Homer: My Father's Odyssey

A highly respected, former national newspaper editor retraces the fascinating and sometimes mysterious paths his adventuresome father followed through life in this model of a family memoir. It is a son's narrative of discovery of a multi-faceted father who seemed to invent and reinvent himself as he traveled through China, Europe, America, a war, marriages and work. Homer Wark changed careers as easily as he changed socks, writes his son. Homer continuously moved his family from city to city. He made his own telescope and claimed the discovery of a star, naming it after his mother. (Later, he would discover a giant tortoise, which he also named in her memory.) He worked variously as a medic, a distillery chemist, and a newspaper copyeditor. He was a Lincoln scholar, receiving an honorary degree from Lincoln Memorial University on the same stage as Carl Sandberg (who gave the author a keepsake book following the ceremony) . He briefly worked for Thomas Edison, naming his youngest son after the great inventor. And he was himself an inventor of a film colorization process that he spent a good period of his life trying, with heartbreaking failure, to patent. Oh, there also is the matter of the sudden vanishing of the mother of the author's three half-siblings.... "Homer, My Father's Odyssey" is a son's touching effort to retrieve from memory, family stories, diaries and troves of historical and genealogical material, the lived moments of adventure, hardship, mystery, and poetry that coursed through his father's life. He succeeds. In fact, if you listen closely, he will help you feel and hear the very music his father heard. I can say that I can hear it. -- John Wark, son of Thomas Edison and Homer's grandson, Pilot Hill, California, July 2017.