My brother, Eric, a bigger-than-life and sweet man, left his mark on the world by the way he loved his family; And I will miss him always, while his memory lives in my heart and soul

Just like any little fellows in the 1950s, my big brother, right, and I wanted to be cowboys. He also liked to pick on me.
 

Eric, who I never will see again, is lying in a private family-viewing room in the bowels of a funeral home in the middle of Nashville.

Dead four days, Eric is dressed as he would if he was alive. His wife, Ann, had chosen a pair of sweatpants and his favorite, dressiest T-shirt for him to wear at this viewing.

Standing by that beautiful man’s body, I think of our last phone conversation, the night before he died, when he was still conscious in the ICU. He complained about the food they’d given him and then whispered, incomprehensibly, through his pain. “I love you, Brother,” I answered. “Get some rest. Love you.”

Upstairs in the funeral parlor, people are beginning to gather for the visitation that begins at 10 and runs until the High Noon service time. I uppercase High Noon because it is appropriate for Eric, an enthusiast of classic black-and-white movie Westerns and technicolor war tales.  “Do not forsake me, o my darling,” as Tex Ritter sang to preface Gary Cooper’s showdown.

Eric enjoyed talking about those cowboy and war films, the actors’ other work, hidden meanings, the reality versus the fiction of a movie “based on fact.” That, even during his mortal, four-week hospital stint, invariably led to a history lesson for those of us lucky enough to visit or even phone him. 

One topic we addressed thoroughly was the streaming WWII Spielberg miniseries, “Masters of the Air.”

It is a great, based-on-fact tale of B-17 bomber crews delivering payloads from their base in Britain and gradually deeper into the heart of Hitler’s Europe.

“I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the last two episodes are grim and moving at the same time,” I told him, since the series was not available on hospital TV.

“No, don’t tell me,” Eric said, correctly guessing that the Tuskegee Airmen would become involved.

 “I’ll watch the rest of it when I get home. I’m going to be in rehab for a while, I imagine. Maybe I’ll go straight home. I hope I can get out of here soon.”

During rehab or recovery, my brother would be, as he would say “sitting here taking up space,” so he’d have plenty of time to watch television.

I wish now he’d allowed me to tell him the ending of the series. Who knows, maybe they’ve got streaming media at St. Pete’s place. Though he had expressed, at times, doubts that such existed, he also had his Methodist deacon’s bright beliefs that it did. I’m hoping the old deacon’s right now getting the Flying Fortress pilots to tell him the straight truth. 

Eric loved to tell stories, make pun-filled "dad jokes" and sing commercial jingles to whoever would listen. Daughters Maria and Ana were his favorite audience. 

“What do you think about heaven and that stuff, Tim?”

“I’ll find out, and somehow I’ll get word back to you,” I told him, sure that – because of my earlier decades of running like I was running out of time – I’d be the first of these two siblings to tag up in the angels’ infield. 

Now, Eric’s gone ahead of me in line. He’s, as he’d say, “taking up space” with the spirit in the sky.

“What’s new in the world of high adventure?” he’d always inquire when phone conversations began.

 “I’ve been writing a lot, but don’t know if I’m working on another book or just writing to keep my brain un-fogged,” I’d say. “I write every day and see where my fingers take me.”

Then I’d ask: “What have you been up to?”

“Oh, just sitting here, taking up space,” he’d say. He would follow it with that booming laughter that he has shared with me for the 72½ years he was my big brother.

Big, indeed.  Eric was a big, big man, so I’d gently joke him “Taking up space is something you are really good at.”

He’d laugh, and for likely an hour, we would be on the telephone, discussing everything that came into his mind, likely when he was toiling away on his beloved yard and garden, storing up things to talk about, while singing commercial jingles in his head. He liked cereal, especially Cheerios, but he was “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” and believed “Trix are for kids.” He’d also tell you “You’ll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent” and say “Mabel, Black Label” or whatever other commercial jingles he could fish from his big, big brain. “When you’ve said Bud, you’ve said it all.”

Eric, our Dad, Em J., and I were a close trio of Ghiannis for many years. I am now The Godfather or Don Ghianni, likely the last Ghianni of my generation in America. 

The most common recipients of his commercial jingle songs were his true love, Ann, and daughters, Maria and Ana. Their husbands, Michael and Joshua, heard them too.

As did Josh and Ana’s boys, Sabatino and Emilio – named for our grandfather and father.  Eric was a great father. He was a fine husband, according to Ann who said “Eric’s my Superman” as she prayed in vain for his survival. “I guess that sounds silly,” she added. She was embarrassed by her Man of Steel analogy. But I was the only one who heard it. And she was right.  (And if there’s a Superwoman in this tale, it is Ann, who was sitting at her husband’s bedside even when drained from chemo for her breast cancer.)  

But the little boys, nicknamed Tony and Leo, both just toddlers, were really what this Superman lived for.   

“Eric was a kind man, but even he surprised himself and his family by how quickly and completely his grandsons captured his heart and filled his soul,” I wrote in the obit I composed for the Woodlawn-Roesch-Patton funeral home website.

The boys – I believe they wore “I Love My Papa” sweaters -- were still looking for him on the Saturday of the service. Of course, they weren’t at the viewing in the quiet room in the basement at Woodlawn.  They were clutching onto their father, Josh, upstairs.  Their last visions of their Papa forever will be of him playing with them just days before he was rushed to the hospital. He’ll always be the giant-of-heart-and-body fellow who loved being with them more than anything ever in his life.

“I hope Papa gets better so he can play with us,” Sabatino told his Nonna in the weeks my brother fought for his life at Saint Thomas Midtown.

Eric brought Irish tweed hats home from Ireland for his grandsons, Leo, left, and Tony. They liked having hats like Papa's.

Eric spared no expense when it came to time and money spent to keep his grandsons happy.  When they climb behind the wheel of the battery-operated Gator truck Papa and Nonna gave them for Christmas, they’ll think of him. Perhaps the most-expensive gift he’d ever purchased, the money didn’t matter when weighed against the giggling delight of his grandsons.

The little boys were like fragile dolls in the hands of my brother.  He would melt on contact with them.  All 5-foot-10, 350 pounds of the muscular and massive body that made him a great football player -- the sport that tore his body apart and even, perhaps, killed him – suddenly would become a cuddly, big Teddy Bear.

I’ve jumped around here, but since I’ve raised the football damage and its part in a surprising mortal ending, Eric (who used to be just 250-260 during playing days), began having to have knees and hips replaced shortly after his collegiate football days at Iowa State University. Hands, arms, discs, knees, hips, ankles, feet, elbows all required repair and, when needed, artificial replacement in his post-football life. He’d joke he was a bionic man, kind of like Lee Majors in the old, pre-inflation “Six-Million-Dollar Man” TV series.

Early in his monthlong hospital stay, they removed one of his artificial knees, because it and the calf below it were badly infected.  They were going to wait until that infection went away before putting a new knee in.  During that wait, more infections, organ failures, heart issues, ulcers and a host of other woes turned up on an almost every-other-day basis.

“I’m really pissed at myself,” he’d tell me, admitting to being discouraged by the almost constant “downgrades” in his conditions. He added perhaps he’d overlooked his own health’s diminishing.  Life simply got in the way. “I’m never going to go through this again. I can’t. I need to do better when I get out of here.”

“Don’t be mad at yourself,” I’d say. “Just get better. Let the doctors fix you and get that new artificial knee.

“Then make sure you always get to the doctor if you feel this sick. I need you around. It’s just you and me, Brother.” I generally addressed him simply as “Brother,” a habit I began probably in the 1960s. He called me “Tim” or sometimes even “Timmy,” the name our parents taught him when they brought me home from Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Pontiac, Michigan, and told their 26-month-old son that I was there for the duration, his only-child-existence crashing around him.

“I’m thinking that Ann and I should move down near where Josh and Ana and the boys live,” Eric said. “I don’t think I’m healthy enough to take care of my yard anymore.”

We likely threw in a few expletives, but you get the idea.

An avid landscaper, he knew he no longer could be toting bags of concrete and rocks, large root balls, gravel and the like. He had spent the last four or five summers building an oasis of fountain-waterfall, plants, grass, outdoor furniture and a firepit beneath his deck and across the crown of his hilly backyard.

He realized he no longer could build fences and sink fenceposts or topple giant trees. The produce garden he and Ann had farmed each summer for the last 38 years no longer, suddenly, was a possibility.  He’d have to get the tomatoes, peppers, onions and garlic for his stew-like spaghetti sauce at the store, or more likely from Ana.

“I bought all sorts of special seeds for this spring,” he said of the varieties of okra, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers and melons he’d been planning. “I’ll see if Ana wants them.”

His annual sweet-corn harvest was suddenly no more.

My brother loved his family more than anything. From left, Michael and Maria, Ann and Eric and Ana and Josh with Eric's grandsons.

Ana and Josh have a small farm out in Rutherford County, a beautiful place for the boys to grow up. And Eric was thinking of the joy he could get if he and Ann would live within walking distance rather than three-quarters of an hour away. Eric loved his time out there with the boys, but also with Ana and Josh. He always helped with Ana’s garden-planning and execution, though I don’t think he ever cleaned out the stalls for the three horses. (That was a talent he and I acquired in the stalls at Dudley Dewey’s Day Camp, a sizeable farm surrounded by Chicago suburbia, where we worked successive summers. Eric, as you’d expect, referred to the camp owner as “Dudley Do-Right,” for the cartoon Mountie on “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.”)

Maria and Ana pose with their mom and pop, Ann and Eric. Eric was an artist, and that's one of his works on the wall.  

The travel camper he bought over the winter, a deluxe job big enough even for him, is parked down at Josh and Ana’s. All sorts of adventures were planned for the warmer weather. Land Between the Lakes was the planned shakedown adventure.  But he wanted to get back up to Traverse City, Michigan, his favorite place in the state where we both were born. He loved to stand at the edge of Lake Michigan and belch. He loved the local wineries and breweries. That day’s catch from the Lake. Laughing into the night with his wife.

His dreams were to go West, as well. To places I’d described to him from my own bouncing and bounding across America: Monument Valley, Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Great Salt Lake and – as Boomers might accidentally call it, “Jellystone Park.”  Maybe, just maybe, he and his Tacoma pickup, camper on the hitch, would bounce all the way to California, so he and Ann could visit my daughter’s family. He only met Emily’s children once – last Christmas – and he wanted to see them more.

That unused camper is still destined for the road.  “We’re going to take Mommy to all the places you talked about going,” Ana told him, as she stood at his deathbed. During the memorial service, she said plans are now to take his ashes along for those journeys.

I should note here that he also loved, without boundaries, Maria and her husband, Michael, who work in the clergy and social services fields in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

They are wonderful young people, and they FaceTimed him often, even as he lay dying.

Eric and Ann took their first-ever trans-Atlantic flight last summer to visit them. Typically, Eric launched into preparing the soil and planting, generally landscaping Maria’s weed-and-dirt yard.

Eric and Ann spent three weeks last summer visiting daughter Maria in Belfast and hitting historic sites and breweries and "The Quiet Man" locations in the Irish Republic.

They also went down “into the Republic” to see sights. He had, highlighted in his travel itinerary, a few days in south County Mayo and in Galway.  He knew the bridges, farms, buildings, pubs and the like he wanted to see.  His favorite movie, fittingly, was the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara film “The Quiet Man,” about a boxer, shaken by ring tragedy, who retires to his homeland, replacing a life of violence for love of the soil and pubs and peace.

Eric called me from Ireland last August to describe what he had seen each day. So much enthusiasm in his voice propelled me and Suzanne to watch the film and look for what he was seeing.

“He was at that bridge today,” I’d say, smiling at the thought of my big brother getting to see that as well as other things: Ancient forts, the remains of an apparent Roman-built bridge to Scotland, miniature Stonehenge-type mysteries, ancient castles and pubs. Man, did he love the pubs. He may have sang to me that “Budweiser is the best reason in the world to drink beer,” but the fresh Guinness at the pubs was something he never got over.

He and Ann were planning a return trip in a couple of summers. He needed to get a knee replacement (again) and make sure his general maladies and diabetes were under control. He wore his Irish paddy cap – a flattop tweed with a stiff brim – wherever he went. Unlike his baby brother, he was not gifted with a full head of hair as he aged, so the paddy cap warmed his head and heart.

I have promised Maria and Michael that Suzanne and I will make that trek sometime, not much consolation, but I am now the last Ghianni of my generation I know of, at least on this side of the Atlantic. My wife told me I am now the Don, The Godfather. True enough. Mostly, right now, I’m still Eric’s baby brother. I cannot yet visualize him dead.

As noted earlier, I always was sure he would be the one to precede me. I had told him so. As a young man, I lived life hard and fast, slowing down when I married Suzanne and we adopted Emily, then Joe.

Up until then were newspaper nights and days, fueled by nicotine and caffeine and put to bed with alcohol. The newspaperman’s life of B-movies and real-life, until the lifestyle died with industry.

It only made sense to both of us that he’d be there for my eulogy. He could tell people about his “crazy” younger brother’s dances on the razor’s edge of life, how he loved to write. And lived for his family.

Eric loved to visit the shores of Lake Michigan, especially in the wine and beer and cherry-tree area in and around Traverse City. This photo was used with his obituary and on the funeral program. He's wearing a stocking cap demonstrating his love for Iowa State University, where he played football and I chased the dawn. 

I wouldn’t lecture Eric about his own health, other than to remind him to take his medicines and listen to the doctors. I would remind him he was too big.  But, in truth, his girth was hidden behind hard shields of muscle and strength. His mammoth hands had a lumberman’s grip, the biceps rippling at his too-thick exterior layer.

Like our father, Eric planned on living to 110. I really didn’t doubt him.

He was my big brother, after all. He never disappointed me … until he died.

Eric always told me he got “A’s” from his doctors at his annual physicals. I didn’t believe him. If he was telling the truth, I am angry with his doctors for not insisting he lose weight and for telling him his heart and body were great.

That heart was the last thing to fail. Liver, kidneys, lungs, stomach, bladder already were faltering –as I think back to that day, as we all circled his bed, urging him to keep that heart beating. Three times he flatlined. Only twice did he return.

The death haunts me.  I’ve got no one to call or hang out with who remembers our youth as the sons of parents who helped create the Beaver Cleaver middle-class after Dad and his comrades stood on the throats of Hitler and Hirohito. During those years, women made massive forays into the domestic workforce. My mother began as a cops and courts newspaper reporter on Chicago’s Southside while her husband was cleaning up the Philippines.

I’ve got no one who remembers our not-so-chummy young years, in which he violently demonstrated his distaste for the baby brother his parents brought home.

I spoke a lot about those years in the eulogy I delivered at the funeral home while his body awaited cremation one floor below.

Basically, my brother took every opportunity to bruise me and humiliate me up until I was in my mid-teens, and one day I challenged him to a fistfight. It was a long and bloody, spit-filled battle on the front lawn of our home in the Chicago suburbs.

I beat him into submission.  “Uncle!” he cried. Then he laughed as he climbed to his feet. Instead of angering him by finally whipping him, he became my biggest advocate.

Eric was my best friend regardless of the mess I left in my wake in the years before I married Suzanne. She became my best friend then, but Eric was always there to talk about life, regrets, admire my writing, love me, my wife and my kids.

Eric truly was my best man. And I’m so proud I was his.

Eric thought I was crazy for the way I lived in my single, party-from-presstime-till-dawn newspaperman days. But he loved me always. He loved our memories. He loved talking about history and educating me on battles and heroes as opposed to the myths and legends. He liked my tales of blood and gore news stories, interviews with Muhammad Ali and O.J. And he even accompanied me and serious journalist pals to see The Lone Ranger when I was “on assignment” 40-some years ago.

I thought about a lot of this while I stood in the viewing room, where my brother’s mammoth, though stilled, body lay, a blanket covering his sweatpants and favorite “dress” T-shirt.

I knew this would be the last time I’d see him. Ashes replace the body. But Eric’s large life goes on in memories, mine and those of the many who loved him.

“I love you, Eric,” I said.

In a few minutes, I would be upstairs at the podium, eulogizing him, raising laughter when describing the old Super 8 movie footage that Dad was taking of my first steps when Eric pushed me to the sidewalk.

I had told that story to Eric as he prepared for his final battle in the ICU. I also told him I loved him, as I ended all conversations over the years.

We all took our time with the big man on the table in the family-viewing room.

It was time to leave him, to take one long, last look at the earthly remains of a wonderfully sweet man.

Before we all went upstairs, I turned to kiss the forehead I’d never see again.

“Goodbye, Brother. I love you.”

Today, a week-plus after that service, I was sorting through my phone. There was a voice message from Eric.

“Hi. It’s Eric. I’ll just call you later or tomorrow.”

It was an old message. But I’m waiting for that call. Just in case.

Eric adopted all varieties of cats over the decades. Here, one of them helps him compose some artwork on his computer.

 

 Eric was and always will be my Best Man. Here he and the Rev. Phil Ross and I share some funny comments before I wed Suzanne.

 Eric here takes time to teach Maria how to be goofy. He always was just a huge little kid when around those he loved. This isn't a great picture, but he'd hate I got so serious here, so this is one he'd like me to close with.

   

How'd you like to go somewhere where nobody knows your name? Cracker crumbs and melancholy with my old friend, Jerry

Jerry Manley, age 31, with me, almost 31, behind him, arrive on a firetruck for the world premiere of News Brothers' charity film, "Flapjacks: The Motion Picture," November 12, 1982.

After walking around the clutch of old folks who are playing spirited cornhole, which seems to be the latest craze in the old-people’s home, I stop to turn around and appreciate what is occurring.

If you’ve never played cornhole – where you throw bean bags toward a hole in a wooden wedge-like box – you may not appreciate how amazing it is to see these old people, most in wheelchairs or depending on walkers to get to the launch point. Laughter filled the hallway next to the dining hall for “normal” residents.

Two women looked over to me, smiling, as I stopped to watch their dazzling performances. I’m serious and I was a 3.85 student at Iowa State University, where cornhole had a totally different connotation more than a half-century ago.

This turned out to be just about the only time I had the chance or inclination to smile on this visit to the old-people’s home where my old newsroom, beer and smoking whatever pal Jerry Manley lives in the Memory Care Ward.  He’s been there since right after Thanksgiving and – other than the snow week that froze me into my house – I’ve gone by at least once a week since.

I’m there basically to reassure him that he is loved. And, I guess mostly, I’m there to help him remember stuff.

If, for example, I talk about our early days of roaming hard and nightly the streets of Clarksville, I’ll ask him if he remembers The Camelot, where Buford Thaxton let us stay an hour after closing time and drink scotch with about half of the Sheriff’s Department and a half-dozen regular cops.

Jerry will ask me where that was. I’ll tell him the location, over behind a shopping plaza that housed Pedigo Hardware and the CVS where I daily bought a six-pack of Coors Light for reinforcement on my way to place where I felt trapped and sad. Enough about that. Everybody makes one “worst” mistake in life, and that was the destination of mine.

Anyway, we’ll talk about Jimmy in the Morning, my good friend the WJZM deejay, who generally was sleeping, his head down by his most recent drink. Me, Jerry and Rob Dollar – the three who were there every Saturday night – would wake Jimmy up. He’d order another round, for all of us.

“What was the name of that deputy we always saw there?” Jerry will ask. Montgomery County, Tennessee Chief Sheriff’s Deputy Eddy Patterson would also buy us drinks, in exchange for information about stories we were working on. We’d generally dodge that question and turn it into us asking questions about any new developments in the latest savage murder of an innocent teenager.

Jerry laughed about that memory.

I’ll remind him of names -- Scott Shelton, Rob Dollar, Gary Green, Big Jim Monday, W.J. Souza and Jim Lindgren, for example – and he’ll reach into his foggy brain to tell me who they are/were. Some are dead and some are living. Jerry seems surprised in either case.

Anyway, it’ll go on like that. I’ve already written about our weekly discussions of Chico the Monkey. 

We’ll also talk about my friend, Skipper, an old salt who lived in a residential hotel on Third Avenue in Clarksville. He’ll repeat a part of the first sentence of my first of perhaps 12 columns with Skipper in them that I wrote over many years: “it was hot, boy was it hot,” he’ll say. For context to newcomers, my first column with Skipper occurred after I sat down on a bench outside the old Royal York Hotel 45 years ago. And, yes, it was hot

Jerry has asked me to bring junk food into the Memory Care Ward, and it is something that I believe to be against all rules. 

But, what’s he got to lose? I’ll stick sugar-free sodas, potato chips, cheese and peanut butter crackers into the lining of my jacket and deliver him the contraband. Generally, he sits in his room and gobbles this stuff down.

I always feel bad that his roommate, Mr. Brown, looks on hungrily. I’ve been repeating names, John, Joe, Bob, etc., in this space after Jerry tells me the name of his roommate.

The other day, I scouted around the room and found a newspaper story about Milford Brown, who apparently was a great Tennessee Walking Horse rider 50 or 60 years ago.

When I have asked Milford what his name is, he generally gets a quizzical look on his face, and sometimes he laughs. 

I’ve spent a number of hours watching homicidal Dodge City Marshal Matthew Dillon cold-bloodedly murder visitors to his Western town. He blows the smoke off his revolver and then goes to the Long Branch, where he grabs Miss Kitty and drags her upstairs. Sometimes she’s the one who does the dragging.

I have to admit I enjoy, in an odd way, my visits here. If nothing else, I am stirring Jerry’s memories. I think we’re about up to 1995 now. Since then is a blank, other than he remembers my name. Or does he?

The other day, as I entered the nursing home’s Memory Care Ward, I saw Jerry sprawled out in a recliner in the combination dining room, party room and social hall.

It was jammed full and mid-1950s rock ‘n’ roll played on the television set. “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” “If you Wear Red Tonight,” “Rock Around The Clock” and “Blue Moon” were among the songs. I actually hate that genre, but most of these people are from the generation where that was a musical revolution.

They clap and stomp and sing along.

I bump Jerry’s right arm, waking him from his slumber.  Cracker crumbs decorate the chest of his sweater.

“I’ve got some stuff for you,” I tell him.

“Good,” he says, nodding off.

He hasn’t made a single motion to make space for me to sit down. I shake his arm again.

“You want me to leave this stuff beneath the fluffy pillow in your room?” He looks at me. “Yep.I don’t know why I’m so tired,” he says.

So I do just that, walk down the long hallway to Milford and Jerry’s room, and store a Diet Sprite and some peanut butter crackers beneath a furry pillow, fairly confident that when he lies down later he’ll wonder what in the hell is making his pillow uncomfortable.

“Can I do something for you?” asks a nurse, who passes by.

“No, I’m just leaving something for Mr. Jerry. He doesn’t want to wake up down in the party room.”

She shrugs and walks away. I don’t think she saw me with the contraband. Besides that, I’m a fairly familiar figure here in this ward where nobody knows your – or their? -- name.

I go back to the party room.

“I used to have two of those,” says a fellow who has his wheelchair jammed up against his friend, Mr. Jerry.

I follow his pointed finger and I see a beautiful young woman, a blonde, in a tight-fitting white sweater.  At first, I thought he was pointing toward her breasts. But he didn’t seem the cleavage type.

Then it struck me that he may have been talking about the attractive blonde.

“You had two daughters like her?” I ask him. “She’s very pretty.”

He shakes his head and points to the TV. “Two,” he says, when I finally grasp that before he moved here he must have had a pair of televisions. Or, hell, maybe it was breasts.

Ending that conversation, I awaken Jerry again to tell him I have left him his contraband.

“It’s all beneath the fluffy pillow, the one that has a furry side.

“Remember it’s there before you get in bed for the night.”

He nods off again. I think about dusting the crumbs off his sweater, but I figure he’s a big boy and would not like to be treated as anything less.

Usually, I spend two or more hours in the old people’s home. I like the inhabitants. And I love my old running buddy.

But, even though I’m standing right next to him, Jerry’s not aware or awake.

“I’m going to take off now,” I tell him, shaking his arm gently. “Don’t forget those snacks.”

“Thanks,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m so tired.”

He shuts his eyes, and his head droops.

I shake his arm again, softly.

“I’ll see you in a few days,” I say. “Do you know who I am?”

He nods and smiles.

I decided not to ask him if he knew my name.

 

 

 

 

For some reason I couldn't stop thinking about my dear friend, the dead cowboy and great reporter, Harold "The Stranger" Lynch. Happy Trails.

As I was thinking about Harold Lynch today, I decided to rescue a column I wrote about him and his death in the old Nashville Banner.  With permission, Rob Dollar and I reprinted it in our newspaper classic, "When Newspapers Mattered: The News Brothers & their Shades of Glory," available on amazon. Here's that column:  

Nashville Banner, Opinion Page (July 30, 1990): Fond farewell to the old cowboy

The old cowboy looked across the Formica table. A pink/white smile—punctuated by down-tilted stress lines—lighted his pasty face

He forked a bit of lemon pie, washed it down with coffee.

“I’ve got no regrets,” he allowed. “Lived life the way I wanted to.

“I mean there are some things I wish I’d done differently. But, you know, I’ve had a helluva good life.”

Harold Lynch’s laughter turned to breath-labored gagging.

“So, how’ve you been?” he asked.

It was typical of the old cowboy to wonder about me when his own life was drawing to an end.

Harold was no saint. You can ask his grieving wife and the two kids.

He was a kind human being. That’s plenty.

Harold didn’t look much like the cowboy of our respective youths the last time we “rode the range” together over pie and coffee at Shoney’s in Green Hills.

He was pale, weary. A cowboy riding a hospital bed doesn’t get much sun.

“You’re looking good,” he said.

I couldn’t return the compliment. I wouldn’t lie to him. Never have. I should say never did.

He died the other day. He was only 43.

The long battle with lung cancer ended the way he said it would.

“I don’t’ know much about this stuff,” he said, as we galloped the range of memories. “Sometimes it’s not worth fighting.

“But the doctor told me that the only good thing about it is that when I want to call it quits, I can.”

Monday night, Harold told the doctors to turn off the life-support machinery.

I can imagine that in his heart he was smiling. He had control over one final act. He died Tuesday night.

Harold was one of the stalwarts of my former place of employment, The Leaf-Chronicle in Clarksville.

Actually, he was in his second tenure there.  He left Clarksville 20 years ago to work at the Nashville Banner. After stints on the state and outdoors beats here, he moved back to the Clarksville paper.

All “News Brothers” drank too much when we were younger.  Harold drank more than any reporter I ever knew. He kept it up when we moved on.

A beer in one hand, Marlboro bobbing beneath the mustache, the old cowboy drawled us through rodeo adventures into endless neon nights.

A Stetson and boots covered both ends of his lanky, arthritis-gnarled frame. All were souvenirs of his bareback-riding days.

He changed out of the cowboy duds for good the last time he overcame a deadly obstacle, when he returned the last case of “dead soldier” Sterlings for deposit, when he rediscovered joys of loving family and sobriety.

Yet, he remained the old cowboy in my heart.

With the beer well in his past, a more upbeat Harold greeted the world.

He’d talk with relish about the war he’d won, enemy hops undone.

A year or so ago, doctors told the old cowboy he had cancer in one lung. “Well, take it out,” he commanded.

They did.  He thought he had it beat, that the remaining lung would be healthy. One more enemy vanquished.

He talked about vacations with his kids, wife and old friends.

“I want to take you to my favorite fishing spot,” he allowed to a riding buddy.

A few months ago, the cancer returned for a final shootout.

The old cowboy didn’t give up.

And, to the credit of the newspaper in Clarksville, they didn’t give up on him either. He returned to work whenever he could.

Scarcely audible, he still commanded authority, respect, love.

He was planning on returning to work right up until he had them pull the plug.

The last time the old cowboy and I rode the range, we watched the afternoon sun’s angle splash color across the Formica table.

We laughed a bit. I cried inside, until he saw the tears behind my eyes. “Take it easy,” he smiled.

Then I understood. He had called to suggest we “have coffee” that day because he wanted to say goodbye.

When the waitress brought the check, the old cowboy tried to rope it in with his thin, near-bloodless hands.

“I’ll get it this time,” I said, rustling the check away. “You get it next time.”

He didn’t protest. He simply nodded.

We both knew there wouldn’t be a next time, that the old cowboy would ride into the sunset owing me a pie wedge, a cup of coffee.

We walked slowly to the parking lot and I grabbed his arm and hand.

“Don’t worry about me,” Harold said. “It’s good to see you again.”

A few years ago, he would have tipped his Stetson.

 

George the ape goes on 'Rampage' on Jerry's TV while the great newspaperman munches crackers, spills Sprite and nursing home 'knucklehead' points out similarities to Chico, The Monkey

 

“I guess this one’s gonna end up like Chico, the Monkey,” I said to my pal, Jerry Manley, as we looked at a giant ape battle authority on television while we talked about old times as journalists and News Brothers and half-century friends.

At least I talked. He mostly opened his eyes briefly, turned to me, and mostly agreed.  

Memories grow dimmer with each sunset.  But even Jerry won’t forget the night we came up with the headline “Deputies Go Bananas: Monkey At Large!”

I won’t let him.  Fortunately, the memory of that story, even the night of the primate pursuit, remains like yesterday in my mind.

 Actually, I remember plenty, too much in fact, as terrors from past “lives” revisit me most nights.

Seldom are my night monsters carrying joy. I do sometimes relive past adventures with Jerry, as well as good and sometimes bloody times with Rob Dollar – we wrote a book about our newsroom lives 12 years ago. Other visitors in my “dreams” include Tony Durr, long-dead, empty pill bottle by his side; Scott "Badger" Shelton, radio-voiced great friend and Yellowest Dog Democrat who fought to laugh, even as we saw cancer consume him; Peter Cooper, a historian and musician who lost his battle with an evil illness; Harold “The Stranger” Lynch, a dear friend who died of cigarettes; Jocko, my best college pal, who continues chemo for myeloma while also recovering from a hip replacement.

Jocko, Carpy, Nardholm and Titzy – with occasional accompaniment by a Bible-thumper who has turned both cheeks and cussed and proselytized away his friends; a Wizard asshole and Dog Shit and the Hanson gang – lived studiously and hard back in our Iowa State days.  Unlike the characters in recent news stories, we always had a “no man left behind” philosophy that made sure we got back to the dorm safely as a team.  If one of us was going to drown in a river, we all would be there, holding hands. Sometimes one of us needed to be bailed out of jail, but the Ames Police Department is filled with good guys who didn’t mind letting an inmate bum a smoke until his pals got by to bail him out.

Anyway, my memories remain, and I can recall not just in my nightmares but daydreams as well, a life of great post-college journalism adventures with Jerry, my longest-tenured newspaperman friend. For half a century now, we’ve been pals. For at least half the time, we chased the dawn.

Night time may have been the right time, but there were exceptions. There was a Saturday morning we went together to our old friend, Louis Buckley’s, funeral in Guthrie, Kentucky. We’d ridden together, so afterward, we killed a bottle of Cutty Sark in Jerry’s house in St. Bethlehem before he went to 1100 Broadway in Nashville and me to 200 Commerce Street in Clarksville. Real newspapers used to live in those buildings. Not now. District attorney is on Commerce. Big damn hole at 1100 Broad.   There were far too many ‘holes when I worked there.

Our most-remarkable friendship was built around our love of being newspapermen, of covering murders, a “Full Moon Rapist” (I nicknamed the monster for headline-writing purposes) and kidnappings of teenagers, found dead in forests and streambeds. Skull dragged out of the woods by dogs, as humans looking on thinking it was an empty gallon milk jug. Rob wrote most of those stories, though I did plenty and especially paid attention to the human cost of brutality. I edited Rob’s stuff – Jerry edited mine – and I’d send it to Jerry for the final edit, layout and headline.  “Wallet Found: It’s Rodney’s.”  “Long’s life cut short.”

Jerry, who is in a Memory Care Ward -- at what used to be called an “old-peoples’ home” --five miles from me, can’t remember much at all. And it’s getting worse.

“What was your favorite news story we did back then?” I ask him on most of my weekly visits.  And on this matter, he does have a flickering memory: “Deputies Go Bananas: Monkey At Large!” he’ll say.  Or something close to it.

The Chico the Monkey story makes him happy and reminds him of the heights of both of our journalism careers.

Perhaps because I’ve been bringing it up weekly during the last four months he’s been in the old-people’s home’s Memory Care Ward, he has latched onto the Chico, the Monkey, story as the best in our half-century (both of us were fucked by Korporate Amerika, but that’s a long story. Too many people’s lives were forever charred and scarred by the bean-counters and age-discriminators).  Not just in newsrooms, where upper management “people” graduate from “Be a shithead to your employees school,” where they learn about acceptable age-discrimination forms and appropriate back-stabbing techniques.

Jerry learned his career was over – after more than 30 years at a large Nashville newspaper – when his supervisor called him while he was on vacation at the annual Manley family reunion down in Petersburg.  He almost choked on his watermelon.

Jerry recalls it pretty well, but is too sleepy to be resentful.

But he clearly recalls the night Chico got uneasy and made a fatal jailbreak.  The pet monkey escaped someplace out near St. Bethlehem, at Clarksville’s edge, and the Sheriff’s Department was called out.

Since there were no teenage rapes, red-neck knife murders, Klan rallies nor ax fights going on that night, the Montgomery County deputies went out in full force, and the entire evening of monkey business was dominating the newsroom police scanner. You could hear them chew on donuts from Don’s in between “10-4,” and  “10-7” as they jabbered their primate excitement. Rob, who had secured the police report, was writing the story, while we all smoked and listened to the deputies as they went ape over the fact this was not your normal night in Montgomery County, Tennessee. Me, Jerry and Rob loaded the story with as many monkey cliches as possible. I did get in a bit of a jam with the publisher over that, but I had grown accustomed to the punitive chair in front of his desk.

Chico the Monkey never was captured, enjoying swinging freedom until he was eaten by dogs a couple of months later. I wrote a column-length obituary about the death of the county’s only well-known monkey. Got a bit of a tongue-lashing from management, but Chico deserved it.

Whenever we talk about Chico the Monkey, Jerry’s always surprised when I get to that gruesome ending. Jerry was no longer at Clarksville paper when the monkey was eaten. I think Rob may have been gone, too, fired because he applied to be police chief in order to gain entry to the closed hearings to replace Ira Nunally – a great man and pal, who retired to be a crossing guard over on Crossland Avenue.  The hearings were closed to the media and to the public, so Rob figured he’d cover them by being interviewed for the position, since his master’s degree was in law enforcement administration.  The brass did not support him, when the mayor and other officials called to complain. W. Wendell Wilson, who had cleared the assignment from his city editor’s spot, kept his death-skull-face down and did not defend Rob as the figurative dogs ate him, as well.

But back to my monkey tale. This retelling of the Chico story is relevant because when I went got into Jerry’s room, he was glued to the giant ape movie on TV.

I had a bit of difficulty getting into the room. When I got halfway down the hall to Jerry’s less-than-memorable residence, Mr. Brown, his roommate, was standing outside the door, motioning as wildly as a 90-year-old monkey.   “Jerry. Jerry. Door. Jerry. Door,” Mr. Brown said, pointing to the door handle.

Indeed, it was locked, so I summoned a nurse who came down to unlock it. Jerry barely looked away from the screen, where a giant ape was being shot by enough automatic weapons to arm a militia’s attack on innocent women and schoolchildren.

“Hey, man, sit down,” Jerry said, motioning to Mr. Brown’s recliner. I asked Mr. Brown if it was OK for me to use it. Jerry answered first: “He won’t care.” Mr. Brown tried to smile and nodded. Then he crawled up in the bed next to the reclining chair.

I gave Jerry two packs of eight Keebler cheese-sandwich-crackers and a Diet Sprite that I had smuggled into the old-people’s home in the lining of my Iowa State jacket, the black one that my old college friend, Captain Kirk, gave me before the Bible ripped away his formerly loving and loved demeanor. “For God so loved the world, but he doesn’t love you, Champo,” is pretty much a direct quote from our final conversation five years ago. Another story, but if you believe the Captain, I’m going to Hell. I hope I don’t have to go to a Memory Care Ward first.  Rather be eaten by dogs.

So, while Jerry enjoyed his snacks – I got him what he requested the week before – we both watched the movie, “Rampage.”

The Rock, as good an actor as Pat Boone and Tab Hunter ever were, was trying to save this giant, genetically altered ape for an hour or so, as he helped fight off evil government forces bent on eliminating this not-necessarily-so-gentle giant from the face of the Earth.  

“Damn, this is going to end up like Chico, the Monkey,” I said, as cops and government thugs kept emptying AR’s into the ape.

“No, I think George lives,” Jerry said, as we watched a big cargo plane carrying the giant ape burn and head earthward.

The Rock and an equally talented actor named Naomie Harris and some other random official parachuted from the cargo bay of the crashing plane.

George, the name of the ape, is trapped in the plane that is on fire and subsequently crashes into the jungle or weeds or a soundstage in Century City.

As the plane explodes on impact in the weeds, there is concern on The Rock’s face – he has a couple of weapons in his rich acting arsenal, and concern is among them.

“Dead like Chico,” I said again.

Jerry looked kind of angered by my insistence on the dead primate scenario.

I’d never seen the movie before, and I was hoping the fiery crash and explosion was the end of this 2019 film that blends elements of “Old Frankenstein” with “King Kong” with “ET,” all tied together by the best acting since “Kojak.” I’ve watched “Kojak” a couple of times lately on one of those oldies channels. I remembered it from my youth as being a good show. It’s stodgy crap. Who loves you, baby?

Certainly not me.  Although I’m a sucker for “The Rockford Files.” I identify with Jim.

Anyway, between nodding off, Jerry is watching this film attentively. He’d seen it before. And, he assures me again that George doesn’t die.

Jerry, who I love, is in the Memory Care Ward for a four-month stretch now. “I don’t remember how or when I got here,” he’ll say.  “I guess I’m not getting out anytime soon.”

Never is not soon, and he knows it. He is not happy about it, but he’s making an effort at living the best life possible.

And that means he’s spending his nights across a dorm room from a guy I have surmised is perhaps John Brown. Or Tom Brown. Or Joe Brown.

I know he’s “Mr. Brown” – as in the husband of the woman who had a lovely daughter in the old Herman’s Hermits song. I never cared much for the pretenders to The Beatles’ throne from Merseyside or anywhere.  But I have spent time with “Herman” – Peter Noone—and found him to be a kind and humble man. A one-trick pony? Sure, but he cashed in on the State Fair circuit.  The only time I’ll cash in is when I cash in my chips before incineration or when I’m eaten by dogs.  

Jerry took another bite from one of the cheese crackers from my contraband hauled out of my coat lining. One eight-pack was cheese-and-cheese, the other cheese-and-peanut butter.

He spilled the Sprite. “Fuck, now I’m going to have to change before dinner,’’ he said. Around these parts, wet trousers are common, but it’s not usually because a fella spills his Sprite.

“I’ll bring you two next time,” I said to Jerry, who stopped worrying about his trousers and focused on the ape movie. 

I’m still not sure of the protocol of sneaking food in from the outside. The Memory Care Ward dieticians make sure that their charges in the special, double-locked and guarded section of the nursing home have three balanced meals as well as snacks.

Problem is the snacks are things like bananas and sugar-free pudding if you are diabetic, which Jerry is and for a long time had a sore on his foot to prove it. It’s healed up now, he tells me.. 

“They don’t give us any junk food,” Jerry noted a few weeks ago. “I’d like it if you could get some in here next time.”

His first choice was potato chips. He wanted as many as he could eat, and the dietician told me they only serve chips – perhaps a handful – when sandwiches are on the lunch menu.

“I really want chips,” he offered again before I left the nursing home that day after I helped cajole the nurses and such into giving him at least another banana and a drink.  They had the banana. He wanted a soda, but those are out.  Crannapple juice, water and some types of milk are the refreshments.

The chips he wanted in his room so he could dig into them while watching “Gunsmoke,’’ the famous true-to-life docuseries about a tall marshal who enjoys gunning down folks, good and bad, if they so much as cast a glance at his favorite whore, Miss Kitty.

Actually, most of the folks deserve it, if, for no other reason, they know there’s a 100 percent chance they’ll be bleeding out in the dust as Marshal Dillon laughs and fixes himself a hand-rolled.  Better than being eaten by dogs, like poor Chico.

The dietician came into the room just after Jerry finished his crackers.

“It’s lunchtime, Mr. Jerry. It’s lunchtime, Mr. Brown.”

Jerry reached into his dresser for a dry pair of trousers and Mr. Brown rolled out of the fetal position on his bed and smiled. Clearly he was hungry. I felt badly I didn’t bring him crackers, too.

But then I’ve found I like all these people and I’m too poor to be their junk food Super Fly.

So, The Rock still in pursuit of George, the ape, I got up from Mr. Brown’s recliner, and I thanked him for letting me use it.

Walking slowly down the hall, using my cane, the nurse who had let me into Jerry’s room looked, with nothing bordering lust, at my very slow stride.

“I thought you were going to stay here with Mr. Jerry.”

I picked up my cane and swung it at her. Nah, I picked it up and forcefully added some pep to my step. I don’t like to be viewed as a soon-to-be client at an old-people’s home.

She let me out through the locked security door just as I heard one of the residents holler “He’s a knucklehead.”  I didn’t think she was talking about me. Maybe Mr. Brown, who was right behind me.

On the other side of the locked security door, the regular residents were playing cornhole and listening to a Willie Nelson record.

Ol' Flap chips away at his own loneliness and brings back a stream of old memories when Jerry meets "Elvis" and Matt and Bob (Dillon and Dylan) enter the scene for bloodshed and song

An innocent bystander, perhaps a local deputy sheriff, caught this photo of Jerry Manley, Tim Ghianni and Rob Dollar in the summer of 1981. Or sometime near then. We had just finished our evening's work at the daily newsroom.

 “Jerry, Jerry … Jerry….” I said as I sat in the party room in the Memory Care Ward.  I didn’t say it loudly – I had gotten in trouble with one old, black-dyed-hair woman a few weeks ago for my volume when talking to my best friend.

I reached over, a foot or so from my chair, and softly shook my best pal’s right arm. Jerry Manley – my running buddy for 50 years – stirred slightly from his nod-off state-of-mind and looked at me.

“What?” he asked, sleep, no irritation, in his voice.

“Jerry: just say ‘Elvis!’” I told him. He looked at me in his attempt to focus and wake up.

“Quick. I’ll tell you why later, but just say ‘Elvis,’” I said.

He didn’t fully open his eyes.

“Elvis,” he semi-hollered, before nodding off again.

The room, filled with kind folks whose minds have been blown askew by age and illness, erupted with applause. There even was a cheer of sorts from a guy I later learned was “Mr. Brown,” who – it turns out – is Jerry’s roommate, Joe or Bob or Tom Brown or whatever.  Maybe John, as in “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave …” or whatever.  

All eyes in the Memory Ward party room focused on my friend.  

“He got it,” said one of two women with guitars who were set up, with a small amp or two, speakers and microphones in front of the TV where “Gunsmoke” played silently. Even though the TV was muted, I saw Matt Dillon gun down an outlaw or someone he just plain didn’t like much.  There’s blood on the streets in the town of Dodge City.

I’d been in the Memory Care Ward for about 45 minutes by the time of the Elvis incident.  The dietician, who did not know I had a fairly large bag of Lay’s potato chips jammed into the arm of the Sports Illustrated Titans jacket draped over my arm, had been glad to see me when she let me through the double-locked secure door separating the regular nursing home. 

“Thanks for coming to visit him,” she said. “He’s right in there. I love him. I love a man who doesn’t say much.”   

She pointed me to the party room, where everyone looked happy, though some looked downright confused.

Many memories have vanished.  Jerry, for example, can’t remember a good chunk of the most recent 30 years of his life. 

“I didn’t know you were coming today,” he had said when I slid into the chair next to him in the party room.  He never knows I’m coming. Heck, he doesn’t really know the day. Course it really doesn’t matter much to me.  

I spend a lot of time laughing with him, reminding him of the days when we tilted at windmills and often lost.  The impossible dream unrealized.

Anyway, back to the Elvis incident.

Jerry was among a score and probably more of his cohorts in the party room. Two nicely aged women who called themselves “The Senior Singers” or something like that, were the focus of the eyes, both cloudy and bright. Though some, like Jerry’s, were mostly closed.

Lovely women, perhaps in their 70s, they play the nursing home circuit. I assume they get some sort of grant money or stipend. They also – like me – are rewarded by the fact they are perhaps the youngest people in the room.

Jerry is the youngster of the clientele, by my guess.  And he’s nine days older than me. We used to celebrate our November 9 and November 18 (1951) birthdays by burning away the carbon from dusk to dawn, beer and Scots whiskey were our lighter fluids. And, generally our friends – many of whom were still alive back then – joined us.  But we literally were the last men standing and the first ones to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle the next afternoon.

“Swallow this,” I’d say, proffering a hand with aspirin or similar potion in it to Jerry as we’d start our days.  We’d wash it down with coffee – I drank 40 cups a day back then, down to about 15 cups these days, as age has eaten away at my general physical stamina.

The two women were singing standards, both country and pop, and sometimes pausing after a song to ask the crowd if they remembered who sang it on recordings.

“Oh! Susana” seemed to be among the favorites, as the crowd sang the chorus.  “… Don’t you cry for me, for I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee…” or something like that.

The “Theme from Maverick” also was a favorite, if I’m recalling correctly.

“The Fish Cheer!” was an uplifter for them all, as they flashed middle fingers into the air. I made that up.

But then there truly was “I Saw the Light!” that had those who could up on their feet dancing.  Mr. Brown got up by himself, clapped his hands and sang along. Doing some sort of solo buck-dancing that reminded me of “Deliverance” for some reason. 

A couple more songs were about God and mercy as they apparently gave thanks for the fact their lives are continuing inside this ward. Hell, I believe they even did “Forever Young,” which may have led to some later confusion. Or maybe it was “Lay, Lady, Lay.” Yeah, I know that one has adult themes, but these people are not only adults, they are post-adults, so they can handle it.

“She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round The Mountain,” was perhaps the most popular, for both singing and dancing.

Hell, I even joined on that, trying to get my buddy to join me on the “She’ll be riding six white horses when she comes” line that always reminds me of a favorite encounter with a white-horseback-riding blonde in Marion, Iowa, 48 years ago. She got a saddle for me to use when I rode along. Long damn time ago.

I was about to lean over and tell Jerry about that horsey adventure, when the Senior Singers burst into “Love Me Tender,” the great Elvis song from the movie of that title.

Afterward, the younger of the two singers said: “Do you know this was from a movie about the Civil War? It starred a handsome young man from Memphis. Any guesses who that was? He sang the song, too.”

“Bob Dylan?” one man asked, (I’m telling the truth). I got up and crossed the room and yelled “No! You crazy old fuck” right in his face. He spit at me and recited the “Talkin’ John Birch Society Paranoid Blues.”

Nah. Again, sometimes my thoughts are more coarse than I am in real life, where I portray an old softie.

“Sinatra?”   “Paul Anka?”  “Tony Bennett?” “Neil Diamond?”  The names of the folks who sang the Great American Songbook were flowing across the room.

Since I’ve still got too many marbles to be eligible in this contest, that’s when I got Jerry to spout out “Elvis!” and receive applause for his mental acumen. I don’t think there were any prizes.

“Hey, man, I’ve got some contraband potato chips in my jacket,” I said to him after his triumph. “Let’s go back to your room.”

He’d been craving potato chips, and they limit him to a few on days when they serve a handful with sandwiches for lunch.

Food is not supposed to be sneaked in from “the outside.” At least that’s what Jerry told me, the first time he requested chips.

We stayed while these quite talented singers finished their set. “They like this song down in New Orleeeens,” one of them said. “This will be our last song today.”

“When the Saints Go Marching In!” brought those who could to their feet to be a part of the number and sing along.

I looked at Jerry and said: “This is a good one for us to leave on.”

So, with Mr. Brown and the other sweet saints – I really like these people, which portends well for my future, I suppose – dancing and singing and clapping the beat, Jerry and I went out in the hallway and to his room.

“I’ve got these for you,” I said, pulling the chips out of my sleeve.

“Man, that’s great,” he said, genuine surprise in his voice, as he grabbed the yellow bag and struggled to tear it open.

For the next 20 minutes, he ate chip after chip. “NewsNation” cable news channel was on the TV. Normally, Jerry wants cowboy shows, and I offered to see if “Wagon Train” or “Have Gun, Will Travel” was on.

“I don’t know how to change the remote, but this is OK. I don’t understand what they are talking about though. What’s AI?”

Now, I can’t explain artificial intelligence. I’m happy enough with the real stuff as long as I can hang onto it.

“Remember when we tried to piss on Max’s car as he was driving to work?” I asked, changing the subject as Elon Musk came onto the TV screen.

He laughed as I told him the story of two stone-cold sober, 35-year-old journalists of some renown standing on the overpass and emptying our bladders.  That was 37 years ago, and almost no traffic was on Interstate 24 at 3 or 3:30 a.m.

We had decided it was a good idea to salute Max Moss, perhaps the truest “newspaperman” except me who I’ve known. We just thought he’d like us to note his passing as he drove from the Moss estate off Fort Campbell Boulevard down to his wire editor’s job at the Nashville Banner. He’d been fucked by corporate at the paper in Clarksville, so he took the Banner job and the hourlong commute.

We didn’t hit anyone with our pitiful drizzle.  The little car we aimed at may have been Max’s Honda, but sometimes, men know, aim is not true. Also, it was 25 feet to the interstate below. Streams turn to light mist at best.

I should add that Max was beloved and respected by us both. It was just a 3:30 a.m. “good idea.” At least we were smart enough not to stand atop the rail.  

“I’d guess we had no chance of getting him,” Jerry told me the other day, after I described the night’s activities. “I sure liked old Max.”

“I loved him. He was my mentor,” I replied. “He was one of my favorite people of all time. I loved his wife, Merrily, too.

“She died a year or two ago, Max about a year before her,” I said.

“I didn’t know that Max was gone,” Jerry said. “Or I didn’t remember that. He was a great guy.”

“The best boss ever. Remember I nicknamed him ‘The Silver Hammer?’” I asked Jerry.

He laughed, remembering I’d given Max that name because of The Beatles’ song “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”

Before Max died, I told him of that old “behind-the-back” nickname, and he approved, although he was more of an Elvis guy than a Beatles guy. He’d for sure have won the “Love Me Tender” singer question.

The dietician lady came into the room as Jerry was digging into the chips. She ignored it. Instead, she was there to help roommate Mr. Brown with some hygiene matters.

I figured she’d say something as Jerry kept crunching.

I told him I’d be back soon with more chips after she left.  “You want me to carry that empty bag out of here? Get rid of the evidence?”

He laughed and tossed the yellow bag across the room.

I needed to get back to my home office, where I’m a professional author in fast pursuit of bankruptcy.

We walked, arm-over-shoulder down the hallway, where the dietician met us, near the party room.

She had a glass of Cranapple juice for him.

“Man, I am thirsty,” Jerry said, reaching for the tall, plastic tumbler.

The dietician let me out the secure door to the “regular” wing of the nursing home.

“Thank you. Thank you very much for taking care of Jerry. He’s the best,” I told her.

The door closed behind me and suddenly I was interrupting a heated game involving aces and jokers and stacks of tiles.

Henry Mancini’s “Moon River” played on the Muzak system.

 

Golden hours in the memory care ward where potato chips are rare, Matt Dillon kills folks and we laugh about the Little Ole Opry the night Jerry rolled his blue Prelude to save a dog

Rob Dollar took this picture of Jerry Manley, me and Jim Lindgren while we met for Flapjacks and flapjacks 12 years ago or so. The restaurant is dead, and we're not doing so well ourselves.
 

Festus, Marshal Matt Dillon’s bewhiskered deputy, was asked what he was going to do after an obviously unsavory character took over the big man’s desk.

In an instant, Festus had his Colt six-shooter pointed up beneath the bad guy’s jaw.

“First, I’m going to decide whether I’m going to fight you or just splatter what little brains you have on the ceiling,” he told the guy who crooked cattlemen had installed in Dillon’s chair while the marshal was “missing … somewhere out in the valley ….” 

My best friend -- at least the longest-living survivor of a lifestyle some might have labeled “self-destructive,” while to us it was the time of our lives – stopped snoring long enough to see if Festus was going to blow the guy’s brains all over the ceiling of the U.S. Marshal’s office in Dodge City, Kansas.

“This is better,” Jerry Manley said, as he swung his legs off the mattress so he could sit up in bed.  “I didn’t want to watch that news you had on. I like to watch TV.

“Game shows and cowboys.”

“Game shows are probably good for you,” I said, after Festus put his gun away and let the bad guy leave the marshal’s office. “If you play along, they’ll help keep your brain active,” I said.

Jerry just shrugged at that. He doesn’t have a lot of hope of recovering some of the phases and stages of his life’s memories, he reckons. Still, even watching “Jeopardy” can stimulate, even if you don’t know answers to questions like “Little Joe Cartwright is connected to the Andromeda by this big snake.” (Answer: “Who is Adam Cartwright?” “Who is Pernell Roberts?” also would be accepted.)

Joking aside, my beloved friend is fighting to hang onto his memories. It’s why this long-haired relic of another age (me … Jerry’s daughter Mary Jane has given her pop a close-cropped and dandy look) so often is sitting in the recliner next to his bed when he wakes up. He remembers me, and I help him remember the who, what, when, where, why and how factors of a journalist’s life.

“You remember the night you almost killed yourself to save a dog?” I asked him.

He smiled as that simple question sparked memories of one of our marathon nights of harmless – to all but us – excess.

Like the time we went to the Little Ole Opry nightclub in the backroom of my friend, John Maddox’s package store (that’s what they used to call liquor stores back in the civilized days of the 20^th Century).

Jerry smiled and contributed a chuckle or two as we talked about that night. For a few Fridays and Saturdays one spring in the mid-1980s, the Opry performers would finish their sets and skits at the Grand Ole Opry House out in Donelson, and they’d rush up to the room behind Pal’s Package Store in Clarksville. It was a nice room, of the old-fashioned gangster-era nightclub variety, with round tables and red, subdued lighting. E.T., Porter, Little Jimmy, Lorrie Morgan and more would play for a few hours.

(The club was short-lived, closed after the real Ole Opry, a bunch of three-piece suit corporate guys, sent their lawyers to Pal’s Package Store, and sternly objected (or worse).)

But it was wonderful while it lasted. They sold beer by the bucket full of bottles. Jerry and I had a few buckets full one night (or probably more.) He dropped me off at the house where I lived unhappily (another life) while plotting my escape.  It probably was 2 a.m. when he dropped me off, and he began his 10-mile drive to the house he lived in in the St. Bethlehem community of Clarksville.

On his way home, probably a quarter-mile from his house, a dog ran out in front of Jerry’s blue Honda Prelude. Rather than hit the dog, Jerry steered off the road, rolling his car a few times.

He was all bruised up and missed a shift or two at The Tennessean (he was commuting from Clarksville back then while plotting his own future). Fact is, I didn’t know anything about the wreck until I got to work at The Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle at 2 p.m. or so and, as was customary, dialed Jerry at The Tennessean copy desk. He wasn’t there. He’d been in a wreck, I was told by Nick Vanocur, another friend (he died alone in a fleabag residential motel a few years ago.)

Nick said he thought Jerry was OK, but I quickly hung up the phone and dialed the Manley estate in St. B. He invited me by after I got off work. He was really beaten to hell by the incident. He was stiff, bruised and scratched up. I poured him a bit of the Cutty Sark bottle we’d finish that evening.

There’s a lot more to it, but this was the part I decided to focus on the other day when I worked to pull Jerry from the partial fog that has him in a Memory Care ward.

  We were “reliving” that tale – I was telling it while he was listening – when he shook his head and slapped his knee.

“I shoulda hit that damn dog,” he muttered.

“You never would do that, Jerry. You know that.”

We laughed, though.  And then he asked me for some potato chips.

The reason I tell these stories to him is simple enough. First of all, it jars some of the calcium loose that is clogging up his brain. Like the game shows, there is something to be gained by listening to me.

Granted, they are sometimes two-hour-long, one-sided conversations, but Jerry stays alert and smiles when something I have said touches what’s left of a funny bone for a guy who pretty much is confined to a large dormitory room with someone he doesn’t know. His name varies from Bob to Thomas to “that guy.”  

Jerry seldom leaves his room to go down to the party room. I think he got pissed at the other patients when we were told we were being too loud for them to hear what John Denver was saying in some stupid TV movie a couple of weeks ago.

Jerry, who doesn’t say much, wasn’t loud. I was, to be heard above the blasting television and the truly mindless chatter of those gathered beneath quilts in the memory care ward.

I know it made Jerry mad that we were being told to be quiet. And since the barbs and empty eyes were leveled at me, he got angrier.

Now he has calmed down.  “I just lay here and watch cowboy shows and game shows,” he said, as he forked a bit at the stone-cold breakfast that had been left at the foot of his bed two hours ago.

“I can’t eat this,” he said to me, forcing a bite of stone-cold bacon into his mouth. "I don’t know why they left it here and didn’t take me down to the breakfast room. I didn’t know this was here.”

When the nurse/dietician came in, I was a little stern. “How’s he going to keep any strength if you just leave his food here while he’s sleeping?” I said.  I threw the plate of cold eggs and the fixings in her face and she fell to the floor.  Nah, that’s not true. But she did have to think deeply for an answer.

“I came and got him at breakfast time,” she said. “But he told me he didn’t want to come down there to eat.

“I’ll make sure he eats something at lunchtime.”

I told her how much he misses potato chips in the memory care ward.

Jerry and I talked about food and women, newspapers and The Beatles. He let out a couple of fine farts,  proof that he hasn’t lost it completely.

Festus was going out to the valley to find Marshal Dillon, according to the dialogue on the blasting TV. “Matthew will come back and take care of this. He won’t like it a bit that this guy is taking his spot.”

Doc Adams agreed, running his right hand along Festus’s inseam.

Nah. But he did agree.

Jerry and I watched for awhile. I always like to watch Dillon commit cold-blooded murder at the end of the show.

“I don’t think I’ll want any lunch,” he had said to the nurse.

I reminded him that if he wanted to be healthy he needed to eat. I felt like my Grandma Ghianni as I said it.

I hugged him the next time he woke up from fitful slumber

“I really like having you out here,” he said, adding that for the most part he doesn’t want company. “You and I have gotten old. Together. Don’t know how. Doesn’t seem so long ago that we were having all that fun and making movies.”

As I walked out toward the “secure door,” so the guards could let me into the “regular” nursing home, I ducked my head into the dietician’s office and asked her again to “make sure he eats.”

She was next to the cafeteria/common/party room, where the people were mostly sleeping, mouths open, while Festus found Marshal Dillon, who climbed up on his chestnut horse so he could get back to town and gun down the lawman-impersonator hired by evil cattle barons.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Dodge City,” I said to myself, parroting angry directions yelled at me, Jerry, Rob Dollar, John Staed, Jim Lindgren and Ricky G. Moore 42 years ago.

“You don’t do that sort of thing in Clarksville,” we were instructed after a task force of armed cops interrupted our tickertape parade through the streets of the Queen City of the Cumberland. We’d been passing hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes and a Jack bottle or two filled with Coke, props for our movie grand finale parade. Cops don’t like freedom of expression.

“I’m going to talk about that parade arrest next time,” I said, inside my weary brain, as I walked to the secure escape hatch from the memory care ward.

 I was let through the double-locked doors and walked through the other part of the nursing home, where about 20 people were playing bingo in a hallway.

I wondered if they’d been given potato chips.