Ron Santo's life centered on the promise of spring; his death sparks memories of Grandpa Champ, friends, war & shoe-store monkey

The kind third baseman’s death exposed raw pieces of my soul.
No. 10. Ron Santo. A picture in mind’s eye of vitality and happiness, a part of my youth, of my life and dreams, gone.

Ron Santo baseball card and the man working the corner for the most-lovable baseball team ever.

 
Perhaps it is not really a raw feeling, but simple melancholy that set in, a realization of how many years have gone and how many miles I still need to trek to find, even find out, what I’m looking for during this sometimes savage, other times honey-slathered journey.
All I can tell you is Ron Santo’s death Thursday, Dec. 2, sent me swirling in “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel” memories that included not just this great player and captain of the Chicago Cubs -- my life’s ball club -- but also had me thinking about the brightness of spring dreams, the renewal, when the waiting ‘til next year is done and fresh hope thrives. That’s the real truth behind baseball’s allure and life’s promise.

Ron Santo clicks his heels on the way to the locker room during the ill-fated 1969 Cubs' pursuit of glory that was stolen by those damned Mets.

But in addition to Ron Santo, I also thought of my first baseball hero, my Grandpa Champ, dead 36 years. He used to take me to see the Detroit Tigers play when I would visit his house at Walnut Lake in the summers. It was always a big deal. If the Yankees were in town, that made it just right. Grandpa was a big Tigers fan, knew Ty Cobb and the early guys from the days he would finish up his shift at the Nash plant and wander to Navin Field, later Briggs Stadium, when he was a young man.
He was by all accounts a great ballplayer back in Clayville, N.Y. Only his busted-up fingers kept him from pursuing a career in baseball rather than as a thresherman and later a factory line foreman. Ran for sheriff once too.
Grandpa Champ didn’t live in the past. He had a great appreciation for the players who delighted me as an 8 or 10-year- old. Stormin’ Norman Cash, Al Kaline, Jim Bunning (yes the politician with the click-heels demeanor was a fine pitcher), Dick McCauliffe, Phil Regan, Charlie Maxwell, Dick Wertz, Bill Freehan.
And when I met many of them at Howard A. Snope’s shoe store in Grand Rapids, Mich., where I lived for awhile as a grade -school kid, they all were good fellows. Howard A. Snope (I may have his name wrong, but he was a nice, bald guy and we got our school shoes there) was a part-time pool-hustler, with a table in the lower level of his store. He may have been a yo-yo champion as well. Can’t remember. Perhaps I’ve gotten the whole thing blended in the time machine that is my cluttered and concussed mind.
Snope, or maybe it was Swope?, also had a STORE MONKEY. Can’t remember the name, but I know it wasn’t Chico, a monkey I encountered later in life. That’s a whole different story, though.
When the Tigers came into the store to sign baseball cards and help the old pool shark or yo-yo hustler sell shoes, the monkey roamed freely. Everybody’s got something to hide, they say, but me, well I just let the monkey climb my shoulders. From that point on I always wanted a monkey … at least until the sad tale of Chico getting run to the ground and much worse by the dogs years later.
Anyway, Grandpa Champ first got me interested in baseball mainly because it was the soundtrack of summers at Walnut Lake, which then was intensely rural, where deer and wildcats roamed freely. He even convinced us one night there was a bear out there. Never saw one, though. Now that is an upscale suburb of Detroit. I doubt the little four-room house he and my Uncle Les built even exists any more. In reality, that is. In my mind, it is always there, especially on days like this, when I ponder what it means that Ron Santo has died.
Not all games were on television back in those Walnut Lake summers. So when they were just on the radio, that was the entertainment. We’d sit and listen to the Tigers. Van Patrick and later Ernie Harwell described the game, in detail. My imagination, as a youngster, embellished and thrived on the mental pictures of what was said. Meanwhile, we’d generally be playing poker.
I don’t play anymore. But back then, Grandpa Champ, who went out west at age 16 to work the threshing crews beginning in British Columbia and working as the wheat harvest moved Southeast, spent a lot of time teaching me and my brother, Eric, and cousins, Marc and Jeff, the tricks of the game.
And no, this wasn’t some soft chump of a Grandpa who would let his 6 and 8- year-old grandchildren win. He played for keeps. Matchsticks? He wanted them. Plastic chips? He raked them in. Got pennies, boys?
So on the occasion we did win a hand when we were listening to the Tigers it was a real victory, doubly so if Kaline made a spectacular play in the outfield or hammered the winner across. (Santo, by the way likely fueled young minds similarly during his two decades as the radio voice of the Cubs after his multi-generational career in the infield and as a pizza salesman.)
Of course when the Tigers games were on TV – usually the televised ones were day games – Grandpa watched them. Crippled by arthritis, he’d sit in his lounge chair, his pipe or cigar going, uttering the occasional “Gawd Gawd Gawd” at his team. Really angry by a bad relay, he’d punctuate it with a “damn.” Not too loud or Grandma would say “Oh, George!” while frying up his afternoon lunch of scrambled eggs, dosed with a blanket of black pepper, and a can of kippers on the side.
So you’re asking what this has to do with Ron Santo? Well those summers and the monkey in the shoe store were a part of the reason I fell, deeply and forever, in love with the Chicago Cubs.
When I was 11, we moved to Chicago. Among the first things we did for recreation was go to Wrigley Field as a family. Grandpa would go with us when he visited Chicago.
It also was a place of my liberation. As I got old enough to take the train into the city or bum a ride with a pal, the friendly confines became a place to escape with buddies, 13 or 14 or 15…. Easily old enough to buy an Old Style in the left field bleachers.

Ron Santo with his friend and teammate, the immortal Ernie Banks, drove the Cubs to near-glory and heartache in the summer of 1969. Two of the most lovable players in the history of the game.
 
Now, those bleachers are the place yuppies go to be seen -- or to cause the Cubs to lose their only chance at a pennant in the last several decades.
Back then, and we are talking the late mid-to-late-1960s, the bleacher bums were blue-collar souls, working stiffs who had the night shift. Daytime was the only time they played ball in the beautiful confines before the bastards who govern Korporate Amerika succumbed to the TV schedulers and insisted lights be put in at Wrigley.
I may be oversimplifying, as is my right as a human being, but basically the Cubs had to put lights in if they were going to have home games in the World Series, which had begun being played at night because of network TV revenue. Otherwise, they'd have to play World Series Games away from the field built by chewing gum's success. Gasp... even perhaps at Comiskey?
(Hey, who else remembers taking the transistor radio to class in elementary school and listening to the World Series when all baseball was played --- as it should be – beneath the sun? Listened to the astronauts take off and land also.)
Anyway, I never understood why the Cubs succumbed to that blackmail and installed lights at Wrigley. It wasn’t like they ever were going to be in a World Series, anyway.
I am one of those fans who have cheered for them for five decades. They are my team. I don’t get to see a whole lot of their games. But they are in my heart and in my soul or however that Rod Stewart song goes.
But this is supposed to be about the now-dead Ron Santo.
And the summer of 1969.
That was the year that the Cubs were destined to win the pennant, rolling through the season.
Jack Brickhouse, the announcer for WGN at the time – he later became a friend – would sing “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way” on the radio and television after the Cubs dropped the Dodgers or the Giants. Unfortunately they didn’t beat the Mets often enough. More details on that later.
I got to know Jack a little bit because I would go up on the ramp to his press box to meet him when I was a kid. Later, I befriended “Clarksville’s Marilyn Monroe,” a large and wonderful spinster named Mary Harris, who ran the almost males-only club known as the tobacco board back when that was the king crop. Miss Mary was always there for me when I needed fresh tomatoes or a cuss-filled dose of Clarksville history.
She was an old woman by the time we met. And her cousin used to come to Clarksville, Tenn., to spend summers with her when he was growing up. His name: Jack Brickhouse.
Miss Mary cut my columns about Clarksville from the local newspaper, The Leaf-Chronicle (named for the aforementioned tobacco leaf) and sent them to Jack. He’d write me notes or even call me. “Any friend of Mary’s is a friend of mine,” he’d say.
“Hey-Hey!” I’d say, with a laugh.
Both of them are long dead. I know later-comers to the Cubs worship Harry Caray. And that’s fine. But to me, I knew Jack Brickhouse and Harry – while quite an entertainer – was no Jack Brickhouse. Course Harry’s got the bronze statue.
There were days in the 1960s’ bleachers when I would cheer my Cubs and curse at Pete Rose, who loved every second of it, even the beer showers presented by anonymous donors. Of course, the Old Style was just so much mist by the time it reached the ball field beneath the ivy.
As those as old as me know, every time someone with a blue hat and pinstripes pumped one over the fence Jack hollered “Hey-Hey!”… or “Holly Mackerel.” (Harry added “Holy Cow” to the North Side vernacular later.)
During the 1969 season, at the games’ ends, Jack’s recorded song “Hey-Hey and Holy Mackerel, no doubt about it, the Cubs are on their way…” pumped through the speaker system as the boys took their bows and ran to the clubhouse, beneath the left field bleachers.
Ronnie Santo, their captain, would jump up and click his heels all the way to the lockers.
Ernie Banks would laugh and cheer his teammates. If they’d played two that day, he’d say “Let’s play three.” I love Ernie Banks, too.
Fergie Jenkins, Randy Hundley, Billy Williams.
My friend, Jimmy Hart – I wonder what happened to him? – and I would finish our jobs at the park district and head down there as frequently as possible. Catch the tail end of a double header or go spend Saturday and Sunday there. We’d go in my 1965 Falcon or on the train.
Jimmy once stepped on my prized aviator’s sunglasses – they were in our cooler box – which really bothered me, as everyone knows how much I like my shades.
Yes, you could sneak a cooler into the games then. It’s not like now when all sports are controlled by the fellows with the screw the public rules and mentality of their hero, war profiteer and Korporate cheerleader Shotgun Dick.
It was a sport in which Golden Glovers made 50 grand. You could watch them smoking cigarettes in the dugout, perhaps tossing ‘em in the dirt by the on-deck circle. If they struck out, it might be worth picking the smoke up and finishing. After all they still were suffering the hangover from the night before.
Jimmy Hart broke my sunglasses on Billy Williams Day, a great occasion for a great man. It was standing room only, and Jack stopped by to chat with us during the seventh inning.
But this is supposed to be a story about Ron Santo.
You see, if Ernie Banks was the soul of the Cubs – and he earned that with his glove, his bat and his spirit – then Ron was the heart.
On either end of the infield, these were the team’s giants. Not those Giants. Lowercase giants. Uppercase HUMAN BEINGS.
Anyway, I got to know these boys, my boys of summer, a little back then. It was before the days of high security and Arab terrorists and American wackos with fertilizer and hate. There were no security guards with Tommy Guns, Tazers and Poisonous Snakes by the player’s entrance and exit outside the stadium. Perhaps a single beat cop with a checkered headband, but that’s about it. And he’d be as eager for fun as anyone else.
Get there early enough; a kid like me could talk to Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams. Ernie would pass by and say “it’s a beautiful day for a ballgame. Let’s play two.”
Here comes Don Kessinger or “Hello Mr. Hickman.”
Likewise Ron Santo would stop and talk to the middle-class American dreamers who still had their lives ahead of them.
Of course we know what happens in this story.
The Cubs did not win the pennant.
The Mets – you know with Tim McGraw’s pop (who I met a couple of times and liked) hollering “You Gotta Believe” – came from deep in the race and ran the Cubs into the ground in September. Damn Art Shamsky, Cleon Jones, Tommie Agee….
Anyway, I was only 17. I graduated in 1969 from Deerfield High and I had gone to Iowa State by the time the horrid end to the season came. I sat and watched, when I could, the games in the dorm recreation room. Or I listened to them. I watched the Cubs swoon.
Those were the least of my real concerns, of course. I was out on my own. I was among new people, no friends came with me, living in a new place. I was worried about the draft and the war in Vietnam. I was meeting Black Muslims and Panthers. I learned that Jimmy Hart had gotten married and was quickly to become a father back in Chicago.
But when the season was over, there was no back-biting among the Cubs. Ron Santo and Ernie Banks still smiled.
They said that phrase which has been uttered every season since: “Wait ‘Til Next year.”
In the years since then, of course, baseball has remained a poetic passion for me, although the rules guys need to cut down on the length. Nine innings needn’t go four hours.
Although I like the violence of football as well, partly because at a time in my life I became very good at dishing out that violence before it began to disgust me.
And as the Cubs were swooning in 1969 I was deep in the pursuit of life, which sometimes led me into strange corners from which I’d escape as I pursued my tomorrows.
I can’t remember if that was the year I went backstage with the Vanilla Fudge. That may have been 1970. That was another big turning point for me.
That year, 1969, remains stitched on my yellowed Deerfield High School letter sweater. Was looking at it the other day thinking I need to throw it away. Haven’t yet, though probably will. Still got my letter jacket, too.
Anyway, all of these thoughts and recollections came flooding when I heard Ron Santo had died.
I thought of my Grandpa. I thought of my cousins. I remembered the monkey in the shoe store.
I thought of my old pal, Jocko. He was a Chicago White Sox fan, but he drank warm beer with me – 69 cents a six for Van Merritt out in Iowa in 1969 – and consoled me. Or at least helped me laugh about it before we headed over to Tork’s Pub to initiate what we later would christen “Rolling,” as good a team sport as any young man could want.
That’s another long story and perhaps I’ll tell it soon. But When Ron Santo’s death was reported, I thought about Jocko, who recently lost his ex-wife to cancer. I was their best man. They still loved each other. I’ve been thinking and writing about death a lot lately, it seems. And so often cancer plays a role. “Gawd” damn cancer.
My friend and marathon running buddy, Tom Carpenter, a world-renowned dog and cat doc in SoCal, reminded me that Jocko once played against Ron Santo in a charity basketball game. Jocko was virtually chased from the game for being too rough with the captain.
(Tom … or “Carpy” as I still call him … I believe is the guy who talked Bob Barker into ending broadcasts with his plea to “have your pets spayed or neutered.”)
Lucky Billy Williams didn’t use one of his bats to tee off on Jocko’s sweaty, bald skull on that day. He did like them high and inside, after all.
There were plenty of laughs, still are, as I sit here writing this.
In 1969, there still was the endless highway of life ahead for me. So I could console myself that the Cubs would be back, that I would be able to cheer them on for decades as they continued to be winners.
But the promise was short-lived. The following year, I was in the draft lottery. I pulled a high number, but some of my friends went. Some of them died. I protested and cried.
There were so many things that were going to happen by this time in my life, by that I mean by today.
I mean, don’t trust anyone over 30 turned to don’t trust anyone over 80….
I’m 59 now. I was 42 years younger back when Ron was clicking his heels.
Those years have been good, for the most part. Bad and ugly at other times.
But that’s life.
Still, when I learned that Ron Santo had died, I knew I wasn’t quite where I was figuring I’d be by this point in my life. My late friend John Lennon sang “life is what happens while you’re busy making plans” or something like that.
He was right, of course. He didn’t plan to be gunned down 30 years ago this coming Wednesday. That may be the subject of another story, another day.
But this is about the Pizza Man, Ron Santo, No. 10, the third-baseman who embodied what the Cubs were all about.
Back when he was playing, I just knew that by now my novels would be published and I’d be a natonally recognized newspaper columnist. Some of that happened earlier than reckoned. Some of it has not happened, thanks to the economy, Shotgun Dick, the times, the death of legitimate newspapers, whoever and whatever you want to blame.
But if there’s one thing Ron Santo and his pal Ernie Banks taught me, it was patience.
Wait ‘Til Next Year.

I read the news today, o boy: surveying the Fourth Estate so it can be auctioned off at a bankruptcy sale & God save the Queen

It was one of those perfect autumn days, where the sweat trickled slightly beneath my Paul McCartney conquers Nashville T-shirt and there was a skip in my step. Or was that a stumble?
Doesn’t matter. At 59, at least I’m glad I’m not drooling. Hold it, let me wipe my lip.
So, I was in a good mood, which is probably my excuse. You see I didn’t tell all the aspiring journalists that the news business, a calling for me, is dead.
Oh, I know it will continue to function in some manner and I’m glad to share my wisdom now before being relegated to “relic” status.
Well, truth-be-told, Korporate Journalism already bestowed me that honor. I wouldn’t back down from my own nicotine-stained newsroom ethics. Seems they didn’t translate well in the age of “information centers,” where back-stabbers play king of the mountain till they are heaved onto the rag pile.
On this happy day, though, I’d been talking with some aspiring journalists about the tools of the trade: how to interview, how to interact, how to get good quotes, how to spell names correctly, how to always tell the truth, how to provide the most-important information to the public.
These are not necessarily things deemed important these days, but perhaps this younger generation will find a way to incorporate these basic tools into the age when the latest news will flash on the back end of the person walking in front of you, or however it will end up working.
I suppose it’s sad, for a guy who is striving to feed his family and the like, that I am so passionate about this truth and accuracy thing. That coupled with belief that journalists are serving the public … I’m not just a relic: I’m a dinosaur.
Surely, the journalists know what is important to the readers, the American Public, citizens of what I like to call – at least during my happy days – The Greatest Nation On Earth That Still Does Not Believe Health Care and Education are Rights. Yes, there are major flaws here.
Oh, I’m a proud U.S. citizen. My grandparents came through Ellis, and disappeared with Vito and the rest into Little Italy before eventually moving to Buffalo where Grandpa Ghianni worked on the railroad, all the livelong day.
And I firmly believe in the Fourth Estate, that the news organizations present the important material, educating and enlightening the public. However, I’ve been told that the Fourth Estate was sold at auction by bean-counters, trend-spotters and the leeches that run American business, industry, the government and the War Machine. Speaking of which, one day, back when I was a student at Iowa State university, some great philosopher once told me: ”I don’t need your war machines I don’t need your ghetto scenes ….”
OK, colored lights may hypnotize, but you know when I was speaking to the young people I found them both encouraged and encouraging. They were attentive and delightful. They wanted to know the little tricks. They wanted to talk about stories. I can’t remember when I was their age. I mean, I really can’t. Perhaps it is because of that concussion from the T-boner last July 4. Perhaps it was that night backstage with Vanilla Fudge back in 1970. More likely it is age.
Anyway, the day was good and fruitful. And, as is my habit when I get home from anywhere, I first look at the local newspaper web site and then at the television station web sites, scoping out the news, trying to glean just what is important, like, for example is it time to finally build one of those tornado and bomb shelters in the garage floor?
That’s the big commercial these days on the news. Meteorologists can’t yet frighten us with the blizzards – I think my old comrades Jocko and Capt. Kirk are breaking out the sled dogs up in Iowa as I write this – but down here in Nashville, it’s still tornado season.
Oh yeah, it’s also flood season here. Always is, especially when the Corps of Engineers closes up shop and refuses to answer the phone during the height of the 500-year flood. Thanks for your diligence guys. Maybe you should go over and help North Korea with its infrastructure problems. Hey, there’s another reason to build one of those sub-garage-floor bomb and tornado shelters… Thanks Commander Sick or whatever your name is, you crazy bastard.
By the way, when you watch those tornado and bomb shelter commercials, do you wonder the same thing I wonder: These little shelters are dug into the garage floor, beneath where you park your car. Unless you always park outside, that means the first thing you have to do when North Korean artillery starts shelling the suburbs or a tornado spins down the street is unlock those garage door – warped from that aforementioned floodwater -- and back the 1985 Saab out into the driveway while two-by-fours, bricks and bicycle and body parts zip past your head?
Back to the news. There was nothing really new on the sites, so I climbed from my little Fortress of Solitude, Da Office, The Flap Cave, Champo’s HQ to the living room and turned on the television.
Time to watch Brian Williams or (name your favorite anchor here, but remember Walter Cronkite is Dead and Dan Rather is still asking Kenneth about the frequency.)
But I really don’t watch just one channel. I am a clicker fellow, beginning with the local news and running through the national and back into the local. (I have my local news favorites and they know who they are… in case they want to offer me work. )
Anyway, on both local and national news on that otherwise balmy day, I found out that a Tea Party princess was going to be competing for the championship “silver chalice” or whatever it’s called, on Dancing With the Stars. I’m not against that show, because I’ve never watched it. For all I know it is highbrow entertainment.
So this was the big news of that day, the stuff that would enlighten me. They were talking about Bristol Palin. I mean isn’t it enough that we have to put up with the constant stream of books her mom writes? Or actually, perhaps, hires people to write. (Dear Sarah: I’m apparently desperate. I think your politics are vile. But, well, how about, you know, hiring me to ghost-write the next tome, about how you are going to be president of the Greatest Country on Earth that During Your Administration Will Ban Health Care and Public Education?)
Already told my pal, The Big O, to start slipping some of the butter knives into his luggage each time he flies back to Chitown.
Course Sarah won’t miss the butter knives. She only uses them to gut polar bears and rally her following of semi-comatose old men, members of the Greatest Generation, her supporters, now known as “the Gang that Can’t Think Straight.”
Back to the news today, o boy, about a lucky man who made the grade...
Nah. That’s the wrong story.
The news outlets did mention that there were some GIs killed in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, this is happening so often now that it’s just “filler copy.” You know, these guys are dead, with photos. No mention of the hopes and dreams that died fighting to save the warlords and their poppy fields from the maniac who serves as president. My friend the Big O told me that “Karzai” means “Crazy” in the strange language they speak over there, English that is learned in England and translated in a boiler room in Bangladesh.
Speaking of England: Do you really care to have a daily update on the pending nuptials of the prince and his shack honey? I mean they seem like nice kids and they will do well. But, I don’t really care. (Prince Bill: Send me an invitation. I think you need to have me work for you and make sure the story is told without any sort of self-serving liberal slant.)
Love grandma, by the way. As John, Paul, George and Ringo once told me: “Her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she doesn’t have a lot to say.”
She should work in the news business.

Loving brothers-in-arms look back on old times, dead friends, dying newspapers and death of Chico the Monkey... and I miss my mom

“The press stinks, too: history on the run. That’s all you’re interested in,” he said, emerging from the shadows of his Korean compact in the subterranean garage.
“Things are past that,” I responded. “These are men with switchblade mentalities who run the world as if it were Dodge City.”
I told him that I was scared of these publishers and corporations. Life is short. Was it worth the price that journalism exacted? After all, aren’t newspapers dead, simply the refuse of a proud profession in which we apparently wasted our lives?
Then we laughed. In the old days, we would have tossed lighted cigarettes on the floor for punctuation after playing out our little scene from All the President’s Men. Of course no one really smokes those little cancer sticks any more, do they? No one blows carcinogens in your face to make a point in a dark garage.
We all smoked during the first half of the 35 or so years I spent enveloped in blue smoke clouds in newsrooms, cussing and laughing, riding the adrenaline rush of bodies found on deadline.
It was the business we had chosen, the only life I’d ever wanted to lead, at least partly because my mother had been a newswoman on Chicago’s South Side during WWII and encouraged my love of words. “Got tired of all the bodies,” she said. “Asked to be moved to society pages.”
I did, of course, enter the business hoping to bring down another corrupt president, like Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford did.
But they’ve come and gone and I haven’t succeeded.
Instead, I spent the decades meeting and spending time with the homeless to the hopeless, the honky-tonk heroes and, of course, making friends with guys like Cash, Kristofferson, Tom T., Earl Scruggs, Henry Aaron and Muhammad Ali, who can’t remember that any more. Glad I can, given the still-concussed brain I’m suffering since a T-boner sent my skull crashing into the driver’s side window July 4.
Had a hard time today remembering who played wide receiver before we got Randy Moss. Oh yeah, Kenny Britt. Kenny, may you stay forever young.
Speaking of Randy Moss, it was old age that had me down in the underground garage in the bowels of Nashville.
The big secret, the reason for the meeting was that 59 years today, there was a snowstorm in Pontiac, Mich. My mom and dad trudged from their apartment to nearby St. Joseph’s hospital where I was born at 7:30 a.m.
My mom used to call me every birthday at precisely that time. It didn’t matter if I had been out on the parched-eye express, embracing life’s sweet and warm as well as raw edges. I knew that on the morning of Nov. 18, I had to get home in time to pick up that phone.
“It was 18 years ago today, right at this time,” she’d say. Or 19. Or 29. Even 39. “You were a beautiful baby. You still are my beautiful baby.”
Whatever life’s circumstances, happy and bleak, for a couple decades – say from age 18-38 -- there was a good chance I’d been out all night, either as a newsman, a sports reporter, a columnist and always a robust embracer of life. And if I hadn’t been out all night, the chances are I didn’t sleep well. “No one .. but no one… drinks more coffee than the Caffeine Kid,” one of my good friends wrote in a newspaper column about my 40-cup a day habit.
I thought about him today too. Tony Durr. My friend, my editor. A dreamer and schemer. He told me he promoted me to his “special projects editor” so I’d do the work and he could play golf with StrawBilly Fields, now a respected civic leader in Nashville. Living is easy with eyes closed and a government job, but I love StrawBilly Fields forever.
They found Tony’s body in his Coast Guard barracks in Alaska after his newspaper dreams expired and apparently, given the nearby empty prescription bottle, so had his hopes.
But I loved Tony. Still do. And today, as names and lives of my 59 sometimes good years flashed through my mind, I thought about the most important one. My mom and her birthday phone calls. The last time she called to wish me “Happy Birthday” -- to repeat the tale of the blizzard and the labor, the beautiful boy, darling boy -- was 1998. She died a few months later.
I still miss that phone call. I expected the phone to ring today. Went out to the cemetery instead. That’s what I do on my birthday. Sit by the tombstone and talk to my mom. “It was 59 years ago today that you went out in the blizzard and walked to the hospital,” I said, after installing the poinsettias in the vases on the tombstone and brushing tree leaves and bird leavings away.
Told her I couldn’t stay long. Had a lot to do today. I could hear her, in my heart, telling me to “sit down and talk to me for a few minutes” during her last, many, bedridden years.
I did, and “spoke” to her of life’s choices and heavenly voices, but then I had to depart because a group of people were gathering for a tombstone unveiling two plots downhill. I wasn’t dressed appropriately in my cardinal and yellow Iowa State Cyclones T-shirt. Yep, a T-shirt on a day like this. It was cold. Boy was it cold. But again, the shirt was specifically chosen for this day. I didn’t want to wear my “No More Mr. Nice Guy” Alice Cooper shirt today, after all. Don’t want to make any false promises.
And besides that as birthdays are times to reflect, there were good and furiously lived years spent at ISU. Just ask my friend Jocko if you ever meet him. He’d probably remember. Maybe tell you about the two giant pink bunnies who stalked the campus in their tie-dyed long johns and rabbit ears. One had long, curly hair beneath his bunny ears. The other was nearly bald. Both were quite charming and, no doubt fetching to the ladies.
Getting a little far afield here in these birthday ramblings, so let’s get back to the underground garage. Two of my good friends – at least those who remain among the living … for Harold Lynch, Richard Worden, Tony Durr and other great newsmen I loved, smoked and drank with are long dead … met me on my birthday eve aka “yesterday.”
It was Rob “Death News Brother” Dollar with whom I played out the scene from All the President’s Men. We are always doing that. I don’t know if you caught our Jack Nicholson/Dennis Hopper rap about freedom in our last “movie” – our series of films date back to the Super 8 days and I hope will be played at my casket covered with dead flowers long in the future, when I figure out where I been.
If you didn’t catch that, look back on The News Brothers page and look for the Give (In)Sanity a Chance video. Here’s the Facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001757294701#!/video/video.php?v=1572748353219&oid=212057599823&comments
Anyway, you probably can guess which one of us got the George Hanson (Nicholson) part and which one played Billy (Hopper) in the classic scene from Easy Rider. “What the hell’s wrong with freedom, man? Freedom’s what it’s all about.” I still ask that question.
That little film was made a couple of weeks ago.
This week, on birthday eve, we weren’t meeting in the garage simply because I was turning 59 today. Nov. 18. Rob turned 54 Nov. 16. Jerry “Chuckles News Brother” Manley turned 59 Nov. 9.
Jerry was waiting for us upstairs from the garage, smiling in the downtown library lobby, after checking out a copy of a recorded book. When you get to be our age, it’s easier to listen than to read, I guess. Except you may be deaf or perhaps, in my case, really tired of listening.
There were no great truths discovered as we wandered the streets of Music City, wisecracking about windblown skirts and fat guys with guitars.
“Look at us, we’re another year older,” said Rob.
“Who’d have guessed that would ever happen?” I said.
Jerry shrugged and looked to the horizon, talking about rabbits. Nah, that was in Of Mice and Men. He actually talked about the times we’d shared, our friendship, life’s sometimes cruel direction that brought the three of us together on a cold and rainy day in Nashville.
There were times, we reckoned, that people didn’t think we’d make it this far.
After roaming along Lower Broadway, past the gangster-run bars and the souvenir joints, we found ourselves at Dunn Brothers Coffee, my new favorite downtown haunt.
There we talked about newspapers, as we all had spent our lives in that profession. Jerry still does.
And I freelance for newspapers still, among my other jobs. My days as a fulltime newspaperman ended more than three years ago, when I got a buyout just ahead of the layoffs.
So, yes, we talked about the glory days. And the gory days.
The murders of young people that changed all of our lives. We laughed at The Big Guy, our publisher long ago, who once called me to his office after I’d led the paper with the story of an escaped pet monkey. Chico, the monkey, had cops and deputies all occupied well into the night in the darkness at the edge of Clarksville.
“Deputies go bananas: Monkey at large” or some such read the headline the next day.
Rob had written the story about a Chico, the monkey. I was the editor and threw in as many primate puns as possible. Jerry, well, he was my copy desk chief and he played along too.
“Good story,” The Big Guy said when he called me into his office the Monday after that was published. “But I probably wouldn’t have done it quite that way. We’ll have to agree to disagree on that,” he said, standing up and jingling the change in his pocket.
So Rob, Jerry and I laughed about those days, about the top secrets we’d uncovered at Fort Campbell, about the adrenaline we all felt as young men chasing the good story, the fun story, wars, commission meetings, Little League championships, drunken soldier traffic fatalities and some still-unsolved murderous sex crimes.
Most of those types of stories aren’t found in newspapers these days, unless the mayor or the chamber are putting positive spins on them. Nowadays Chico could be just another missing pet.
Newspapers changed. But we haven’t. At least not much. My hair’s longer. And the weight has shifted some.
OK, so life sometimes has changed more than we would prefer. Nothing we can do about it.
Instead of grousing, we laughed as we wandered through downtown Nashville, talking about news stories past and reflecting on our fallen friends, the guys who grew up with us in the smoke-filled newsrooms. It was a “Hello sweetheart, get me rewrite!” kinda day. (That phrase screams from the framed poster in my office, two feet from where I'm writing this. It was a gift from Tony Durr 28 or 29 years ago.)
And we laughed at our own funeral plans that include Cadillac convertibles, cigarettes in holders, ashes and some of the world’s best scenery.
The smiles, as usual, lasted well after we climbed back into our cars and went back to the real world. I had a story to work on for one of my many fine employers.
Jerry had to get to the office.
Rob had a film to work on and a great-nephew to entertain.
It was a good birthday eve.
After Jerry left, Rob and i descended into the lower level of the underground garage.
We thought again about the reason we’d chosen journalism and where it has come and gone.
“Where we been?” We asked each other, with a shrug as we drove off, promising to get together soon, whenever one of us put a flag in a flower pot.
I smiled to sleep on my birthday eve.
But this morning was different.
I cleaned up the poinsettias and knocked back three or four double-mugs of coffee. The 59-year-old Caffeine Kid watched the clock and waited for 7:30 a.m.
The phone didn’t ring….

(By the way, Chico, the Monkey, was finally chased down and killed by a pack of dogs. I wrote his obituary. We ran it on the local news front, with the headline: “Chico, the Monkey, is dead.”)

Jocko's loss, Uncle Moose's furious, vile cancer have me following John Hartford's plea and sending bouquets of love to comrades

Life’s laments, time passed never to be recaptured, aren’t setting so ‘Gentle on My Mind.’
I was thinking of that old John Hartford classic, perhaps the best song from a genius’ catalogue, as I talked to a wandering minstrel the other day.
We actually were talking about music and musicians, but when the minstrel mentioned his favorite artist’s farewell bow after a 21-year fight with cancer, that dreaded disease and its cost to me, in terms of memories and friends, began attacking the otherwise gentle afternoon.
I didn’t know Hartford well, although I’d met him and admired his music and his riverboat captain’s outfit. I know Glen Campbell, the guy who took that song to the top, a little bit better.
But when I spoke with the minstrel, my mind wandered, first to Hartford’s “comfortable” grave in Madison – he has a gazebo there for pickers to visit and play in his memory – that I visit when I’m in that part of town.
But really the conversation with the minstrel, who has become something of a friend, made me think of loss.
“Remember that last concert over at War Memorial. Everyone knew John was dying. He sang ‘Give Me the Flowers While I’m Living.’ I don’t know how he did it without crying. I sure did. Everyone was bawling,” said the minstrel, as storm clouds began settling in, for once, over the city.
I thought then about the flowers I wish I’d delivered to Nola, the ex-wife of my old running buddy, Jocko. And I hastily sent a mental bouquet to another old friend, Uncle Moose.
I don’t want to let cancer make me miss telling Uncle Moose how much I love him. Course, he may survive his long war. He’s always been ornery. Heck he stared down the draft board after drawing No. 4. They drafted him, prepared him for Nam. He’d have gone, too. Much more of a heartland patriot than I, despite his sometimes dabbling in Scandinavian mythology and having a beautiful sister who was a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Oh, that shouldn’t be held against him.
Anyway, he was able to convince Uncle Sam to send him home, as he was the primary breadwinner, his dad was dead and he had to go run the family farm. I think, if my often-funky and lately concussed memory serves me, Moose had aspirations beyond the farm. He wanted to study more. Oh, I’m sure he would have eventually settled on the Circle M Bar, Grill and Homestead with its motto: “You bring ‘em, we’ll cut ‘em and brand ‘em and fatten ‘em up to eat” flashing in neon into the cold Iowa nights.
Tasty eatings at that cutting time, by the way.
The need to make sure I tell Moose how much I love him – even though I thought his mutton-chops were way-too-Elvis back in the 1960s and early ‘70s – is fueled by the fact a woman I loved died and I’d let life get in the way so much that I didn’t even know she had cancer until she was gone.
Nola’s cancer is making me lament lost opportunities and make the most of the ones I have in front of me, the opportunities to be with friends, to embrace them, to forget about life’s pettiness and instead look to the now.
Problem is, too many people are running out of NOWS.
I wrote the other day about Nola and her marriage to James Edward “Jocko” Mraz, my partner in life-at-the-edges, high-speed, statues-be-damned, quarters-on-the-bar exploration. No boundaries, especially on laughter in the grocery aisle at 3 a.m. Or when making the most of the flooded Des Moines River by foolishly linking arms, I think with Nardholm and Captain Kirk, and letting the current carry us downstream. “Anybody going to Des Moines?”
Jocko is this weekend going to a memorial service in Florida for Nola, who had a horrid battle with cancer. Next weekend he’ll be at another memorial in Iowa.
I wish somehow I’d known. I’d have called her. Perhaps comforted their kids. At least I would have listened to Jocko talk about his own regrets and pain.
As it is, I can regret that for whatever reasons, and there were some, Jocko and I pretty much ceased regular contact for the past couple of decades.
But there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about him. Maybe laugh about the day Old Man Hanson took flight. Well, it was dawn really. It was one of those particularly-parched eyeballs mornings when we greeted the sun’s glow, marveled at its blur.
We also confided in each other things I would not tell anyone else.
Enough about that, though. I am fortunate that I have reconnected with that friend, that I find out he has thought of me often. That now we are together, running mates in spirit though old men in body, we need to take advantage of it before the obituary I read is his. Or, more likely the one he reads is mine.
We have missed consoling each other on the loss of my mom and his mom and dad, though I knew them and was welcomed in their home.
I missed out on the death of his grandmother, of course. But I do remember the fried chicken she made for us that second dawn we saw in Antioch, Ill., after, for the lack of other places to sleep that were peaceful, we crawled into a boat when the sun rose. I don’t know whose boat it was….
The chicken went down hard. And a nap was in order before that night -- I believe it was the Fourth of July 1974 or 75 -- began in earnest.
More about Jocko, I’m sure. And about Nola soon, I imagine. I was their best man on that less-than-sober occasion. At the reception, punch was served in the house, beer in the barn. I don’t think I ever went in the house until the next dawn.
Anyway, this brings me back to my Uncle Moose.
Steve “Uncle Moose” Mainquist is a good man. He was a big man. I haven’t seen him in almost four decades. The last time, I believe, was when I drove up to his farm in Red Oak, Iowa, during a couple of weeks of vacation I took in my first year or two in the workforce.
I spent a week in Ames, Iowa, with Jocko and Carpy, Nardholm, Captain Kirk and the boys. Then I drove on over to Red Oak. It was harvest time.
Uncle Moose, he was nicknamed that for his massive size, graduated two years before me. He didn’t engage in much of the weekend frivolity because he always went home to work on the farm. His dad was dead. He was the man of the family.
Other than the weekends when his own childhood chum, Conrad -- the skittish, bud-toting, gun-shy Vietnam grunt who jumped to his feet as if he was going to kill me one Saturday, visited -- Moose was in Red Oak.
He was tending his cattle and the corn. He was helping his mom. He was lamenting that his sister had become a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
When Moose was in school, sleeping on sheets he washed at least once a year, I would sometimes hang out with him or he with me and Jocko and the rest of us who lived there seven days a week. He was a cigar-smoking guy, so we enjoyed a fine cigar together.
On the night of my first all-night finals studies, I ran out of cigars. I believe we were calling them “Ginsbergs” then for the poet we went to see and meet together. We also saw Groucho together in his last standup performance, although it seemed the old comic already was as dead as Lydia the Tattooed Lady.
Anyway, Moose had no cigars to help in my all-night study either.
So at about 3 a.m., he accompanied me downstairs to the lower floor of Storms Hall – long since demolished -- where I bought my 50-cent pack of Camel straights. I’d smoked a store-bought cigarette or two before, but had been a pipe, cigar and roll-your-own kind of guy.
That night I began a habit that lasted 30 years. I quit because of a tumor scare and because my children, fresh from Romania, both told me to stop using those “fire sticks” in the back yard.
Moose didn’t smoke the cigarettes … Jocko and I called them “snarfers” … and yet Moose is the one who is battling for his life with cancer eating away at his body if not his resolve.
After hearing about Nola’s death, one of the calls I made was to Moose. Oh, I’d been in contact, but it seemed important that I reach out that day. He said he was doing OK, that they were changing his medications. That the cancer apparently had spread.
He was weary yet cheery. He talked of his summer vacation with his kids to Washington. He talked about his promise to buy his son a decent car -- ”you remember how it is when you’re 18, don’t you, Timmy?” – I do barely -- and he bragged about his daughter at Nebraska Wesleyan.
He talked about his neighbors and how they were helping him with his chores. It’s a tough and tight-knit group out there on the Great Plains. They look after their own.
Anyway, as we talked, I traveled in my mind to the time I spent on the farm. I was helping, supposedly, with the corn harvest.
I actually was running the elevator, unloading the corn from the combine. Moose told me to be careful as he didn’t want one of my arms to be a part of the harvest.
We had pre-dawn breakfast, those marshmallow/chocolate cookies and lemonade for a snack, a huge lunch.
In the evenings we rode down into the back field to throw hay out for the cattle before hitting the pub in Red Oak and listening to Ernest Tubb and Eric Clapton on the jukebox.
The crisp clear nights allowed me to see the hills for miles and miles as we rode back to the farm.
On the day we spoke, Moose was going to go outside, after he put the phone down, and spend time with one of his cats, petting her and, I’m sure, describing his distress and his joys. Moose has a hard time talking, but he sure enjoys it.
I’m hoping to one day in the next year make it back to Iowa. I hope to visit with a feisty, battled-back Uncle Moose.
For sure he doesn’t have the shock of long, blond hair and those mutton-chop sideburns that are in my mind’s-eye. And the chemicals I’m sure have taken their toll on his body mass. But he’s still Moose to me.
Of course, when I’m there, I’ll also be making up for lost time with other friends with whom I’ve reconnected.
We’re all getting old. Captain Kirk has a stent in his heart and is taking nitroglycerin rather than the compounds he’d likely prefer.
Carpy, a distance runner by passion, also has suffered heart woes.
Nardholm, well, as far as I know he’s doing fine. Lots of acreage, a lake house. I can remember when he was just a curly-haired blond kid in gray gym shorts cuddling his now-wife in the top bunk in the room he shared with Titzy. Now, he owns two combines. That’s a big deal.
And, of course, I’ll see Jocko.
He and I grew up together. Bailed each other out. Cried with each other. And even when we were separated by the woes and misunderstandings of “growing up,” we still thought about each other.
As I wrote the other day, his wife Nola was among the most beautiful of brides. She entrusted me to get her husband to the church on time. And we did, barely.
It was our last real run as carefree boys, although we did get together a few more times before circumstances got in the way and the black dogs of depression and disappointment became a part of my life. And I’m sure a part of his.
What separated us doesn’t matter. It vanished with the first laugh Saturday night, with the inflection Jocko put on “professor” when I told him I was working part-time at a university. You see, we had a certain way of pronouncing that title way back then. Just the fact he remembered, and used that, two minutes into the call, made my stomach ache in laughter. “Champo, you mean you… you are a Pro-Cressor?” he said, incredulous and mocking happily.
It was as if there were no decades, no years, not a minute passed. Although there were too many. Perhaps a half-life has gone since we witnessed Old Man Hanson’s remarkable display of flight and gravity.
I’ve also made a point of telling my family how much I love them. And, of course, I continue detailing the story of The News Brothers, both in film and in written form.
If it hadn’t been for The News Brothers – Rob “Death” Dollar, Jerry “Chuckles” Manley and Jim “Flash” Lindgren and, later Scott “Badger” Shelton and assorted hangers-on and groupies – I don’t know if I would have survived the first real challenges of being a so-called grownup.
They were my comrades as we raged against newspaper deadlines and the night back in Clarksville.
“Death” and I are always plotting the next move, the next film, the next reunion. It was and remains a gang of misfits that perfectly fits the life I’ve led: A good and honest man who was perhaps born to run and to love.
Oh, I’m not old. Not really.
But I always got by with a little help from my friends. And I need them to know how much I continue to love them.
Now, as I write this, I reflect on how Moose’s little sister, Linda, irritated her big brother when she cast her family beliefs in Scandinavian mythology aside and became a devotee of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
I like Linda a lot, so when I see Uncle Moose, I’ll have to jump to her defense. You see, I also like an old Yogi, the one who said “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”

Nola's death brings memories rolling back to the guy in the power-blue tux, Jocko's best man

When I learned Nola had died, my first thought was to look for that picture of the two guys in their power-blue tuxedoes standing at the front of the church in Marion, Iowa.
Of course, the two men, boys really, weren’t the focus of that picture. The focus was the beautiful blonde, a tall, former pompon girl at Iowa State University, full of life on that day. The smiling and happy bride. Nola.
As I’m not the world’s most physical guy, I would always greet her with: Nola. N-O L-A. Nola. No-No-No- No Nola … especially if I drank champagne that tasted like cherry cola. Again, another side trek here. But it’s true. I never hear that Kinks song without changing from "Lola" to "Nola" in my head and heart.
The guy next to her in the picture was Jocko, my comrade with whom I chased many dragons and caught a few. Sometimes he didn’t go along for the most reckless of the rides, as I pushed both limits and sky, but he was always there to greet me, literally standing on his head on my returns. He was a loyal and good friend, a guy I loved. Still do. A brother-in-arms.
We’d actually arrived on the cusp of late, at the wedding ceremony.
I had been asked by the tall woman, the bride, to drive her future husband because she was afraid he might be too nervous. Jocko’s mom concurred. “Yes, ladies, I’ll drive.”
Instead, we did as we’d done for years, sped through the countryside, spinning Iowa gravel. Our tuxedo jackets were in the backseat, because we were sipping and sliding toward destiny. Everything was going to change. So we stopped for a bag of grease burgers, as I called them. We tried to make sure they didn’t drip over the fancy suits.
The bridegroom goosed his GTO or whatever the muscle car was … I can’t remember … other than it was brown with a light top and I had driven it a time or two when we were out on our night-time patrols. It drove faster than my ’65 Falcon, although that too found its share of duty as we escaped into Iowa nights.
Finally, a couple of miles from the church, Jocko pulled the car into a picnic area, one of those old roadside things with a turn-around and a picnic table, and said I’d better drive, as everyone expected the best man to be in the pilot’s seat when the groom arrived at the church.
I was the best man that day. I think it was 1974, but it could have been 1975. Perhaps 1976?
Doesn’t matter. It was a long time ago.
Ages of memories and heartache, good things, sad things … just life really … separates that that day from this one.
This morning, Oct. 7, 2010, I learned that Nola was dead. Cancer. A week ago in Montgomery, Ala., where she’d ended up after the divorce that I guess came 20 or so years into the marriage.
Even if I can’t find that picture of the boys in powder-blue, it is in my heart and my sometimes fuzzy, still-concussed brain. The beautiful blonde bride smiled, as did the bridesmaid, her sister, who herself was to get married two weeks later in a bowling alley. There is a side story there that I may tell one day.
I kept that picture among the pictures of my life in an old file cabinet next to my desk in my office before the flood of May 1-2. I didn’t look at it often, but when I did, it always made me smile. It was piled in that drawer with pictures of my grandparents, my various pets, an old drifter pal named Skipper, my mother and a “Have Gun Will Travel: Wire Paladin, San Francisco” calling card from an old Tide box when I was a kid. There was a picture of a young man with long, dark hair and a scraggly beard walking out of the Grand Canyon and sitting by a redwood in the High Sierras. Looked a lot like me.
Parts of my life long gone, people, for the most part, long gone. In the massive Nashville flood that washed away a part of my house last spring, I rescued that cabinet, but it had to be separated and carried to dry land drawer-by-drawer. Some things from lower drawers washed away. Others still are piled, awaiting their turn to be rediscovered, in the garage.
That picture may be there. But I really don’t need to look at it today.
I remember the bride and groom looked nervous. I looked a little nervous myself, even though I was reinforced by vodka and, of course, Lifesavers. As was the groom. A good best man, after all, has to take care of his charge.
The bridesmaid looked magnificent, as well. Always did.
It really was among my life’s happiest days.
The whole world was ours to unravel, to chase. I was a year or so out of college and I was still going to be Jack London or Jack Kerouac or Woody Guthrie. Kris Kristofferson. Tom T. Hall. Hemingway maybe, but I wasn’t going to blow my brains out. At least I didn’t think about it at that point in my life.
The bride and groom were going to settle down in a farmhouse on her parents’ farm in Marion, just outside Cedar Rapids.
He was going to work an inside-sales job at a local company. She was going to be a teacher. They were going to have children and live happily ever after.
In my roaming, I’d visit occasionally, if for no other reason than to chase away the pheasants and squirrels when Jocko went hunting on his property. I’d get him to laughing so hard that there was no reason to kill, a hobby he’d picked up from life on the farm.
I don’t drink any more, but back in 1969 when I first met the guy on whose right I’m standing in the picture, it was about 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday. My dorm room door was open. Actually I seldom closed it, ever. I looked down the hall to see this big guy I’d met only briefly in our first three or four weeks of freshman year. He’d been busy as a football player, so I didn’t know him that well. He looked exhausted from morning drills.
I reached into my footlocker and produced an almost full bottle of cheap gin and hollered down the hallway: “Hey, Jocko, I’m having dry martinis this morning. You want one?” With that both a nickname – I called him Jocko because he was a scholarship athlete – and a friendship was born. And we took turns pulling very dry martinis out of the bottle that morning and probably into the night.
I’d say it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
For the next four years, no party was off-limits. No excuse for laughter ignored. I was a good student. But, even back then, I believed time was running out. Of course it was, slowly. So, I got mostly A’s. Profs loved me. I never missed class. I did my homework. But then it was time to signal, with that hand-over-hand motion, that it was time to roll. Studies done. No one had been called by the draft board. Let’s roll, baby, roll.
Sometimes it lasted days, like the time Jocko and I planned and executed the Viking Fest – a debauched feast ripped from either the movie Tom Jones or the life of the Rolling Stones. We charged boys $5 a head for all they could eat and drink if they brought a girl. We charged men who came alone $10. Unaccompanied girls were admitted free. Such festivals, where we cooked turkeys and pheasant stew, drank from spiked kegs, were the way Jocko and I made pocket money.
Of course, we also were the primary beneficiaries of the frivolity, that night at “Lean Feeners Lodge” or elsewhere. After expenses, we could easily clear $200 or $300 and it beat working at Taco Tico.
We were the guys who walked into parties singing that Carly Simon song, who rode motorcycles long and hard into the night, who saw way too many sunrises through parched eyeballs. We knew every obscene word and gesture to throw into the Guess Who’s “American Woman” and the Doors' "Touch Me." He cheered me on when I first established my Joe Cocker party routine or became the notorious and still-famous-in-Ames guy known as "the Dancing Bear."
When we’d enter Tork’s Pub, now long gone, the bar would grow silent. It was like those old cowboy movies when the gunslinger comes in. We weren’t looking for trouble, though. Just laughs. I never set out to hurt anyone. I just had to laugh.
I had other sidekicks for some of the adventures because Jocko was on a football scholarship and things like practice and games got in the way. But still, when he had time, he was there, with gusto. He was a brother in arms in my helter-skelter race against depression and war.
There were others I loved as well. Captain Kirk. Carpy. Uncle Moose. Titzy, Nardholm.
Life changes things and people. After I left college, I moved South to be with family – my mother already had begun showing the symptoms of the suffocating disease that slowly and finally killed her 25 years later --and because I loved Tennessee. I talked with Jocko about every day for a few years, until we had a falling out that needn’t have happened. But we both had our reasons and, well, those phone calls stopped, with a few rare interruptions, more than 25 years ago. I’m sorry. But that’s life.
I am one who goes through life closing doors on the way. It spares heartache. It’s kind of that “Don’t Look Back” philosophy.
But it really never works. For the last decades, I’ve thought of my friend often, daily at least. I knew he’d gotten divorced … we did talk about that. I had heard that from other people and called to make sure he was OK. But I hadn’t been in touch in the years since his wife was remarried and perhaps began something of, I hope, a truly happily ever after existence.
I have both ridden the white horses and worn the black hats in my life.
But one thing that can’t be questioned is my loyalty. You hurt anyone I love and I am slow to forgive.
You ever own a piece of my heart, you are there to stay.
I really don’t know much about the lives of Jocko and Nola since their divorce. Last I heard from him, he was dating a nice Lebanese woman. I hope he’s happy.
And I hope Nola was happy too, although, from reading the obituary in the Montgomery Advertiser, she apparently died a slow and painful death.
While I hadn’t been in touch with Jocko I always looked for him and Nola on Facebook, which is where I have connected with other friends from my wild and carefree days.
One of them forwarded me an e-mail today from Jocko: “Nola lost her battle with cancer. Kids were with her when she died. Kinda sucks,” he wrote. Simple, true statement. I knew there were tears there somewhere.
I’ve tried to reach him. Sent him an e-mail. Found the obit on line. And inside I have cried, for Nola, for Jocko, for their kids. For myself, I guess, and the fact time really is running out on lives and dreams.
The years haven’t all been kind, although I am in a wonderful place now in my life, thanks to my wife and kids and my good friends in Nashville and, of course, the notorious News Brothers, especially my appropriately named friend "Death," who help me stay focused and laughing.
But there were years when I was in free-fall, when I needed that old friend who I’d let get away or who had done that to me. A few times, the black dogs barked at 3 a.m. or so and I'd dial his number. Hear his tired -- not irritated -- voice, hope to hear back sometime. Perhaps he needed me too at that time, too. But we just kinda lost contact. Except in our hearts.
No one’s to blame. I know that’s life. We all change. Years fly by.
Tork’s Pub has been torn down.
Nola’s dead.
“Kinda sucks,” Jocko wrote.
Makes me want to go up to Iowa and scare away the pheasants while my old friend totes his shotgun. Maybe we can even have a Geezers Fest and sell admission to those of our friends who are still alive and mobile.
By the way, for the sake of uncommon modesty, I had to buy powder-blue boxers to wear under that tux. Still got 'em.

Compassionate, brave and ethical life of journalist Jack Shelley left lifelong mark on the soul of a no-longer-young hippie lad

“Jack Shelley, longtime voice of radio and TV, dies at 98,” reads the headline.
Below that headline is Jack’s face, smiling robustly, from the Des Moines Register website.
I lean back in my well-worn office chair – my perch on this well-worn life – and for a few moments, well, probably longer, think about Jack, what he meant to me, how important a role he played in my life just by being himself.
He was of journalism’s greatest generation, a man who served his public by going overseas during World War II, sending taped dispatches from the front during some of Hitler’s worst brutality and from the days when U.S. airmen began the nuclear age by dropping A-bombs on Japan.
First thing I did was type in a Facebook update, letting people know that we had lost a journalism giant who also was a friend and mentor. He wasn’t a household name, like Reasoner, Cronkite, Huntley, Brinkley or Murrow. He had his opportunity to join that crew in the public perception, but he turned it down in favor of serving his own state, the pig farmers, educators, businesspeople, grain elevator operators,barkeeps and store owners across a gloriously beautiful state.
In the hours after I learned about his death, I did more than lament it … for after all he had lived a good and honorable life. But I was transported to the day I first met the then-retired journalist who had taken on a role as a professor at Iowa State University.
It was that smile that greeted me on my first visit as a prospective student to the then kinda shabby confines of the Journalism and Mass Comm building, where cigarette butts littered the stairwell and burned coffee’s aroma flavored the air.
Jack’s also was the smile that consoled and counseled me as I made my way through the four years it took me to earn my degree in journalism and mass communication, graduating with “borderline-almost-honors” after indulging in the passions, pursuits, whims and rallies that tore through campuses where males were pitched on the precipice of war. Friends were drafted and died. Others came home and twitched and turned in the night, sometimes springing from their bunks and prepared to kill at the slightest interruption. Talk him down, man. This isn’t Saigon.
That’s just the time it was, a time I wouldn’t trade, filled with mistakes and experiments and experiences savored and regretted and sometimes forgotten. These years – 1969-1973, when Jack was a constant in the life of a young man teetering precariously between cold-sweat fear of war and exuberance of living life to its fullest -- flavor me and the writer, the journalist I have been and always will – even though corporate newspapers seem to feel me old and in the way, as my late pal Vassar Clements might say.
That picture of Jack Shelley and the obituary saddened me and made me proud at the same time. It also launched me into memories of anti-war rallies, time spent with the Black Panthers and Black Muslims, Give Peace a Chance seriousness and Sly and the Family Stone escapism. Suddenly I was in the lecture hall near the administration building and my history professor came into the building, tears rolling down his cheeks, exclaiming “I’ve tried to be neutral and calm about the war in Vietnam, but God damn a country that shoots its students. Class dismissed. I don’t care what you do, but you need to make your voices heard if you think this was wrong and cowardly. Damn. Damn.”
Four dead in Ohio.
Oh, that really doesn’t have anything to do with Jack Shelley, other than that he framed that time for me, made me welcome, a young hippie drifter and Kerouac wannabe who came to ISU because I was kinda pissed off at the state of Illinois.
I had earned the honor of being named an “Illinois State Scholar” for pretty much an A-minus average in what was then considered, at least by Life magazine, to be one of the top 10 high schools in the country. I’d worked hard (played hard, too, but I was sober during much of my high school career) to become a recognized student, athlete (not so good, but popular because I would mouth off to coaches if they were in the wrong), a friend of greasers and a dater of cheerleaders and princesses.
Neither a renaissance man nor a man of means by no means. Which is why I ended up in Iowa and made a close friend in Jack Shelley, perhaps the greatest journalist I’ve ever known personally.
You see, the state of Illinois, while it recognized my “scholarship,” was not going to give me a penny toward my schooling. They said I didn’t qualify because of my father’s income. The fact I was paying for my own school -- that I worked as a night stock boy at Jewel (quit because I hated to wear bow ties at midnight while ink-stamping prices on cans of corn and stew) and did yard work and shoveled stalls at a nearby day camp as well as worked for the Park District (big responsibility: learn to drive the stick shift so I could get donuts from the nearest bakery at break time) – didn’t change that a bit.
So, since they didn’t want to give me any state money, I wasn’t going to give any to them. Which meant going to school out of state. I’d been to Iowa State before, because my big brother was a knee-damaged and shaved-headed football player there. He’s a nice guy and not a bit like me.
As I looked at the catalogues – remember those big catalogues, glossy pictures and text that all universities had before the internet? – I saw that the university had a solid journalism program, featuring print and broadcast reporters who had covered World War II. These guys didn’t have Ph.Ds in journalism. They didn’t have master’s degrees. They weren’t scholars. They were cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking professionals. That appealed to me, as those passions, along with writing and enjoying life and running scared from a war, were prominent on my own life’s resume.
At that point, I was thinking of going into broadcasting, so I honed in on the fact that one of the great reporters from TV’s early years – Jack Shelley – would be my adviser if I went to ISU.
On our first meeting, we hit it off well. I know I was not the prototypical Iowan at the time. My hair was a bit longer than many of the kids from the cornfields and I drove a Ford Falcon instead of a GTO and a John Deere. But did you know that the farm kids grew hemp between the cornrows? Did you know that possession of pot in Iowa at the time was a simple $5 fine, less than a traffic ticket?
A lot of hog farmers had started growing hemp to help in the manufacture of rope during World War II and, well, they learned how to dry the leftovers on the pot-bellied stove out in the barn.
This did not play into my choice of ISU as a place to go to school, oddly enough. Really, the deciding factor was Jack Shelley. Oh yeah, I was there to see him because I wasn’t going to give Illinois my money and I couldn’t afford Northwestern. I had considered the University of Michigan for a time, but it too was expensive and there was something about the wide open prairies of Iowa I relished after a youth in the Windy City.
It was later that I met Uncle Moose, Capt. Kirk, Smokin’ Joe, Nardholm, Carpy, Titzy and Jocko – some of the boys who helped me in my pursuit of embracing life before life began to consume us and turn us old. These fellows would come and go from my life, some entering school before me and leaving sooner, some arriving later.
But Jack Shelley was there from the start to finish. I had heard of him, as he was the biggest name in Iowa television.
In addition to his famous stories of hometown heroes or whatever they called his “nice” features, he was a hard-news guy who honed his chops on Hitler’s ass.
You see, in his younger years, this jovial man – I considered him old then, though he was only the age I am at this writing – Jack had covered the Battle of the Bulge in the defeat of Hitler’s Europe.
From Fortress Europe, he went to the Pacific Theater, where he had the first recorded interviews with the men who dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He also attended the signing of the peace treaty in Tokyo Bay and covered the A-bomb tests in the Nevada desert.
In his obituary in the Register – anybody else remember the “Big Peach” of the Register’s pre-Gannett emasculation? -- it is reported that Jack is held in high esteem in the history of broadcast journalism, right up there with the likes of Murrow, Cronkite and Sevareid.
Fact is, if my ancient and concussed memory serves me – and sometimes it does not -- back on the day I met Jack in 1969, among the things he said was that he actually turned down the opportunity to be the talking head on ABC, a job that went to his friend, Eric Sevareid, in order to remain in his beloved Iowa.
You see he was born in Boone, Iowa, just west of Ames, where ISU was located. Best thing about Boone was it was on the way to the Ledges and sometimes gas was 15 cents a gallon there.
The basic news reports of his death mention that he began as a reporter for the Clinton (Iowa) Herald in 1935. That was back when every journalist honed skills at newspapers. TV was just being “discovered” and radio was king. It was when broadcasters didn’t need to have pretty faces and nice hair. Good thing, too, eh Jack?
He went from the newspaper to WHO radio in Des Moines and quickly rose to news director, remaining in that role after the station became both TV and radio in the 1950s and people began buying those blond-wooded Philcos.
Oh, I could go on and talk more about his role as a hero, covering the great events of the 20th century.
I could talk of the comfort his voice brought to the farmlands. He still did some substitute broadcasting when I was living out in Iowa and I was always a fan of the soothing tones of a man who had seen humanity’s best and worst.
He chose to live his life celebrating the latter.
I opted out of broadcasting rather quickly. I had too much passion as a writer, but when I changed paths, I asked to keep Jack as my adviser. He helped me negotiate the precarious path of a student who was living sometimes in the fast lane but also attentive to school work and dedicated to his profession.
Yes, I am a writer. Sometimes I wish I had gone into broadcasting. But then I’d probably have to giggle at puns by weathermen and wear my hair short.
But the lessons of fairness, the principles of press freedom, the lessons of the responsibilities those of us who entered that then noble profession – either print or broadcast – Jack (and a couple of other professors, long gone), taught me have been my guideposts.
In my lifetime as an editor and writer and now a part-time educator -- I am journalist-in-residence at a local university and have similarly served at another Nashville bastion of learning -- I hope I have and can continue to pass on the principles,hope and lust for telling the story right that Jack embraced.
I loved the old guy. I loved the profession which he helped me enter. Now Jack’s dead and some might say so is real journalism.
I’ll miss them.

Reflections on 9/11, an idiot with a walrus mustache, moon shadow and yearning for the peace train

“Yes, I’m being followed by a moon shadow, moon shadow, moon shadow.. and if I ever lose my eyes, if my colors all run dry. Yes, if I ever lose my eyes, OOH, I won’t have to cry no more.….”
Yep, just the terror-filled message of another Muslim, from which we should cower. Obviously this is a man who is filled with hate for all of us, the kind of messenger of Satanic evil whose sacred book should be burned before … well, before he runs a plane into another building and kills thousands of innocent Americans and civilians from all over the world. Heck, if I’m not mistaken, there were even some Muslims who died on Sept. 11, 2001 … not the ones in the planes, but the ones in the buildings.
Yes, this is the kind of person we should obviously fear.
On this day, 9/11/10, nine years after that horrid day in all of our lives, I began to think about just how evil this message was that earned Yusuf Islam the reputation of persona non grata in the U.S. a few years ago, even earning him, if memory serves, deportation when he flew into Nashville for a recording session.
Yep, the artist previously known as Cat Stevens represents all that is the evil that backwater preachers with walrus mustaches – no he ain’t the real walrus, goo goo ga job, because he’s an ignorant headline grabber --- want to abolish, to humiliate, to cast asunder, to throw under the bus, perhaps even to stone.
At least the preacher has advocated burning the Quran, Koran or however you want to spell the name of the Muslim holy book.
Wonder if he realizes just how terrified we should be of guys like Yusuf Islam. Ooh baby, baby, it’s a wild world, isn’t it?
I mean, isn’t God, God, no matter the name? At least that’s what I thought. But of course, now on 9/11, the purveyors of hate have tried to tear us apart. And it’s apparently not difficult.
Here’s another example of the Islamic hatred of Yusuf Islam: “They used to call him Jesus long time ago. They’re still calling him Jesus, don’t you know. They crossed the wood and hanged him, a long time ago. They still misunderstand him, those who don’t know.”
How can we let this kind of hate for all things sacred to America go unpunished?
OK, I don’t think a mosque a couple of blocks from Ground Zero is necessarily a great idea, only because of the hate it seems to bring up in what I loosely refer to as “the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.”
Of course, how wise an idea is it to have, pardon my language, “Titty Bars” right there in what the guy who ain’t the walrus and other hate mongers are referring to as hallowed ground?
No don’t get me wrong, I like a naked woman as much as the next guy – always have -- but a smoky bar where exotic dancers rub private parts on chrome poles while leprous, snot-dripping old men and tattooed, broken-toothed young men stick dollar bills in barely concealed crotches is not my idea of a holy place. Those aren’t spirits which are getting lifted there.
Yet, those strip joints haven’t caused redneck pastors to rally around the burning of G-strings and tasseled pasties.
But, of course, that’s beside the point. Muslims flew stolen jets filled with innocents into skyscrapers, into the Pentagon and were going to go for the White House when some Americans re-hijacked that jet and crashed it into a field instead.
Damn Muslims, right. Hate them all. After all, shouldn’t we hate all Christians because some cowards blew up children in a church all those years ago. If I’m not getting my religions mixed up, I believe people who at least called themselves “ Christians” incinerated six million Jews? Now I sometimes get my history confused, but if I’ve got it right, folks who worshiped in the tabernacles of the South “owned” other human beings, whipping and raping them as if they were … well … I suppose as if they were Muslims showing up at some of those same churches today.
Now, 9/11 still makes me ache. I hate the sound of that date. I remember hearing about the first plane smacking into the Twin Towers when I was on my way to work – yes, I used to hold a steady job until I got old and in the way – when my pal Brad Schmitt, then host of one of those crap-rock/hip-pop early radio shows interrupted his on-air pretend foreplay with Scotty O and Cindy to describe a stunning scene on the TV monitors. Even Brad, who is Jewish by the way, was stunned to silence.
I rushed into work and, since I was toiling at what then was referred to as “a daily newspaper,” I prepared to help in the coverage of that day.
When the afternoon drew to an end, I went home to embrace my then small children and help them understand what had happened – which they really didn’t understand – but also to assure them we were all right and the world wasn’t coming to an end.
That night, we went to a candlelight service, sang “God Bless America” and prayed for the dead and for peace and for our nation and for our world. I still get chills recalling the resonance of that song on that night.
But already, the talk shows – not just Fox, but all of them – were talking about the threat of these Islamic cells in our country. Suddenly, people looked at the Muslims -- who otherwise were basically allowed to flourish in this “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” (there I go again) that has freedom of religion at its very core.
I mean, folks all saw them as they assembled at their mosques. A bit different perhaps. But then again, so are Mennonites. And they’re Christians. I’d say “fer Christ-sakes” here, but that’s not really my style.
Anyway, I had spent a fair amount of time with Muslims and very seldom had one thrown a bomb at me or tried to amputate my hand with one of those big swords. Instead, they were prayerful, thoughtful people, as shocked as anyone else by the acts of 9/11.
And they had more reason to be scared, because of the festering hatred that was directed at them.
I called one of these Muslims the next day and invited him to come to a men’s group at the church I was attending. I wanted him to describe his faith to these men and to also share his thoughts about the vile killers of 9/11.
He was a gentleman, in the truest sense, and he was angry with the mass-murderers of the week before. Of course, he could have been frightened by being among those of a faith that was unlike his own. But he wasn’t. He bravely offered answers, explanations and reassurance. He was applauded and embraced.
OK, so I’m getting a little rambly here. This surely isn’t the definitive 9/11 recollection. I’m just me, a fairly simple guy who likes most people, as long as they aren’t mean to my family or my friends. Hurt somebody I love and I may come after you. Other than that, I’m sort of a turn the other cheek sort of guy.
Which brings me back to the pop/folk prophet Yusuf Islam, formerly Cat Stevens, and the messages of obvious hate that had him for a time banned from America.
“Why must we go on hating? Why can’t we live in bliss?
For out on the edge of darkness, there rides the peace train. Peace train take this country, come take me home again.
“Peace train sounding louder, ride on the peace train.”
Pretty damned chilling.