My father’s early life was in constant motion and likely contributed to his nomadic spirit. His father, also named Harold Tilzey, worked for the state highway department and relocated the family every few months building Montana’s highway system. Between project assignments, the family often returned to the childhood home of his mother, Clare McCauley, in the Boulder Valley. Daddy was fondly attached to Boulder and the valley.
In high school, my father would disappear for the summers into the Cabinet National Forest, working the most remote fire towers. Packing in and not seeing another soul for a month or more at a time, he honed his tracking and hunting skills as well as his keen cartography skills in spotting, triangulating, and reporting lightning strikes and the first hit of smoke in the forest.
This speaks volumes about my Dad. He was comfortable in his own company, meticulously detail oriented and self-sufficient in a very Montana kind of way. These unique experiences would set him on a path that would see him head off to war, spend more than five decades in an ever-evolving data processing career, indulge his intellectual curiosity, and explore the far reaches of our planet.
My father was the kind of man who volunteered for the draft. He did so with great pride in serving our country and equal pride in continuing his family’s legacy of service dating back to the Revolutionary War. He was the sort of man who volunteered in part to spare another kid from his hometown from being called up involuntarily, and in part because he felt it was not only his duty but an epic adventure. His service during the Korean War and afterward in the Reserves and Air Force solidified his love of country and would further fuel his love of exploration.
Daddy was the kind of man who had a bucket list before bucket lists were a thing, and he filled his to overflowing. He indulged his interests as deeply and passionately as anyone I’ve ever known— and those interests were many. There were the fine wine years, then masonry, coins, rugs, gemstones, antiquities, football statistics, military history, ancient cultures, and decades spent as an amateur gunsmith becoming an expert on the WWI era Springfield Rifle. His intellectual curiosity guided him through life. If there was something that caught his interest, he wanted to study it in as much depth as possible.
Upon returning from the war, Daddy finished his degree at the University of Montana and headed off to South America for many years. Later, he packed up and moved his family to Middle East for many years more. He was a man who would not be contained and pursued his passion for travel, people and places with zeal. He ultimately sailed the seven seas, saw the seven wonders and explored the seven continents – including Arctic Circle and Antarctic expeditions in his mid- and late-seventies.
He was not the sort of man to simply visit a place and see the sights. Engaging local experts and university professors, his travels were planned in excruciating detail. He was known to offer a bit of a bribe so a guide might turn a blind eye while he and his young daughters ran the 100-meter dash at the site of the original Olympics or unlock a door to gain access to artifacts not available for public view. He not only wanted to see it all, experience it all, he genuinely wanted to learn as much as he possibly could.
In the end, he blessed his children with his Montanan work ethic and self-sufficiency, his passion for service and love of country, an insatiable thirst for knowledge and a life-long desire to explore. Given the many lessons he passed along, perhaps the greatest was his desire to be laid to rest behind the little church his ancestors built in the valley he called home as a young boy. At the end of a life very well lived, his final lesson for us was the everlasting importance of home and family.
