed life after death, and it is a beautiful and amazing thing.
Thank you.
Jack Cashill - November 2009 (Return to Family History)
- 2011 Postscript: Click here for "Hackettstown High School dedicates football field press box to former principal (Bill Cashill)"
