BILL KNIGHT

As winter increases its mean freeze, there’s something warm and inviting about Byron DeHaan. The long-time director of public affairs at Caterpillar for decades helped instill a sense of corporate citizenship at the Fortune 500 company, and the 96-year-old resident of Lutheran Hillside Village is remembered for helping Peoria pass a Fair Housing law (years before Congress did) and serving on the Illinois Commission on Human Relations.

Besides experience as a business executive and civic leader, though, DeHaan has been active culturally, from chairing the collaboration that led to the Peoria Riverfront Museum to personally participating in music, art and writing.

“Byron is the epitome of what it means to be ‘a gentleman and a scholar’,” said Keith Butterfield, a newsroom pal who later worked for and with DeHaan for eight years at Cat.

“He also never disappointed when it came to his knowledge of things beyond Big Yellow,” Butterfield continued, “ — be it literature, the arts or just sitting down and having a engaging conversation about the current marketplace of ideas.”

In fact, nestled in the middle of his 66-page collection of 32 poems from 2004, Breviary, is a favorite DeHaan poem I’ve enjoyed in December, poetry that somehow suggests acceptance and hope amid folly and cold:

“Cold Villanelle Hell”
I drive my car on streets of ice and snow
As clouds appear and threaten storms of sleet.
The weather experts oft aren’t in the know.

The elms are laced with ice in winter’s glow.
As winds now howl and rage and freeze the feet,
I drive my car on streets of ice and snow.

Then falls a hail of ice (this wintry foe),
Surprising sheep that freeze — and whine and bleat.
The weather experts oft aren’t in the know.

I soon must opt to stay or stop — or go.
Since I have friends I hope to join and greet,
I drive my car on streets of ice and snow.

The sun emits a friendly evening glow —
consigning hellish storm to full defeat.
The weather experts oft aren’t in the know.

This warming trend has conquered icy woe —
I have no need to plan a weak retreat;
I drive my car on streets of ice and snow …
The weather experts oft aren’t in the know.

“The villanelle is a French form poem — that is, one with a fixed pattern — with roots in medieval Italy,” DeHaan explains in the book. “It requires two rhyme patterns and two repeating full lines in five three-line stanzas and a concluding four-line stanza. It often appeared in iambic pentameter, as above.”

Retired Bradey University English professor Kevin Stein, Illinois’ poet laureate from 2003-2017, commented that, “Breviary invents a modern prayer book whose mode is less supplication than inquiry. With graceful intelligence, DeHaan embraces subjects ranging from Mother Teresa to pedophile priests … No matter where his eye falls — upon Normandy, Machu Picchu, or the Illinois River valley — what DeHaan sees there redeems our bloodied humanity.”

Just 600 copies of the book were printed, so if you have a copy, treasure it — and DeHaan’s subtle, playful poetry. Like the man himself, it affects me like a soft blend of Louis Armstrong singing “What A Wonderful World” and filmmaker Frank Capra presenting “It’s A Wonderful Life.”