Duncan Christy

I’ve written poems and plays, songs and sonnets and musicals. I was the editor of the inflight magazine of Delta Air Lines, Sky, for 14 years during a long career in magazine publishing and writing. But nothing I’ve ever done in life could match that of the man I will always admire most, my father, Arthur H. Christy.

           He was one of the youngest commissioned officers in the United States Navy during World War II, the skipper of the SC1038 at 21. He was the then-youngest United States Attorney, guiding the prestigious Southern District of New York at 34 in 1958 and 1959. He became the first Special Prosecutor in Government appointed under the Ethics in Government Act passed in 1978 in the wake of the Watergate scandal. He was also a lifelong Republican. Until, that is, he could no longer stomach the deviations of his own party from a commitment to the truth, and from a respect for the Constitution in particular and for the rights of all Americans in general. A party which now has no understanding nor acceptance of the guiding phrase “to put country above party.”

           He stands with me here in 1979. He’s visiting me on the West Coast from his home and legal practice in the East. He loves San Francisco, where I was then living, and has borrowed a pullover from me bought during a rather wild trip with my sister to Baja California. The two men you see here are happy, happy to be together, happy to be in San Francisco, happy to be Americans.

           Every son craves the respect of his father, craves to learn that his father is proud of him. Wherever you are, my sweet father who gave life so much, I hope what I’ve done here will make you proud of me.