Eulogy for John Rainey
By Bud Ferillo
As prepared for delivery, March 17, 2015
In The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy wrote: “Man wonders, but God decides, when to kill the Prince
of Tides.”
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spirtus Sancti…
the language of the old church and the classics in literature John, his father and family loved.
Before I begin, I must tell you that John’s sister, the formidable Mary Rainey Belser, directed me
after the burial service, with full military honors, on Sunday, to be sure I insert some humor into my
message to avoid too many tears.
Mary, I will try, but you know most of the humor John and I shared cannot be spoken from this
altar, because some of the faithful here might think it obscene. And they’d be right.
So before my formal remarks, I will ask the congregation now by a show of hands which party
allegiance is theirs. The choices will be as follows, and I will call them one by one after you have a
minute to reflect upon this matter.
The choices are: Republican, Democrat, John Rainey’s party, Whig, None of the above and, lastly.
It’s none of your business.
You can only vote once, since we are not in the Holy City of Charleston where multiple votes are
routinely cast and counted. For some of you, this may be your first or more recent confession.
Are you ready for the show of hands? Louder please.
Republican… (God help you. Put your hands down.)
Democrat… (I am from Charleston and am voting three times, my birthright, and, more
importantly, counting the votes.)
John Rainey’s party, Whig…
None of the above…
It’s none of your business…
The winner of tally is … John Rainey’s party, Whigs! See, that was easy. I don’t know why the
Richland County Election Commission cannot conduct an election more efficiently.
Now down to business.
Republicans, fasten your seatbelts, I have messages for you from on high. You are just going to have
to suck it up because I have this assignment, by John’s direct orders, and you don’t. If you finish
listening before I finish speaking, you may leave early. But be warned, we have a platoon of Vietnam
veterans outside the Cathedral to greet deserters.
I am here to praise John Stringer Rainey, not to bury him.
2
In his military life, he attained the rank of Captain of a combat Infantry Company Commander. He
was also a sailor where he, of course, was the Captain and John, Jr. most often his First Mate, and
later with Anne in that slot. So we begin this final salute with that in mind.
“Oh, Captain! My Captain!” is an extended metaphor written in 1865 by Walt Whitman about the
premature death of President Abraham Lincoln. The American Civil War was the central event of
Whitman’s life.
At first Whitman did not care for Lincoln but came to love him as the President who saved the
Union, emancipated the slaves and had begun planning the reconciliation of the country.
The poem begins with euphoria for Lincoln’s achievements and concludes with the poet’s vast grief
and heartache for the early death of his idol.
“Oh Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weather’d every rack, the
prize we sought is won; The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! Heart! Heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! My Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills; For you bouquets and ribbon’d
wreaths – for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse or will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.”
The poem was translated by Israeli songwriter Naomi Shemar into Hebrew and who wrote music
for it to honor Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and is performed annually
Rabin’s memorial day all over Israel.
You may recall it from the 1989 film Dead Poets Society when English teacher John Keating (played
by the late Robin Williams) tells his students they must call him “O Captain” if they feel daring. At
the end of the film, the students show their support to the recently dismissed Keating in defiance
against the school’s headmaster.
3
Such is the awesome power of poetry, and the sheer beauty of our language.
John Rainey’s work on earth was outlined in his obituary and speaks for itself. And like Lincoln’s,
they now remain our tasks. What are those tasks?
Two of John’s many favorite stories were from the final years in the life of his hero, Robert E. Lee,
under whom John’s great-grandfather, John Rainey, served in the Army of Northern Virginia and
walked home after Appomattox to Sharon in York County. John held his great-grandfather’s pass
for the walk home as a prized possession.
The first story is when Lee was serving as president of what is now Washington and Lee University
when a mother asked Lee how she should raise her son. Lee said: “Madam, you must raise your son
to be an American for we are one country again.”
The second relates the story of when General Lee went to church one Sunday when at communion
time a black man, impeccably attired, walked up the aisle and knelt at the railing. Every white person
there sat in astonishment. Frozen in their seats. All but one. Lee rose from his seat and joined the
black man at his side to receive the body of Christ. The black man walked out of the church and was
never seen again. Lee had spoken that day for freedom won, country served and the long road to
reconciliation begun.
At his passing, John was hard at work completing a PBS documentary, A Seat At The Table, to be
aired nationally this fall. It reports on this state’s ongoing struggle to bring unity between the races.
Many here have been interviewed for it.
Another effort involves establishing a version of Mississippi’s William Winter Institute on Racial
Reconciliation at an institution of higher learning in South Carolina.
John was leading the fundraising campaign for the War Dogs monument in Memorial Park to be
dedicated this year on Veterans Day, November 11, which John always echoed from the description
of Armistice Day following The Great War, in 1918, as “the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day of
the eleventh month.”
All of this to be followed by the dedication the same day at Anderson University of two sculptures
funded by the Raineys, one honoring an Anderson native, Army Corporal Freddie Stowers, an
African American, who John recently learned was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor killed
in action in WWI just weeks before the war’s end. Stowers was from Sandy Springs and was killed as
he led his squad from the all black 371st Infantry Regiment into no-man’s land in France and
defeated German troops. His commanding officer recommended Stowers for the Medal of Honor
but the nomination was “misplaced” by the Army for seventy years until two Congressmen, Joe
DioGuardi and Mickey Leland, resurrected the case while conducting other research. President
George W. Bush welcomed Corporal Stowers’ sisters to the White House to present the medal to
Corporal Stowers posthumously in 1991. John learned this story recently as a member of the new
Medal of Honor Museum being designed by an international architect and contracted with sculptress
Maria Kirby-Smith of Camden to create a bronze monument of Stowers on the campus of
Anderson University.
4
John was often asked: “What kind of courage was that?” John would answer: “Indefatigable. The
kind of courage that Stonewall Jackson had.” That was John Rainey brand of courage as it is for the
entire Rainey family.
Even more, a second sculpture of Jewish financier and presidential advisor Bernard Baruch, a native
of Camden, is also in Maria’s capable hands to inspire students at Anderson University to value
scholarship and begin lifelong public service.
He planned for the two of us to helicopter from Memorial Park in Columbia to the Anderson
dedication site just hours apart.
I told him of course I would be on the chopper if I could sit in the door gunner’s seat.
He remembered that I scored EXCELLENT with the M-60 machine gun at Fort Polk, Louisiana,
after I failed by one point to receive the same award on the M-16 firing range. Raggedspec, his call
sign, said, “Panther”, my call sign, “you got it.”
One day, Rainey family, a photographer should take pictures of all the sculptures and monuments
from Brookgreen Gardens to Colorado, and God knows where that John and Anne gave so
generously. They may well be countless. Countless.
Now, considered by many as the conscience of South Carolina, John Rainey expects all of us, not
just we band of brothers, to continue his work, especially the mighty struggle to unite our state, still
much divided by race, income disparity, petty partisanship, lapses in ethics, and crippled by voter
and donor apathy.
He left a special message for the wealthy in Columbia who he often said were too comfortable
sitting on their money, unlike the private philanthropists with whom he worked across the state and
nation. “They are still hiding the silverware in their eaves and backyards when they need to
contribute to their city, state and nation.” Those who hear that message are in John’s crosshairs right
now. Not a bitter pill, but a challenge to civic engagement and the good of the commonweal. The
damage resulting from that considerable blind spot is all around us.
So I say to you for Captain Rainey: Rise up, South Carolina. You are late to the fight. Rise up, South
Carolina, and change the trajectory of our future.
If not for your sakes, for those who follow you. Your children, our children, all the children of all
the people from the mountains to the shore.
As Black American soldiers entered Charleston in 1865, they sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord…He is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored …He has loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible
swift sword… His truth is marching on … He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall
never call retreat … with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. As he died to
make men holy, let us die to make men free...He is wisdom to the mighty, He is succor to
the brave, So the world shall be his footstool, and the soul of wrong His slave, our God is
marching on…Glory, glory halleluiah, glory, glory halleluiah! Glory, glory halleluiah! Our
God is marching on.”
5
Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and the Rainey bloodline runs back to Ireland and Scotland. It fitting and
just to recall Owen Roe O’Neill, a hero of the fight for Irish freedom. After Owen’s death, the entire
nation was engulfed in grief that a poem was written for him. After President John Fitzgerald
Kennedy, the first Irish Catholic elected to the Presidency, was felled by a bullet in Dallas, the poem
was resurrected in every Irish club, parish and family and reworked to honor John Kennedy.
“Sagest in the council was he,
Kindest in the Hall;
Sure we never won a battle
T’was Johnny won them all
Soft as woman’s was your voice, Johnny
Bright was your eye,
Oh! Why did you leave us, Johnny?
Why did you die?
Your troubles are all over,
You’re at rest with God on high,
But we’re slaves, and we’re orphans, Johnny!
Why did you die?
We’re sheep without a shepherd,
When the snow shuts out the sky –
Oh! Why did you leave us, Johnny?
Why did you have to die?”
So, on this St. Patrick’s Day, let us recall John Rainey’s Irish bloodline, and that of all of us whose
ancestry runs back to the Emerald Isle. Let us hold out our hands to those who struggle for freedom
today – at home and across the globe – as Ireland struggled for a thousand years.
To finish my joy filled task this beautiful afternoon in a city where signs of spring with flowers
blooming, a sign itself of Resurrection, this from Horatio upon the death of Hamlet: “Good night
sweet Prince. A thousand angels sing thee to thy rest. A thousand angels sing thee to thy rest.”