He Took a Funny Little Bird Under His Wing

They had a nice memorial Mass for Jack Gene Hughes on Friday at St. Mary Magdalen Church in Camarillo. Msgr. John Hughes gave the homily. Jack’s wife Virginia and his five grown children sat in the front rows. A stuffed Tweety bird gazed out at dozens of mourners, its big blue eyes on the alert for putty tat. Jack was 66 and a fan of the irrepressible canary.

He collected Tweety Pie figurines, shirts, caps, refrigerator magnets, toys, you name it. When he was dying of bone cancer, he asked Virginia to arrange half a dozen of his favorite Tweeties on his night stand. His obituary listed his relatives, described him as an avid bowler, noted that he had retired from ABEX in 1989--and ended with the lines: “I Tawt I Taw A Putty Tat! I Did! I Did! I Did! I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat! I Did! I Did! I Did!” The last page of Jack’s funeral program shows an inch-high Tweety beneath a halo. “He had Tweeties everywhere,” said Virginia, Jack’s wife of 47 years.

“He had a plastic Tweety glued to the dashboard of his Cressida. He traded it in for a used Lexus and one day I saw him walking out the door with the Tweety and some glue, and I said: ‘No way, nohow! It just isn’t going to work.”

After his death on Nov. 18, she found the Tweety in the Lexus’ glove compartment.

“Can you imagine gluing a plastic Tweety to the dashboard of a Lexus?” Virginia asked with the wondering tones of a woman who could. Tweety first saw daylight in 1942, won an Oscar in 1947 and entered the life of Jack Gene Hughes about 1950, with the birth of the couple’s first child.

Jack would joke a lot with his brood. He did a good Donald Duck imitation and a fine Tweety soprano.

“He’d say, ‘I tawt I taw a putty tat,’ and he’d grab their tummies and they laughed so hard,” recalled Virginia. “They just thought that was the best game.”

Over the years, friends gave Jack a stuffed Tweety here, a Tweety key ring there. A modest collection grew to . . . 100, 200, who-knows-how-many Tweety artifacts. At the same time, the family grew to 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. And Jack would entertain each in turn with a hug and a tickle and an “I tawt I taw . . . .”

His family meant everything to him, even more as his life was ending, Virginia said. “I’d go in in the morning and lay down beside him and hold his hand, and he’d say how wonderful our family was, how wonderful the kids were, and he’d go through each one, child by child . . . .”

The bones on the left side of his back were dissolving, but he never was one to complain.

He never complained back in Michigan, when he worked for Chrysler on the day shift and Hudson on the swing shift.

He didn’t complain when the kids were little and he would have to pump gas at night after a full day at Purolator.

He was even OK when doctors kept recommending massages and physical therapy for what turned out to be an excruciating and lethal tumor.

“I’d say, ‘Honey, I think they’re killing you,’ ” Virginia said, “and he’d say, ‘Gin, you’ve got to have faith in people.’ Even when he was sick, he said he was the luckiest person there ever was.”

Maybe it takes such an optimist to love the ever-threatened Tweety.

At a family dinner a few years ago, Jack cut into his rock Cornish game hen and kept rearranging the meat on his plate without lifting a forkful to his mouth. Couldn’t eat Tweety, he confided to his wife; he would sooner choke.

Not a notable Tweety fan herself, Virginia cherishes a Tweety pendant Jack bought her in Alabama. “My sisters would look at it and they’d want to barf when I’d say, ‘Well, I’m Jack’s Tweety,’ ” she said. She has been parceling out Jack’s Tweety things to all the kids.

They don’t want them because Tweety is now one of the Warner Brothers stores’ hottest sellers, or because there are now Tweety Web sites, or because they admire the craftiness of the tiny bird in outwitting big Sylvester.

“They all want something of grandpa,” Virginia said.

That’s a fitting tribute to a man who was into Tweety--well before Tweety was cool.