Eric was saving the expensive Irish whiskey for special occasions; A year ago it turned out to be his wake: A rapscallion little brother's kiss of love, loss

Eric, who particularly enjoyed brown whiskeys, had a secret stash that he hid from guests.

If he hadn’t died a year ago today, perhaps I’d be enjoying my first sip of this secret stash with him as he sat, surrounded by his three cats – one resting atop his belly – in the kitchen of his house, five miles from my own.

The notorious cat man and gentlest of souls had splurged for this secret, hiding it away on the top shelf of his kitchen booze cabinet, high above the regular stuff.

It was a $150 or maybe even $175 bottle of Jameson 18-year-old, Limited Reserve Irish Whiskey, if I recall correctly.

 He had tasted it, but then put it back on the top shelf, saving for special occasions.

He did not expect that occasion to be his wake, nor for those who drank it to be among the 40 or 50 friends, cousins, in-law families and his own nuclear family, with spouses and offspring.

His widow, Ann – and I was deservedly their best man all those years ago – didn’t have any alcohol.  She couldn’t and can’t now, as she, with courage and fortitude and faith, continues her battle with cancer well into its second year. I love her and find this damned cancer unfair, as she already lost her husband.  This isn’t about her, though, but I believe she’ll eventually triumph. If you pray, this is a good time. If not, send your best thoughts.

The splurge on the Jameson was just that, an extraordinary purchase. Eric -- who I normally referred to as “Brother,” since I only had one … and now have none -- wasn’t cheap. I’m told you can get pretty damned good brown whiskey (his color of choice) for $50 or $60 range. I really don’t know, because I pretty much retired from that game 30 years ago, limiting consumption to special occasions, holidays, deaths, and the like.

Eric’s upper shelf hidden treasure came after he and Ann had returned from both the Irish Republic and Belfast, where his protestant youth minister son-in-law Michael and his Christian social services worker daughter, Maria live.

My big brother enjoys Lake Michigan 

Eric and daughter Maria strike delightful poses for the camera

I did call him while he was in that green land of Bono and St. Patrick. Highlights included his visits to the locations of his favorite movie: The John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man” – and times spent at Guinness breweries and Irish whiskey distillers. 

There was joy in his voice when I talked to him during that tour. Much of it came from his delight at seeing where the great film, about a former boxer, who escaped from the violence in the blood-soaked rings of America in pursuit of a quiet life in his homeland. If you knew my brother, it only makes sense that this former Illinois All-State offensive tackle and less-successful college football player -- whose body had been torn apart by that sport, causing the need for a dozen replacement parts over the decades – would find camaraderie with the Duke’s Sean Thornton.   

Brother’s blue Italian eyes were smiling all during that three-week tour, and I’m told he more than held his own when it came to blarney while in the pubs or visiting castles and the like. 

That visit came in the summer of 2023. It was his first, and turned out to be only, trip overseas in his 74 years. 

He did tell me once on the phone that he was almost ready to get home and see those young fellas who thoroughly overtook the heart of the 5-10, 350-pound nicer of the two decrepit Ghianni boys.

But being with Maria and Michael in their warm embrace kept homesickness at bay. 

You see, he also loved his time at home in Nashville, within driving range of his other daughter, Ana, and Josh and their two boys, Sabatino and Emilio (aka Tony and Leo).

 Sometime, after returning to the States and immediately playing with his grandsons in Rutherford County, he splurged on that whiskey.

“I’m going to save that for really special occasions,” or some such he told me, laughing, almost apologetically, for this dynamic expense.

“You can taste it if you come by,” he told me during one of our frequent phone calls. I still have the last voicemail he left me on my phone. The gist of it is that he said he was going to call me back in a later time that never arrived. 

Michael, Maria, Ann, Eric, Ana and Josh with their sons Sabatino and Emilio

He did admit to me, many months post-Ireland over cheeseburgers and beer (him) and dark iced tea (me) at our regular Brown’s Diner lunch, that he began to feel a bit out-of-sorts even before he went to Ireland. In the hospital, he told me he ignored it, figuring he’d get better. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

As for the whiskey invitation, he knew I no longer drank much alcohol. In my younger years, when I was a newspaperman, a rapscallion running like I was running out of time, I drank, sometimes to excess.

I told him I’d be glad to taste it though.

Well, when he talked about that special occasion, he wasn’t talking about the wake that came three or four days after he died a year ago.

He didn’t know that 40 or 50 people would be in his paradise, a rock and plant and waterfall-fountain retreat he’d built with his very big and rough hands on a reasonably hot Nashville day.

Pulled pork and fixings -- or maybe it was Mexican food, with beans, rice and guac? (Doesn't matter now) -- filled the counter in the outdoor kitchen he’d constructed next to that oasis, presided over by The Buddha. Eric was no Buddhist, but that statue did kind of favor him on a good and healthy day when he would have been sitting in black T-shirt and sweatpants in this green-grass paradise of stones, water and landscaping.

Water and sodas and beer filled coolers in that outdoor kitchen. The brown whiskeys – mourners brought some and Maria put it all (save for the special bottle, I believe) on the counter below the whiskey shelf.

I mostly sat there, in the shade of outdoor kitchen, trying to converse pleasantly, but mostly a mourning quiet man, realizing Brother was gone for good.

Sometime as that long, sad spring day turned into a night of laughter and tears, the special bottle was discovered and put on the whiskey counter. At least that’s the way I figure it.

For the most part, the bottle was as drained as were those of us who had spent a morning at a funeral home and many, many hours laughing through melancholy, which is what you are supposed to do at an Irish wake for an Italian-American who saw himself in John Wayne’s gentle giant who won Maureen O’Hara’s heart.

I went upstairs to visit with my son Joe and Maria and Michael, when I saw the special bottle had been ransacked.

Eric, who was somewhere in the clouds or chirping with the crickets, depending on what you believe, wouldn’t have minded, though.

The bottle was for a special occasion. He wasn’t there, but his loved ones were, plastic tumblers and shot glasses from his special collection filled, remembering him and reflecting on his impact on them.

Unfortunately, I never got to taste from the special bottle, but that’s OK. I wasn’t planning on coming out of my reckless retirement on that day. I had too much to think about.

I sure as hell miss my brother. I’m still waiting for him to drive his tan pickup truck over here to pick me up for lunch at Brown’s Diner. Maybe I’ll have a beer with my cheeseburger this time. I think it’s my turn to buy.

 #####

I was the eulogist at the funeral at Woodlawn, where the kindly undertakers allowed family a few minutes to see Eric’s earthly remains before planned cremation.

 

If you are interested, you might like to read that eulogy. Eric would have laughed his ass off and made fun of me:   

 

The long, black cloud settling in on the ICU room a few days ago, I knew my brother was listening to what people were saying, so I leaned close to his left ear.

“I love you, Eric. More than you may know. I’m going to miss you.  But I still wish you hadn’t pushed me down when I was taking my first steps.”

Eric stirred a little. I think others in the family were worried that he was moving too much, for a man on the brink, to be healthy.

So, I was asked not to say any more right then, so he’d calm down.  There still was hope, of course, but it was dimming.

But that motion by my big brother as he lay there?  I swear he was laughing. About me reminding him of his jealous cruelty to his baby brother more than 70 years ago.

He always laughed when I recounted that incident that our Dad captured on his Super 8mm movie camera back in 1953. 

I’ve seen it countless times. I was taking my first steps on the sidewalk in front of our house at 1812 Beverly Road in Sylvan Lake, Michigan.

I don’t know how old I was. Less than 2.  Just as I begin those steps for posterity, a to-then-unparalleled achievement by me, Eric comes from behind and pushes me down. Then he walks to the camera, smiling.

That kind of defined our relationship until we got into our teens, really. Eric simply didn’t take kindly for a long time to the fact Mom and Dad brought this beautiful specimen home from St. Joseph Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan.

He never apologized, by the way.  But I more than forgave him.  He looked up to me for my accomplishments. I looked up to him, not just for his accomplishments but for how nice he was.

Yes, this guy who pushed his fragile and sweet baby brother down on the sidewalk went on to become my best friend, other than my wife.

If I was shook up for any reason, personally or professionally or financially or simply because I’m a guy who gets all shook up, I’d call him or see him.  He had simple, practical, to-the-point advice.

I’d like to think that I was something of a lifelong security blanket to him, after he stopped pushing me to the concrete, rubbing my face into a rug or slugging me in my left arm. Always the left. 

When my arm aches, I’ll generally blame it on a lingering after-effect of a COVID or flu shot. Perhaps. More likely deep bruises left by my brother, right up into our mid-teens when we squared off, in one of those kicking, punching, spitting, hair-pulling fights on our parents’ front lawn in the Chicago area. Neighbor kids came to watch. They probably were too young to bet, but if they did, I’m sure they’d have picked Eric to leave me dazed and confused.

I figured I was going down myself, but I’d started the fight because I finally had enough. I did beat him that day.  And when he stood back up, he smiled.  He was proud of me. We never had a fistfight again. In fact, we became each other’s biggest advocate.

I always was so proud that Eric was my brother, even during the early, bully years. He was smart. He was athletic. He was a great football player to my mediocrity. My Dad liked him a lot better than he liked me…..

That’s true, of course.  That was one thing Eric and I agreed on.  We also agreed on a lot of things about Dad and his peculiarities.  We loved him like we had loved our mother, who had her own quirks.

I’m not going to go any further on this subject, but last Saturday, when my wife and I were in Eric’s hospital room, his daughter, Ana, called. He spoke with her and his two grandsons on Face Time. He had no favorites between these beautiful, beautiful, beautiful darling boys. But he asked Ana to call back in an hour or so.

“Tim is here with Suzanne,” he told her. “We want to make fun of Dad for a while.”

It was one of our favorite topics when we’d go out to an occasional lunch at Brown’s Diner or maybe when he called me from his backyard garden and just wanted to talk and laugh and to offer up a toast to Dad’s memory.

I need to add that Eric liked to get me in trouble. Eventually I figured out how to reverse the score. I remember one time his bullying backfired mightily, embarrassing Mom and Dad.  I don’t think a switch came out, but there was anger in the air after Eric locked us both in Davy Crockett’s boyhood cabin on the Nolichucky.

I was maybe 3, Eric 5, when our parents decided to take us on a road trip – we took one every summer – to the South.  We saw D.C. We saw the changing of the guard at Arlington. We saw Gettysburg.

But it was at Davy Crockett’s cabin that Eric came up with the wise idea that he was going to scare his little brother by locking me in the cabin with the big, wooden sliding lock. Problem was he hadn’t thought it through well. Sure, I was scared by being locked in. Just me and my brother. I couldn’t open the door.

But you see, Eric couldn’t lift that wooden bar either. We both were locked in. Outside, we could hear Mom and Dad yelling for us, as if we were lost.  It fell on Eric – who was taller than me – to holler through the open window.

The park ranger crawled through that window and unlocked the door, angrily escorting us out and I’m sure telling Mom and Dad to keep the little beasts under control.

Oh, we also got in trouble together, I should note.  One time, in Chicago, Eric and a friend of ours and I were out blowing off illegal firecrackers on the Fourth.  The biggest booms came when we tossed a batch of Lady Fingers near a school. The firecrackers echoed. Apparently, phones were dialed. 

Suddenly, there were sirens coming our way. We ran through the backyards, trying to find sanctuary from the police.  Just as they turned onto our street, we came upon my mother, who had our dog, Misty, out on a leash. When she had heard the sirens, she figured they were for us, so she was out in the dark giving us an alibi.  “Just pet Misty and be quiet,” she instructed us. “And we’ll walk home.”

The cops saw this Norman Rockwell scene of a mother walking three young boys and a dog on the Fourth of July and they figured we were not the suspects in the harmless, but noisy explosions.

I talked with my best college friend the other day, telling him Eric had died. Eric seldom joined us in our all-night weekend adventures on the streets of Ames, Iowa.  But my friend, like Eric, was a football player at Iowa State University.

“He was a real good fellow,” said my friend, Jim Mraz. Then we laughed about the day we left our dorm to go across campus to see Eric compete in a campuswide pie-eating contest. They were blueberry pies. Eric won.  Jim and I laughed at the memory of the big guy with blueberries filling his beard and hair as a price of winning. 

So many stories. The New Year’s Eve we went to downtown Chicago to see the film The Great White Hope, only to find out that the rest of the theater – except us – were fully uniformed Black Panthers.  We stayed, but when one of the Panthers got up to go get some popcorn, he stomped his boot, accidentally, on my foot.

“Oh, man, I’m so sorry,” I told the guy. Eric was just watching, holding in a laugh that out of fear I had apologized to the guy who should have been apologizing to me.

Younger days shouldn’t be forgotten. There was the Camp Spikehorn gang, me, Eric, and our cousins Marc and Jeff. We were all in single digits age-wise, and Marc and Jeff, who spent chunks of their summers with us, went to Camp Spikehorn day camp a couple of summers when we lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Marc’s gone now. And Eric has joined him. But Jeff’s still around. And he may or may not remember that the biggest thing we got out of the camp was the song “Up in the air, the junior birdman, up in the air upside down, up in the air, the junior birdman, with your noses to the ground.”  There are hand motions and hand-goggles to go with it. I’m not sure if Jeff remembers it or not.  The only reason I do is that Eric would break into that song, from a dead silence, all of his days.

And when you hear the grand announcement
That your wings are made of tin,
You will know the junior bird men
Have turned their box tops in.

For it takes five box tops,
Four bottle bottoms,
Three wrappers,
Two labels,
And one thin dime.

I can’t help but smile when thinking how that song would have sounded coming from the mouth of a 90-year-old Eric.

I’ll not find out, of course.

And I’m a little angry.

Eric, what a fine mess you’ve gotten me into this time.

For all of our early bickering, that nasty downward shove to this toddler, all the “I’ll tell Mom” threats, mostly unrealized, as we knew we’d both get in trouble, I loved you more than just about anything.

For my 72½ years, you were there. My big brother. The football hero who Dad loved best. The guy who collected abandoned cats like they were baseball cards. The kindest and nicest guy I ever knew.

Eric: I fully anticipated that this would be you up here talking about your crazy brother. I was sure you would outlive me. I told you so. It didn’t work out that way, so I’m going to pledge to stick around as long as I can, at least long-enough to teach your grandsons, the lights of your life, Emilio and Sabatino, the Junior Birdman song.

Sixty or 70 years ago, there was this nice family, basic middle-class Midwesterners. Mom and Dad at the ends of the table, Eric and me on either side.   We had the basic Beaver Cleaver All-American conversations while we choked down brussels sprouts and liver, if that was the meal of the day.  Most days, of course, the food was delicious.

And they were beautiful dinners. An All-American Family. Four people loving each other more than anyone else in the world.

That’s in my memories, and that’s good. In reality, there’s only one still sitting at that table.

 

  

It's a good thing Uncle Chuckles has a devoted nephew as he stares at TV, eats monstrous portions and wonders why he can't get offa that cloud of mental haze and kidney poison

 Jerry Manley, also known as “Chuckles,” a name he hated but that we stuck him with, since he offered none when we were “christening” News Brothers back in 1982, is alive.

Not well, but alive. And he’s watching television all day, when he’s not eating.

Many people who have some sort of dementia forget to eat. Not Jerry. He eats all the time, according to his wonderful nephew Steven, who takes care of Jerry down in the house they share in Lewisburg.

He’s doing the job Jerry’s children should be doing, but I guess they don’t have time or energy.

Steven, who was a chef and worked at night, quit that job to work as a construction crew boss many months ago. He did that so he could be home at night, feed his uncle, take care of  his other needs.

When he leaves during the day, Steven leaves food in portions available so Jerry won’t eat everything all at once. “I think he just forgets that he has eaten, so he gets hungry again.”

Jerry apparently sleeps and eats and watches TV day and night. Not altogether a horrid retirement, as long as he’s got Steven to help him.

According to his nephew, who is back-burnering some of his own health woes, Old Chuckles generally knows who he is and who Steven is, and he makes it to the bathroom on his own.  I worried (or really knew) that he wasn’t making it to the bathroom on time when he lived in the nuthouse near me for most of a year.

You may recall that I visited him once or twice a week for 10 months, carrying illegal foodstuffs Diet SunDrop and cheese or peanut butter crackers with me for him to devour as we watched TV and he enjoyed the brand new episodes of Gunsmoke, Columbo and The Twilight Zone.

Of course, he got tossed from that old-nuts-and-derelicts home for pile-driving his roommate a couple of times.  All Bob/Milford was doing was sitting in Jerry’s chair. Anyway, the subtle violence – he really didn’t put weight on it, but simply tossed Milford from the chair to the floor, all captured on Nurse Ratched’s nuthouse video cameras – was enough to get Jerry tossed.

The only relative to step in, because he didn’t want Jerry to be institutionalized in the state facilities or elsewhere, was Steven.

I caught up with Steven today, as he was working a construction site in Franklin. He told me about his own health woes, mostly that he’s ignoring to take care of Jerry.

“Jerry’s doing OK,” said Steven. “Problem may come tomorrow, when we go to his kidney doctor.

“They probably will put him on dialysis, which will complicate what I do,” he said.

“His kidneys are really bad though, so it might help. All of the toxins from the bad kidneys may be what has contributed to the fog.”

I remember times, in the 1970s, 1980s and even into the 1990s when Jerry was my invincible sidekick. We would laugh and drink all night and put out great newspapers when we were more-or-less sober. It was really a rock 'n' roll lifestyle, and we loved it.

  He was one of the four main News Brothers, good journalists who gave their souls to newspapers that eventually kicked them to the curb.  None of us -- Jerry, Rob "Death" Dollar, Jim "Flash" Lindgren or me "Flapjacks" are as spry as we were 40-very-odd years ago. Another beloved fellow who joined us in our jousts with korporate Nazis was Scott "Badger" Shelton. He died 13 years ago of cancer.

Jerry was a great newspaperman, especially when it came to line-editing and headline writing.

Now he sits in his house in Lewisburg with his kidneys failing and the world a confusing fog.

Well, actually, he and I sat in our houses in a confusing fog on many days and nights when we were younger, back when I had a great back and Jerry was lucid and had good kidneys.

Welcome to life after leaving the fast lane. 

   

 

 

  

Every picture tells a story, don't it? I've run this shot before on Facebook, but thought this is a good day to tell the more-or-less true story of the pictured scalawags and my dead pal, Tony Durr

 Derelicts and scalawags and the occasional cretin with a giant forehead were everywhere I looked on that last night Tony Durr was in Clarksville, after he had found it necessary to resign his editor’s job at The Leaf-Chronicle.

Actually, he disappeared for weeks without explanation “to take care of some personal matters,” was the Big Guy’s explanation. True enough. Tony was feverishly looking for another job after he’d been questioned about bending health insurance rules in order to pay serious medical bills for his desperately ill almost-fifth wife, who was beautiful but sometimes bordered on death from her battle with the effects of systemic lupus erythematosus.

Jerry "Chuckles" Manley, Ricky "Dumbo" Moore, Tony "little short asshole with a beard" Durr, Tim "Flapjacks" Ghianni, Rob "Death" Dollar, "StrawBilly" Fields and John "Street" Staed prepare for Tony Durr's last day at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper. Thomas Anthony Durr may have been Flap's best friend, but that has nothing to do with his departure from that and many more papers and his eventual lonesome death. There are a million stories in Flapjacks' faltering memory, and this is one of them.

His sudden and unexplained disappearance – he was at work on a Friday and didn’t return until three weeks later, just a day or two before our farewell party for him – provided fodder for some of us in the newsroom, especially me and Rob Dollar, to make a newspaper satire of a movie about our searching for the suddenly vanished Tony.

More later, perhaps, but basically our film premise was we were looking to solve Tony’s “mysterious disappearance,” primarily because he had abandoned us without explanation and no one – not the Big Guy, our publisher Luther Thigpen, not my pal and mentor Max Moss (God, I still love and miss him …Max, I mean, although the Big Guy also is dead.) Max did, during the Durr-less vacuum, ask me to take on even more dominant newsroom roles.  Like the ones I’d been doing for little or no credit when Tony was the big boss editor, golf fanatic and jogger.

“Where is Tony?” we asked. “Fuck’f I know,” said the Big Guy, jingling his pocket change, small tears in his eyes.

 “I can’t tell you right now, partner,” Max told me, personally. “Sound reasonable?”

Tony actually had fled, as the old Gene Autry movies might have it, just ahead of the posse.  I loved the guy, still do, a bunch, miss him daily, but his disappearance and the eventual reason – as fictionalized by Max in a newsroom meeting – was unsurprising.

Basically, the official line was that Tony had leaped at new opportunities in the dirt pit that was San Antonio, Texas, 45 years ago.

Confidentially, Max told me more. You see, bending rules and work expectations – I had ended up doing most of his editor’s work during his active year as editor, while Max took care of Tony’s clerical and Big Guy issues and editorial stances – was something Tony was good at. And his natural Cajun charm almost always got him out of any corner. Pretty Boy Floyd of the newspaper world. Five-five, 35 years old. Perhaps that many jobs.

It was almost as soon as he got back from San Antone that we were forced to say farewell.

Hence the night of the scalawags and dirtbags in this picture. These were guys Rob and I already had designated as The News Brothers, a group of hard-working, exploding-cigarette-bumming, plastic-vomit carrying rebels who laughed while tilting at the windmills (aka, The Big Guy and corporate policy), while at the same time pricking away at the cone of silence in the law enforcement world so we could get scoops. We used scotch as our “pricking” weapon. And our friendly demeanors.

Rob and I, along with my now-demented pal, Jerry Manley, were lucky that Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddie Patterson and various other members of law enforcement hierarchy were as loose with their wallets as they were with their lips when they started buying us 2 a.m. rounds of double-scotch on the rocks at Buford Thaxton’s Camelot. Sometimes Skipper – an old con man and adventurer Rob and I loved – came along to fascinate cops and young ladies – like Max’s college-age daughter, Karen, although I’m not sure she saw this act – with his teeth-in-the-beer-glass routine and his tales of Hawaiian whores and his frequent quotes from the Old Testament.

I did, one night, see Karen, who was under-age and who I’d known since I started hanging out with the Moss family when she was still in grade school, sitting with frat boys and others with anxious fingers and petty ambitions, at a table at 2 a.m. Rob, Jerry and I asked the bartender to take her a glass of milk. We were looking out for her virtue. By the way, she’s now a beautiful businesswoman, in her 50s.  I know she was red-faced when the milk arrived. I’ll tell you that at that point in my life, I only wished that she was 15-20 years older. Old dog, old tricks.   

Ahh, but back to that night of the sunglasses-wearing derelicts and their thrift-shop suitcoats and trousers, I was the only one who really knew why Tony had suddenly gone on a job-hunt splurge that ended up with him leaving for San Antonio, Texas, in the middle of the party (i.e. 3 a.m.)

We had been writing a book together on his small porch at his stone house that he only recently had purchased. He abandoned that project (and I’m sure mortgage payments) via still-of-the-night disappearance a few weeks before the party, and explained his absence to me with a midnight meetup when he crept back into town wearing leather cowboy chaps and spurs and a battered Navy peacoat. And little else.

I look at the picture of the derelicts and scalawags here – with Tony, “the little, short asshole with the beard” as we dubbed him in the movie about his disappearance, “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” in the middle – and I grow anxious and melancholy as I recall our adventures together as a couple of journalists, one legit and one not-so-much.  

There was the time when he and I raided a nursing home in the middle of the night, trying to catch administrators off-guard after getting elder-abuse complaints.  All we caught were some of the nursing home denizens, the ones who were night owls, drooling in the TV room. Dramatic expose shot to hell, we met with nursing home corporate hounds and lawyers the next day and abandoned the story. I do have to add that there were procedural changes at that nursing home in the weeks after our “raid.” I was told about this in a wine-loosed late-night discussion with one of the younger female administrators. Pretty woman.

Tony Durr goes on TV in Anchorage where he proclaims to one and all on C-SPAN that "I AM an ALASKAN." Not many years before, he had been "A CLARKSVILLIAN." He also said he was "A TEXAN and then "A CHICAGOAN." He was a lovable and gentle chameleon and a rascal, and I loved the little CAJUN. He's been dead more than 30 years, but I talk to him often, when he and I both lie through the stars and heavens. I really miss him. He was the first of my truly close friends to die. Most of them have since followed. Even my parents, Dot and Em Ghianni, were taken in by Tony's charm and told him how much they appreciated his protective attitude toward their beloved baby boy. Despite his many flaws, he was a truly damn nice guy.

And there was the time Tony got so upset with littering along the U.S. 41A bypass, that he told me to come along with him, bring some gloves and grab a trash bag. From newspaper janitor John Spurlin, who had a dent in his skull from where someone had shot him, Tony grabbed one of those sticks with the nail protruding from the point. The two of us spent an afternoon cleaning a median, taking photos and otherwise chronicling this environmental calamity. I kept on telling him that we ought to get back to take care of the newsroom.  He kept drawling things like “Manley’s there, Jim Monday’s there, that prick Wendell is there. We’ll go back when we please.”  There was no story in the cleanup, though I did pound out my “Clarksville Calling Card” column, complete with a photo of the late and lamented Editor Tony Durr with his garbage stick and a black bag full of beverage cups and popsicle sticks and chicken pieces.

And then there was W. Robert Cameron, the self-titled “Savior of the Cosmos,” who Tony found on one of his runs – he often ran along railroad tracks during jogging that took up many business hours. Tony didn’t do anything about W. Robert, but sensing “a great Ghianni column” in the Manson-like figure on the railroad embankment, he trotted into a nearby Shoney’s and called me, said there was a guy who looked like my type of human-interest piece. I spent half-a-day on the trestle and also arranged with my cop friends – who came to arrest him for trespassing (he’d gone into the Shoney’s to panhandle) – to take W. Robert to the county line rather than arrest him. I ordered and paid for W. Robert’s lunch while we waited for the law. All I’ll add here is that W. Robert was hitchhiking to Austria. I always have wondered if he made it. I know I didn’t.

Tony and I had a lot of fun, and he enjoyed being with a real newspaperman as much as I enjoyed being with a big-dreaming pretend journalist who learned most of his newspaper tricks by watching “All The President’s Men” and by being a computer corporation’s salesman whose job it was to sell and install newsroom computer systems. He’d apparently hang out with the journalists at each location, until he got to Clarksville, where his charm so worked on the Big Guy that he was offered a job, including the medical insurance that was his downfall.

Basically, I have to say that Tony was and remains one of the people I’ve loved best in the world and still do, 30 years after he was found dead, empty pill bottle and an off-the-hook telephone receiver near his sprawled body in a Coast Guard Barracks in Alaska. His stint in the Coast Guard included about a year as a telegraph operator at U.S. Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia, a small island which, according to the Navy “provides logistic support to operational forces forward deployed to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf areas of responsibility in support of national policy objectives.”

It's hard to imagine Tony as the guy helping to translate American war and peace troop and ship and airplane movement while sitting on this little island just south of the equator. His return to the Coast Guard base in Alaska was his final stop after maybe six or seven wives and that number of newspaper editor’s jobs in his last few years of life.

He probably went through so many women and jobs because he was versed in the laissez les bons temps rouler of his Arcadian upbringing. Or maybe it was the “short man’s complex,” like that which drove Hitler and Kareem.

In addition to trying to attract me to the newspapers where he landed, Tony also offered me refuge from real life – and mine had gotten complicated – by proffering shelter from the storms of life among the gators, bugs, snakes and semi-civilized, untamed Cajuns at his family’s tomato farm in the swamps of Louisiana.

 He told me to come spend a few weeks, my vacation time, or even abandon life altogether and join him in the bayous, where he often sought comfort from his many personal and professional failures.

“Everything will be on me,” he said. “I’ll even pay for your gas to get here. The Durr family farm is right in the middle of the bayous.

“It’s hot, but quiet. We have the best tomatoes in Louisiana,” he said. “You can get your head right here.”

It’s funny to read that note now, because I don’t think Tony ever did get his head right. I was in the middle of a life decision, and I’d been consulting him for advice. I took the advice, regretted it almost immediately, and spent three years drinking my way to freedom. Man, I could have used that bayou tomato farm hideout then.

I probably should have gone down to the bayous. Whenever I use that word, bayou, I always think of John Fogerty, a rock icon I got to know some. He was the leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and “Born on the Bayou” was one of the hits for these Central California rockers.  John’s best song, “Who’ll Stop The Rain,” is perhaps the most gorgeous and complicated and understated plea for our nation to get out of Vietnam.  Still I wonder what took us so long.

In the final years of his life, I was offered jobs, one from each newspaper where Tony had landed.  I never took those jobs, in San Antonio, Chicago or Anchorage or even Kodiak, because I knew that sooner rather than later Thomas Anthony Durr’s charm and bullshit would catch up with the reality of his jobs, and I’d be excess and likely unwanted baggage at his last newspaper spot.

 I did not want to be suddenly unemployed in Kodiak, Alaska. I guess I could have become a king crab fisherman. I’m surprised Tony didn’t do that. Course, from all accounts, it is a tough job, “The Deadliest Catch,” as they call it.   Hell, I think I’ll add that to his legend here: As soon as he lost his job at the newspaper in Kodiak, Tony went into the cold Pacific waters where he spent six months on the Calypso as a Alaskan King Crabber.  Yeah, that’s better.

OK. So perhaps he was a big talker even more than a big dreamer. I told him early-on – shortly after he came to Clarksville to be my boss – that I knew he was “full of shit, but I love you anyway.”

“You’re the only one who has ever said that to me,” said Tony. “I’m glad you see me for who I am. Call me on it anytime.”

And, you know, I did on countless phone calls and in hotels and bars in the towns where he’d brought me for job interviews. I remember one night he was supposed to meet me at the original Billy Goat’s Tavern, below the Wrigley Building, in Chicago. I had just landed in the Windy City for a job interview the next day at The Sun-Times. I was interviewing to be “Senior Writer,” and my job would be to wander Chicago streets looking for human stories. It would have been a great gig, but I didn’t get it. My visit was just a setup. They just brought in one of the editor’s cronies from elsewhere in the Rupert Murdoch chain. Got an offer to work in the city room instead, but pay was less than I was making in Clarksville, moving costs were on me, and I knew Tony likely would be castoff within six months. I had grown up in Chicago. Too cold to be unemployed.

Anyway, after I checked into the Sun-Times condo where I stayed, Tony called and said to meet him at Billy Goat’s. It’s where I was for more than two hours, sitting near the cook whose “Cheeseburger, cheesburger, cheeseburger” trademark chant had been appropriated by John Belushi when he was at Chicago’s “Second City,” an improv gig that eventually got him to “Saturday Night Live,” where he took the “cheeseburger” guy to a generation. He also played a giant samurai bee and others on SNL, while learning how to consume speedballs. The latter is what canceled his performing career one night at the Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills. One of the things I remember about that was Wendell Wilson’s almost tears when he heard that Big John had died. I don’t know why that alleged “newspaperman” had any feelings for anyone, let alone a drug-addled comedic genius. Wendell was none of those.  I was sad, because I saw a taste of myself in Belushi.  

Anyway, even though I was in town for a night, Tony stood me up for a few hours. “I was walking past the symphony hall and I saw these two young women in line and I began talking to them,” he said. “They ended up taking me to the symphony. I left at intermission. Did you get a cheeseburger?”

This story’s getting too long now, so I want to get back to the gathering of derelicts in the picture here who danced, ate and appropriated liquor during the quick farewell party to Tony.

By the way, as I did trek to visit him in his latest job locations, he also had become a regular visitor to my apartment and houses in the years before the fatal dose in the Coast Guard barracks. Hell, one day, I drove him down to the newspaper, where he went to see the Big Guy. Despite the circumstances of Tony’s departure, it was obvious Luther loved him. I think they went out to lunch at Austin’s and perhaps jingled the change in each other’s pockets. Two desperadoes on different missions.

 Tony and I talked, at least once a week, while looking at the same star, me in Nashville, him in Alaska.  The calls to and from Diego Garcia were trickier, filled with dead air and static and Tony’s tales of getting in bar fights with drunken sailors and his melancholy lookbacks at his failures, mostly the women who punctuated his errant path.

He paid for my gas and a night’s hotel stay for an interview in San Antonio. I enjoyed the hotel on the River Walk, but enjoyed the week I slept on an air mattress in Tony’s house much more. “Once you get here, you can move to Old San Antonio,” he lied, knowing full well that I was going to decline the $400 a week and no-moving-money offer and just wait until he played out his string.

Actually, a few weeks before Tony’s disappearance, my police reporter pal, Rob Dollar, and I (associate editor/columnist) started calling ourselves “The News Brothers.” It was a reaction to corporate interference and their almost Chamber of Commerce-sanctioned news mission and our own determination to say “fuck it” and go for nothing but the truth.

Tony Durr, shown here as Santa Claus, hugs Okey "Skipper" Stepp, while Flapjacks soberly smiles. Tony spent most of a week at Tim's Clarksville apartment in order to be a special guest at the all-night screenings of the fabled film, "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture," which was sorta "inspired" by Durr's disappearance.   

Tony was around for the birth of the News Brothers. He wasn’t one. But he enjoyed our spunk. “Tim, you are crazy, but this News Brothers attitude is great for us and the newspaper. And every Saturday, you wear that Hawaiian shirt (we had to wear shirts and ties and pants and underwear during the week). You are to this newspaper what Hawkeye Pierce was to the 4077^th.”

The News Brothers lived on, long after Tony’s disappearance and we produced classic investigative journalism, blood-and-guts school board, Rotary and cops coverage and eventually a lead story about the escape of a pet monkey, the police “manhunt,” followed a few weeks later by my sad column about the dogs chasing down and eating poor Chico.

Our News Brothers association – several others joined us in this Quixotic quest – was fertilized by physical exhaustion caused by non-stop coverage of a beautiful teenage girl’s disappearance, rape and murder, combined with the same style of journalistic adrenaline jolt from covering the kidnapping and murder of a football player at the local university.

Those stories plus nonstop tales of death on the highways (especially soldiers from nearby Fort Campbell) and other redneck rapes and mutilations had made us emotional shells. So, as a way to “reset” our attitudes, I – as the editor in charge on Saturdays and the Sunday paper – told everyone to wear shades to work one day. Rob offered the advice that we should call ourselves “The News Brothers.” In addition to the shades, we began to “dress” like so many derelicts, with hats, second-hand store clothing and, as noted earlier, distribute exploding cigarettes and rubber vomit when it seemed like we all needed a lift. Sometimes Rob and I brought black licorice sticks to distribute.

There is a whole book about those days, “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers and their Shades of Glory.”  It’s fun in parts, and sadder in others. And the death of local daily journalism is the end-prediction, 35 years before the presses stopped and a pathetic billionaire’s Twitter and the Chinese-spy ring’s TikTok became the main distributors of news.

Of course, there is that movie that we filmed as we “searched” for the “little, short asshole,” etc. A lot of guys partook. Rob “Death News Brother” and I “Flapjacks” wrote it and paid for it and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and Jim “Flash” Lindgren formed the rest of the core of the corps. John “Street” Staed, Ricky “Dumbo” Moore, Reverend Larry McCormack, StrawBilly Fields and Danny “I am Reagan” Adkins joined us when their wives or pet snakes would let them. “Flapjacks: The Motion Picture” – which featured many of these derelicts in discarded clothing – played to rave reviews on November 12, 1982, and contributed many, many piles of bills to local charities.

It ought to be noted that the opening action scene showed The News Brothers, including Tony Durr and StrawBilly Fields, dancing like drunken fools with the rest of us up a ramp from an alley in downtown Clarksville. Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” blared from a boombox.

It was the News Brothers’ arrival at Tony’s farewell party, that I had planned, to coincide with his last shift at the newspaper.   

I had asked my friend, Jerry Uetz—who owned Austin’s, the restaurant where Tennessee Williams sought refuge and “Flap” had admired O.J.’s use of steak knives to eat ice cream —to stay open for an after-work party, beginning at midnight, after Tony finished his last shift and hours before he fled to Texas.

Jerry Uetz used to run the best restaurant in Clarksville, years ahead of what eventually became a downtown revival.  He also always has been a good friend to Flapjacks and loaned him his restaurant on the night the News Brothers said goodbye to Tony Durr. Tony's long-gone, but four decades later, Jerry's still going strong. He may be retired from the restaurant business, but he's a helluva great guy. During his time in Clarksville, Flap ate at Jerry's Austin's Restaurant regularly, even taking double-murderer O.J. Simpson there once. I think I also took John Wooden, "the Wizard of Westwood," there when I hosted him for much of a day. A friend of mine, Tennessee Williams, once sought refuge at Austin's after terrorizing the staff at a bank three doors down Franklin Street. Long story but it involves a mask, a sword and a loud proclamation "Reaganomics." The police then interrupted his ice cream dessert. Photo is from Jerry's Facebook page.

Not only did Jerry Uetz allow the joint to stay open, as soon as I got to the back door, he gave me the keys and told me to lock up when we left. He stayed for an hour and hugged Tony and me. At dawn, a few living News Brothers rolled out of Austin’s, me locking the door. Rob and Chuckles both double-checking to make sure I hadn’t fucked up. Tony had left around 3 and supposedly was enroute to San Antonio. 

The rest of us showed back up around noon to clean up Jerry’s restaurant and bar, only to be greeted by this kind gent, who had already cleaned it up and was eating what had been left of our potato salad.  He did not even mention the fact that when our own booze – a few cases of beer and some scotch – ran out, we helped ourselves from his bar.

“I like this,” he said of the potato salad. “We’ll call it even.”

 Jerry, a great gentleman, and I crossed paths again when I later visited in San Antonio to interview for the job on Tony’s staff. I was greeted by Jerry Uetz, who at that time was opening a restaurant in that Texas city. Jerry insisted on taking the whole crew out to dinner. Eventually, he returned to Clarksville to reopen his restaurant there for a few years.  I have online contact with him to this day.

Anyway, as noted, Tony left in the middle of the party and began his drive to “San Antone.” StrawBilly Fields also left the paper around this same time, mainly because he had no one to take him golfing when he should have been working. Tony spent more time teaching StrawBilly how to hit a nine-iron than he did editing Billy’s scattershot copy. Billy went on to run the corps of East Nashville Good Ole Boys who had a pistol grip on Music City’s tourism, politics and finances and party buses.

But we didn’t throw Billy a party on his last newspaper night. Refused to, in fact. Most of us didn’t even know he was gone until someone asked, “Whatever happened to Billy Fields? Wasn’t he around here when we began our movie?” Everyone looked at the almost-busted desk chair that Billy had occupied, shrugged and got back to work. (Billy reminded me later that when he left for P.R. in Podunk, Ky., everyone simply applauded and called the lovably large fella “a hack and a whore.”)

So, the picture of the derelicts and whoremongers and drunks (pre-beverages), was shot on Tony’s final day at The Leaf-Chronicle. I’m not even sure he was supposed to be in the building at that point.

Yes, we went to work in those clothes. Laughed at death and exploding cigarettes for 12 hours. Lighted farts and I drank 40 cups of coffee.

We took Tony with us down to the Royal York Hotel (flophouse) coffee shop, where I chain-smoked, Rob fiddled with his Kools, Jerry Manley ate pancakes and smoked Virginia Slims and Tony and Skipper tried to one-up each other in lies about conquest on the mattresses and linoleum floors and beds of nails of the world.  

"Death" and "Flap" -- Rob Dollar and I --loved to take our old pal, Skipper, out of his flophouse and into the world of sober, after-hours reflection. Skipper always thought Tony was full of shit. It takes one to know one. I loved Skipper, who I first befriended one hot Clarksville day when I sat down next to him on a bench outside the Royal York Hotel. It was hot, boy was it hot. He's dead now, too. Most of my friends are, I guess.

I still miss Skipper, who like most of my friends, is dead. He did come to the farewell party, but we had to walk him back to the hotel at about 2. I think Danny Adkins was his escort, since no one would trust me, Rob or Chuckles with the safety of a 70-year-old World War II fighter pilot and rodeo cowboy.

And Tony, well, if I’m outside in the dark, I look at the star at the tip of The Big Dipper and I say “I miss you. I love you still, Tony. And yes, doctors have told me I am nuts.”

Then I just laugh.

The Durr era in Clarksville was very short, but it did help Flapjacks become the leader of a newsroom and helped with the spark behind the Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar creation "The News Brothers." Many tales from Ghianni and Dollar's time in newsrooms as well as adventures involving the rest of those rascals are told in this book.  

 

 (All of the selections in this blog are copyrighted by Timothy Champ Ghianni) 

Badger Shelton, dead 13 years, and my brother, dead 9 months, and me, still alive, were chased by a cop, danced with a big, red elephant after we joined Death to become pals with Mr. Lone Ranger

 Scott Shelton, my brother, Eric, and I were dancing and cavorting between the four legs of the giant elephant and tugging, salaciously, on his trunk.
I wish we could do it again, but Scott died 13 years ago January 23 (today as I write a quick, no-edit tale of glory). My brother died last spring.  They were among my closest pals. Most of my closest pals are dead, by the way. They all were glad they knew me, and I hope they'll  tell God to have mercy on my soul when the counting’s done.
But Scott and Eric were with me on the day we met Mr. Lone Ranger, befriending him for life, and later doing our best at evading the law and dancing with the elephant down on the boulevard.
The elephant dance came maybe 15 minutes after my life-or-death attempt to escape Kentucky State Trooper Rudy, who was damned determined to make sure we followed the rule of law in Christian County, Kentucky.
As Rudy chased my old, faded-yellow Dodge Duster with its slant-six engine and apparently failing brakes, Scott – who was in the back seat – leaned over my shoulder and kept on urging me to “run for the border.”
“He can’t follow us into Tennessee,” Scott said. “Let’s go, Flap…. You can make it.”
My brother, Eric, wasn’t much help, either. He just tightened up his seat belt and laughed, looking over his shoulder to see Trooper Rudy closing in on us as I did my best to elude the long arm of the law on U.S. 41A. “Fucker’s gonna get you, Timmy,” he said. “Either go faster or pull over.”
Not wanting the trooper to begin firing his .44 Magnum at my tires (which weren’t so good to begin with), I succumbed to common sense and a will to live – I used to have that – and I nursed the Duster up onto the shoulder of the highway.  The only thing other than trees and fields in sight was a long, seemingly endless white, wooden fence.  Cattle farm obviously. Or perhaps it was a place to ride your horse till you can’t no more.
I’ve told this story before, and it involves all kinds of legal treachery in the courts system of Christian County, Kentucky.  The facts are mostly the same, depending on when I’m telling the tale and how much sleep or whiskey I had the night before. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me, God,” I pledged on the Bible in the courtroom where I ended up a week or two after the feverish attempt to make it to the Tennessee line (even though we were still miles from that goal.)

Rob "Death" Dollar, Scott "Badger" Shelton, Mr. Lone Ranger, me "Flapjacks" Ghianni. My brother, Eric, took this picture. We also took one with him in it. Scott died 13 years ago January 23, 2025. My brother died in the spring of 2024. The Lone Ranger also is dead. Rob and I live on, and are damn proud of it. Instead of mourning Scott on this deathiversary, I choose to tell a true story of truth, injustice by Trooper Rudy, salvation and a red, concrete elephant.  

I jumped ahead of myself there.  You see, I was in court because Trooper Rudy – a kind and laughing fellow – didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense as an excuse for driving too fast on HIS highway, and he gave me a ticket that I ended up taking to trial. The judge didn’t buy my Lone Ranger defense nor my explanation that I usually drive much faster than that.
The law-and-order segment of this tale can be found in other blogs and in the journalism classic expose “When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory.”
My time in court is legendary in Christian County, primarily because of my Lone Ranger defense (“I am a friend of The Lone Ranger”). I had thought of using a different tactic, telling the judge I was driven to break the law because of the death of Chico the Monkey, but I decided I wouldn’t. Instead of The Lone Ranger trial, as it’s been dubbed among State Police and judges in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, it would have been “Tim’s Monkey Trial.”
Interesting, but certainly not accurate. Chico, you may recall, was a spider or squirrel monkey whose escape from a Clarksville house sent deputies and lawmen there in a panic. “Deputies go bananas: Monkey at Large!” screamed the next day’s newspaper. Almost cost me my job, but newspaper circulation skyrocketed.
I’m getting a bit far afield here, but all of the above – including the crawling around the elephant legs – is related.
Scott, who was a News Brother dubbed “Badger,” and Eric -- who was the News Brothers’ biggest fan and who used to tell my approving mother that I was completely crazy, dreaming my life away and living that life in one of the faster lanes – were in the Duster that day, because we were going to meet another News Brother, Rob “Death” Dollar at the Dollar Estate and cat sanctuary on Sherwood Drive in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Rob and I co-founded The News Brothers, suffered dastardly at the hands of Korporate Amerikan “journalism” and also wrote the book mentioned above.
Rob was going to ride with me and the others as I drove to some sort of fairgrounds in Hoptown to meet The Lone Ranger. It was a dream come true for Baby Boomers, who grew up loving those thrilling days of yesteryear and hollering “Hi-Yo Silver” every time our mothers took a wooden spoon to our butts.
Of course, that sort of stuff happened 30 years before this adventure I’m telling you about today.  Rob had been invited to a Lone Ranger Day at the fairgrounds that was staged by a local wheeler-dealer and damn nice guy who always wanted to make movies.
There were two original, full-length movies, featuring the Lone Ranger origin story and further adventures with his virgin-white horse, Silver, and his best friend, Tonto, on his pinto, Scout.   
Then Clayton Moore, the only actor who ever should have played The Lone Ranger, spent an hour talking to all of us overgrown kids and real kids.  Me and Rob and Scott and Eric, though got more time with him.
Rob and I corralled The Lone Ranger as he was attempting to leave the celebration. He was headed outside to climb aboard Silver (the real horse was long dead, but this one looked the part) and get him to trot into the horse trailer attached to the big, pink Cadillac with longhorn horns on the hood that The Lone Ranger had driven all the way from Calabasas, California, where he lived.
“Mr. Lone Ranger, we love you,” all four of us chanted, before we started shooting the breeze with the legendary masked lawman.
I guess he spent about an hour with us, telling us wisdom of life on the trail as well as lamenting his best friend – seriously – the actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto and died within months of our time together in the Hoptown fairgrounds snow.
Any jokes or untruths aside, we all did form a bond with The Lone Ranger, who began calling us by our News Brothers nicknames (I was “Flapjacks” and Rob was “Death” … on this day, Eric was going by his own nickname “Big Bro", even though he was only linked by blood to perhaps the most notorious and deranged member of The News Brothers). The Lone Ranger also referred to us as “my kids,” because we represented his demographic.  I was 30ish, Rob and Scott a year or many younger, Eric a couple years older than me and a much-nicer person.
Rob and I continued to stay in contact with Mr. Lone Ranger right up until his death and several years before our own.
This is all building up though to our trip back to Clarksville, after dropping Rob off at the Dollar Estate.  I had to get to my newspaper in Clarksville, where I’d write a column about The Lone Ranger that I’d use to lead the Sunday newspaper. I think Rob had that day off, if he hadn’t already been fired for applying to be Clarksville police chief (please read our book). Eric was going to spend a part of the day in the newsroom before going to my apartment and eating my meager food and drinking my sody pop while I put out the Sunday newspaper. He might meet us for a drink at Camelot at 2 a.m. the next day.
Badger had to get back to WJZM-AM, a 50-watt station that operated out of the attic over a furniture store in downtown Clarksville.  He was news director there, and a damn good one. Rob and I formed our friendship with Badger because we always were bumping into each other at news events.
Also, Scott liked to hang out with me in the newspaper newsroom, where he enjoyed watching the staff reel from all of the exploding cigarettes and rubber vomit involved in putting out a quality newspaper.
Interestingly – to me, not you – is the fact that Scott’s Dad, Bill, had become my friend before Scott did.  Bill was the nicest older gentleman in Clarksville. He enjoyed my regular columns and stories about his town. So, instead of just calling to say something, he started coming in and sitting in the chair by my desk.
 He would tell me tales that made me laugh, fill me in on local history, talk about his family, ask who the fuck I was and why I was in Clarksville, anyway? Many stories came from our visits. If it was a news nugget, I’d pass it on to Rob, Richard “The Marine” Worden or to Harold “The Stranger” Lynch – depending on the year and who was working at the paper and alive at that point. I was in Clarksville many years, too many, but I had a demon to shed before I left town. That’s a long and sad, remorseful tale and 40 years in my past, now.
Bill several times asked me to quit smoking. “The cigarettes always win,” he said, preaching and beseeching me.  I did quit, but not until 2000, long after I became the burnt toast of Nashville media.
But this really is supposed to be about Scott. Well, not really. I wrote a long and teary farewell to him when he died, and I’ve saluted him some in my blogs in recent years.
Today, instead of being somber, I choose to revisit the day we met The Lone Ranger and danced between the giant elephant legs.   
You see, after the trauma of the $80 ticket for allegedly doing well over the speed limit on Trooper Rudy’s highway, I continued driving the Duster home. That path goes right through Oak Grove, Kentucky, back then best known for the Cat West strip joint. Stripped all the way down to the vagina. The subsequent raids and illegal activity among city officials who loved to witness flesh on a pole and didn’t mind the related drug and sex-trafficking activity led to us establishing a one-column spot on the top of the front page. We called it the “Cat West Corner.”
It was a way for newspaper execs to have it both ways.  If it was a Cat West story or perhaps a story about raids of my truly good friend Connie Lampe’s two brothels, it went up in that corner of the paper. They didn’t want me to put it in the main three-column spot with sensational headlines like “Bare breasts titillate Fort Campbell soldiers” or “Connie’s Whores told to squeeze their business assets shut.”    
That main three-column spot was for Wendell Wilson’s “serious” news stories that always began “The City Council met last night and ….” Substitute County Commission…. School Board …. Chamber of Commerce … or any other government body that met.  
When Wendell became city editor, the reporters – Jerry Manley, John Staed, Harold Lynch, Rob Dollar, Greg Kuhl, Elise Frederick, etc. did not write leads that stale, so Wendell rewrote them.
Ooops, I may get back to this section when I have the desire, but today’s entry is about Scott Shelton, who, like Harold and Kuhl, and most of my friends are dead or mentally infirm.
Anyway, this is supposed to be about me and Scott and the elephant, not about his death 13 years ago.
As we drove down toward Clarksville and our mutual workplaces, we had to pass through and across the highway from Fort Campbell, the sprawling Army post where the 101^st Airborne (Air Assault) rests when not keeping their Rendezvous With Destiny (their division slogan, basically meaning that in all American wars, the 101^st is the first division in and the last out. Look it up. It’s impressive. 
Soldiers, in addition to seeing naked women either as entertainment or as professionals, also enjoy liquor.
On the left side of Fort Campbell Boulevard stood a full-size red, cement elephant, an eye-catching beast that helped this liquor store stand out from all the others and the neon bars and too-many (from my perspective) barber shops, like Buddy’s, run by a toothy fellow who liked to tease me about my hair. “Fuck you, Buddy,” I’d say. And the shorn soldiers would laugh.
As Arlo Guthrie told me long ago, you can get anything you want on Fort Campbell Boulevard. Or shit, maybe that was his dad, Humphrey.
Scott, who did not normally venture this far north of Clarksville, immediately focused his eyes on the massive, red elephant.
“Flap, let’s stop here and look at the elephant,” he said in his best news radio voice.
I think he was suggesting this as a way to get me – I am medicated OCD – from dwelling about the basically full-week’s take-home that Trooper Rudy and his judge pal were going to extort from me.
So, I pulled the Duster onto the broken-asphalt, yellow-striped parking lot and we got out.
I went in the store and asked simply: “Can me and my friend and my brother play with your elephant, sir?”
You’d be surprised what people agree to, if you are polite.
So, while my brother filmed on the Super 8mm camera I’d stolen from my Dad, Badger and I played elephant tag and came up with words that rhyme with “trunk.”
It was like two little kids in a playground, discovering a new teeter-totter (“See-saw, Marjorie Daw,” we’d always chirp when on those devices).
I told Eric to take his turn, and I held the camera. If you ever heard either my brother or my friend Badger laugh, you’ll not forget it.
Hell, it even almost drowned out the clatter as the sun reached noon over Fort Campbell Boulevard.
Unfortunately, that film, like a lot of that we shot back then, has faded or been displaced.  Rob and I did a whole Johnny Carson Show on film one night, and that’s gone as well. And the L-C rooftop scene, where Badger, Death, Danny Adkins and Tennessee Williams watched as I almost tripped and fell three floors to Commerce Street while filming also is gone.
But when I think of that day, of many days, spent with Scott -- who used to let me sneak on the radio airwaves with Jimmy in the Morning (also dead) and spin “Helter Skelter,” which both deplored -- today I’m not really dwelling on his death all those years ago.
I’m thinking about the fun we had, the laughs we shared. I’m also thinking about Trooper Rudy and his refusal to accept my plea that “we’re all friends with The Lone Ranger” as an excuse to let me get out of the ticket.
I think about my friend, Death, who is alive and as well as can be, on Sherwood in Hopkinsville.  He rescues cats and takes care of all generations of Dollars. Despite political differences, we love each other.
I think about all the guys who were my friends – really, since I was a workaholic, my only real friends have been those I met in the newspaper business – and who have died. I’m basically alone in this world, at least in terms of friends.
On that subject, I always think about my brother, whose fairly recent death keeps me awake in the middle of the night.
But then I think about the red elephant and how much fun we had being silly, even though we could claim “Mr. Lone Ranger,” as we addressed him, as our friend.
I dropped Scott off at the radio station and took my brother to my apartment before I went to work for the day. Thank God Harold, not Wendell, was the Saturday reporter. One day when he was the Saturday reporter, he was our “cover” as me and Rob and Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and John “Street” Staed ambushed American astronaut and U.S. Senator John Glenn. He, too, remained our friend until the end of his final countdown.   
At 2 a.m. the morning after The Lone Ranger’s friendship was ours, I was sitting with Rob and Jimmy in the Morning at Buford Thaxton’s rambunctious Camelot club, telling the story of Badger, Eric and me and the red elephant that lifted my mood after enduring police cruelty. My brother came in to join us. Rob fiddled with my Lone Ranger mask, that Clayton Moore had signed. We were hoping Scott would show up. Fuck, let’s just assume he did.
 Life has its ups and downs. See-saw, Marjorie Daw.