George Christian Edler was born Dec. 13, 1889, in Chicago. On Jan. 1, 1907, at age 17, he started writing his life story. His first diary was a compact, black engagement book. Edler wrote neatly and stayed in the lines.

Up at lake. Played Hearts. Temp. around 32 degrees. To bed at 10. Ma not feeling well. ... Had applecake for breakfast.

George Edler died Feb. 25, 1987, in Bethesda. He was 97. His daughter-in-law, Joan Edler, wrote the last entry in the man's 80-year-old diary.

Joan here 10: 45. No pain but angry. I.V. and catheter still in. On Valium. Pastor Omholt visited 11: 30. Prayer. Moved to 5th Floor in afternoon.

Note: George Edler died 6 pm of kidney failure and cardiac arrest.

The rest of Edler's 1987 diary is perfectly crisp and blank. There is no mention of the day's temperature. He would have added that.

Edler's life was all in the details -- many mundane. Such is a life. He knew this a very long time ago -- after spending a day eating applecake for breakfast, playing Hearts, and noticing that his mother was not well and the temperature was 32 degrees. Every day of his unremarkable life, he felt the need to mark his time on earth.

But Edler also must have known no bulk of facts can tell the whole story. There must have been more to George Edler than what he left in 46 diaries and 10 notebooks. These pocket-sized diaries -- the Guinness Book of World Records claims Edler has the longest-kept handwritten diary on record -- are not allowed out of the Kensington home of his only child, George Edler Jr.

"He loved the details of life," says Edler, 66, toting out his father's diaries. No one has ever asked to see them, not since the Guinness people had to verify the world record in 1987.

George and his wife, Joan, have only skimmed the diaries. After all, that's 80 years of details. "I figured if I ever broke my leg, I'd have the time to read them," Edler says. Plus, he and his wife knew the man all too well.

They knew his habits -- the way he always noted the day's temperature, who visited him and the length of their stay, the total mileage on his 1958 Pontiac in 1959 (1,707 miles), when he passed a kidney stone or was stung by a yellow jacket, the cost of groceries for 1958 ($474.92) and the cost of each meal out plus tip.

"He was a statistician by trade. That should tell you something," says Joan. Her father-in-law had been a longtime employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Edler knew crops and seeds and kept track of them for a living. The diaries seemed a natural extension of his personality.

"He was keeping his life in order," Edler Jr. says.

His father spent a lifetime taking notes. "It was real obvious," says Edler's granddaughter, Nancy Cadigan. Now 40, she spent Sunday after Sunday visiting her grandfather when she was growing up.

"Instead of saying 'hello' he would look at his watch. When you left, he would look at his watch. He knew exactly how long you were there."

Family members suggest that the diaries were perhaps meant to solve any family argument, lest Edler Sr. was challenged on a point of family fact. "He was a tough German," Joan says.

Beyond that hunch, the family isn't sure exactly why Edler wanted to keep his life is such order. "None of us really asked him, 'Why are you doing this?' " Nancy says. "But he did have sort of a goal in mind.

"He wanted to live long enough to see himself in the Guinness Book. "

Edler died before he saw his entry in Guinness -- a book whose very factual nature he must have appreciated. But we saw it -- which led us to his son and to a cardboard box packed with the factual remains of George C. Edler, world record-holding diarist.

Telling his story

At age 89, George Edler was living in a retirement center in Bethesda and had all the time in the world. Long since widowed from his wife Edna, Edler began to write his life story based on the 46 diaries he had written since 1907. His idea was to edit the events already recorded in his diaries.

I won't color a story to make it more interesting, Edler wrote in 1978 to readers of his autobiography.

He kept his word.

Nowhere in what would become a manuscript of 10 binders would there be evidence of any coloring. Edler was not a man to exaggerate or spike a story. No one ever witnessed him telling a joke. What made him laugh?

"I'm trying to remember," his son says.

Yet, men have their passions, don't they? For this former traveling seed salesman, his beloved sports often took top billing in his entries:

Dec. 7, 1941. Raw wind from NW and temp about 40. Wore heavy underwear. Redskins 20-Eagles 14. Sammy Baugh threw 2 touchdowns to Aguirre. Home at 6: 30. Japan bombed our possessions in Pacific early today.

July 20, 1969. TV: All channels run minute-by-minute accounts of Apollo 11 flight. Even baseball games were sidetracked. Yanks beat Senators 3-2 in 11 innings. Saw Neil Armstrong step onto the moon.

Family events, such as the birth of his granddaughter, warranted equally dispassionate mention:

1. Birth of Nancy Elizabeth Edler. Apr. 6.

2. Alfalfa seed survey. Apr. 27.

3. Castro gains power in Cuba. Troubles mounting ...

As one family story goes, when introduced to his brand new granddaughter, Edler told George and Joan, "I used to have a dog named Nancy." This, apparently, was his way of saying congratulations.

Nancy the dog is noted in his diaries -- as is brother Fred (Played catch with Fred and, years later, Fred is deeply in debt) and his mother Adele (She was always stout) and Nancy (I spent much time with Nancy pushing the stroller) and his son George (George's 26th birthday. Dinner at Blackie's House of Beef. Bill for 5-$17.19. $2.50 tip).

"The diaries don't tell you about what he was feeling," Nancy says. "It's all black and white."

Not all. Occasionally, feeling downright sentimental, Edler wrote about the banner events in his childhood: birthdays, Independence Day and Christmas. We almost invariably had the tallest, the shapeliest, and the most beautiful trimmed tree.

He and his brother, then staunch believers in Santa, would awaken Christmas morning at 4: 30. Isn't it time for us to get up? they'd ask their parents. Back to a bed for another hour. Then, they'd come down and see the tallest and most beautifully trimmed tree.

Pa held a butcher knife pretending to have scuffled with Santa and slit his bag. ... Fred and I exalted Pa for the wonderful deed he had done, Edler practically gushed a century ago.

Edler left Chicago to attend the University of Illinois in Champaign, where he would excel in tennis and graduate with a degree in agronomy. In a rare self-conscious moment, Edler wrote: I suppose some of the readers of this autobiography are wondering why I made the change from the College of Engineering to that of Agriculture.

"He was a real neat guy," Nancy says, pausing, adding, "he was a little egotistical. He always just talked about himself. He didn't take an interest in anybody else." One tended to let him do all the talking. "But you learned a lot because he'd talk about what he did and where he went."

Little emotion

Like many men of his generation, Edler did not express his feelings. He was not a hugger. But his family knew how he felt.

"He was like a father to me," Joan says. "He liked me. He thought I was the living end! But I never heard that from him."

Edler was a man of science and cold fact. So, it was surprising to find a "Solar Horoscope for George Edler" tucked into one notebook: You have a taste for researches in the fields of philosophy and natural sciences ... and have a tendency to brusqueness of manner and bluntness of speech that drives a good many away.

In his annals, Edler records rolling 87 games of duckpin bowling in 1941 for a 110 average; switching from a General Electric television to a Zenith; and in 1960, writing a letter to Radio Moscow. (A short-wave radio enthusiast, he'd tune in to Moscow at night.) He tracked his son's career, as well, noting George's $250 raise one year.

There are many more facts -- books full of them. But his memory is also kept alive by snippets told, in this case, by family members sitting around a living room in a house outside Washington.

It's a little thing, but how that man loved his food hot. "Remember that?" George asks Joan. Dad would eat right out of the pan so it would be hot.

"He was a piece of work," Joan says.

"His ultimate goal," says George, "was to write a grammar book but that fizzled."

"I didn't know that," Joan says.

Are they alike, junior and senior? Joan breaks up laughing, then mentions the thermometers. It seems George Edler Jr. owns five thermometers and can talk weather with the best of them.

Another memory: Before remote controls, Edler Sr. would stack three black-and-white televisions to watch his sports teams simultaneously. In those days, the TV picture would sometimes crawl. "He'd bang on the floor with his foot," Joan says, looking at her floor. "He knew the right spot to hit so the picture would straighten out."

The year they were to be married, 1956, Edler's wife, Edna, died on Thanksgiving Day. George and Joan thought about delaying their December wedding. "But he told me, 'Your mother would have wanted you to go on with it.' " It was, for them, a rare heart-to-heart talk between a father and son. It was not for the record.

Memories make sounds, too. Plink, plink, plink. The sound, George and Joan say, of water trickling into the tin cups his father attached under his leaking water pipes. The man didn't believe in plumbers. He was thrifty.

"He was cheap!" Joan says.

"He was very formal," says Nancy. She never saw her grandfather without a suit on. Sundays after church, the family went to his house. He made popcorn. But he couldn't just make popcorn, Nancy says. Her grandfather built a wooden tray with a screen. He'd dump the popcorn into the tray, filtering the unpopped kernels from the popped.

"Isn't that a weird thing to remember?" she wonders.

Chris Edler, 36, is Edler's other grandchild. The Redskins were their common bond ("I could talk sports with him"). But of all his memories, Chris remembers his grandfather's tomatoes. He grew them large, he grew them often.

"It was insane. They were bigger than grapefruit," Chris says. "But he never ate them. He grew the best tomatoes in the neighborhood, but he didn't like them." Last year, Chris gathered all the family photos to create a montage as a keepsake. His grandfather had taken many of the pictures.

"It was so funny," Chris says. "There was a picture of a tomato on a table with a ruler next to it."

Edler logged (and recorded) hours in his garden, cutting some 2,500 roses each year. And like some other older people, he developed a keen interest in who was dying. Along with his diaries, he kept scrapbooks of famous people's obituaries, his son says.

"He would have loved the Internet," Nancy says.

At the end

Edler never finished his autobiography. Those notebooks end at the year 1960. Joan and George had encouraged him to continue. They knew this had been his life's work.

"No," he told them, "I'm tired of this."

Instead, in the last years of his life, he went back to writing in even more pocket-sized diaries that date to 1987, his last year. At 97, Edler still noted the day's temperature and what doctor had seen him and when. But his handwriting had deserted him. Edler could no longer stay in the lines.

Temperatures can still be made out, but only a few words are intelligible. Shaved. It's snowing. It was a life slipping away.

On Feb. 21, 1987, another person's handwriting abruptly appears. Broken shoulder and hip. Shot of demoral for pain. Dr. Ward here, Joan wrote in a steady hand. She was visiting him every day. "He would give me my 'gimme' list of things to bring him. He never said 'hi' when I saw him, just maybe, "Did you bring my toothpaste?' " He would study the toothpaste, make sure it was the right kind, then inspect the price. He'd say, "You paid that for toothpaste?" as Joan remembers -- and perhaps will always remember with tenderness and love for the tough German who thought she was the living end.

Mon. Feb. 23. Used suction for lungs. Bruises all over arms from needles. Cat scan ordered. ... Tues. Feb. 24. Joan here. 10: 40. Dr. Ward canceled any more tests. George and Joan here. 5: 45 p.m.

Wed. Feb. 25. Joan here. No pain but angry ...

George Edler's life story was over.

Pub Date: 5/19/99