Boak Gilmer

Remembering Boak Happy birthday to my brother Boak on his 71st birthday! Maybe someone else remembers, but I don’t know why my parents named their second child Boak so I’m going to make up my own story. I looked up his name, and it almost always refers to a Scottish surname meaning boundary ridge. In Old English, the name can also refer to beech trees. As a first name, it is “exceptionally rare,” but has been used outside of Scotland to recognize a branch of the Boak family tree that lacked male heirs. It certainly is a unique, strong sounding name (Oak tree immediately comes to mind). A distinguished man named Thomas Walker Gilmer may have been one of our ancestors. He served as governor of Virginia and was appointed Secretary of the Navy in 1841. In 1920, his daughter commissioned a Clemson class destroyer named in his honor. After a meritorious career, USS Gilmer was decommissioned in 1946. How is this information relevant to my first name Boak brother? It turns out that for a time in the early thirties the Lieutenant Commander of the USS Gilmer was named James Earl Boak. The insignia for a lieutenant commander? An oak leaf! Mere coincidence? I think not! I learned this tidbit about Thomas Walker Gilmer on Ancestry.com, which also revealed that our branch of Gilmers has a strong Scotch-Irish background. In any case, according to our mother, Boak was an “easy” baby compared to her eldest son 😊. You can see in early photos that he had a “sunny” disposition and a nonstop grin. Since we six children were close in age, we had a boisterous childhood filled with outdoor adventures, indoor games, fights and fun, laughter and tears. Boak was particularly rambunctious. He was famously the child who laughed when Mom broke a yardstick while trying to deliver a spanking. Boak was a classic boy of his era, enjoying army and cowboy/Indian games and brutalizing his sisters 😉. I remember that Boak and I played “Honey West” in our scary Michigan basement. I played the title character sporting our mom’s red “go-go boots” while Boak played Sam Bolt, her “man Friday.” I believe our cat Tiger played Honey’s ocelot, but I do digress. As we entered our teen years, things naturally changed. In junior high school, I was constantly pestered by girls who would never have spoken to me except that I was Boak’s sister. He was very cute. As a teenager, Boak was suspended from high school more than once for smoking and frequently violated curfew. In other words, as he grew up, he became a classic “bad boy.” When Boak joined the army, a highlight was the family trip to Fort Knox to see him graduate from boot camp. We were all very proud. When he returned home after his military service, Boak came bearing gifts from Europe including some amazing mementos from Paris for me! After he moved to Arkansas, I had limited contact with Boak. I’m aware of the general outline of his life, but it saddens me to think of how little I know about its everyday contours. We had a few close “re-encounters” in the 1980s, for example when Boak and family attended a family reunion in Coldwater, Michigan and for Christmas after Bonnie died. Decades later, he and Debbie visited Michigan for a family gathering at brother Paul’s house, and Boak and BJ returned in recent years to say goodbye to our parents. To my eyes, he was a good father to his son BJ, and like our dad, the strong, silent type whose infectious grin never left him. I regret that I did not have the chance to see or speak with him after his cancer diagnosis and also feel gratitude that for me, he remains the playful boy and the young, strong, handsome man from our shared youth. Peace to you Boak. Here’s a blast from your Flint past: Grand Funk Railroad, Closer to Home: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=fvOPucs7dC0

Boak was a fun guy to be around he will be missed…

Boak was a fun guy to be around I worked with him for years and he was always cheerful! I’m so sad he’s gone.