An old crony from Santa Fe went west on Saturday in Utah. Don Gale finally lost his long battle with colon cancer.
Don was a cyclist, a skier, and a snowboarder, one of several real-life wrenches whose character traits I shamelessly exploited when creating my cartoon character the Mud Stud. We hadn’t seen each other for years, and I feel badly about that now. But we exchanged notes on Facebook recently, and I was struck by how how courageously he was pushing on to the Big Finish Line. “Inspirational” is a term that has become cliché, but not in Don’s case. He made death seem a part of life, which of course it is.
Happily, like most of the 7.2 billion people on the planet, Don did not require my close attention; he was surrounded by family and friends at the end. My condolences to those who knew and loved him.
Over at Teh Twitters yesterday a gent praised a non-rant I’d written way back in 2002, saying it was one of his “all-time favorites.”
I had forgotten about it — these things vanish from my consciousness about a nanosecond after I hit the “Send” button — so I looked it up, and y’know, I kinda liked it myself. Even an old blind dog finds a tasty Milk-Bone now and then, it seems.
Written when we still lived in Weirdcliffe, it was prompted by a reader’s complaint (one of many, actually) that my stuff was too negative, which it can be. That my VeloNews.com column was christened “Friday’s Foaming Rant” didn’t help. A label like that tends to set a certain tone, and when I wandered off the Rantinista reservation other critics would jeer, “Call that a rant?” You can’t win.
But if two of us liked it, it must not be entirely lame, so here it is, reprinted in all its faded glory for your entertainment.
Nov. 22, 1963, may have been the day when I first realized that all was not as it seemed.
I was sitting in front of my fifth-grade class at Randolph AFB outside San Antonio, reading aloud to the other kids (yes, even at age 9 I had the mellifluous speaking voice we have all come to know and love), when The Authorities announced via loudspeaker that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
That was it for school. Stunned, confused, we trudged home and, with the rest of the world, watched on TV as the young president was buried and Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson sworn in to replace him.
Yeah, right. Replace Jack Kennedy. Like that could ever happen.
Forget everything you’ve learned about him since. For a 9-year-old Irish-American, JFK was as good as it got. Like my old man, he’d been in the war; like me, JFK was a swimmer. “PT 109” sailed well ahead of “The Ten Commandments” in my personal mythology, and “Profiles in Courage” may have been the first work of non-fiction that I ever read.
JFK wasn’t some baldheaded old warhorse like President Eisenhower, or a sweaty, shifty-eyed rodent like Richard M. Nixon — he was young, and brash, and when he went eyeball to eyeball with the Commies, guess who blinked first? Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, that’s who. Made it a little easier to crouch under the desk during duck-and-cover drills, knowing that Jack had our back.
Then, in a wink of an eye, he was dead. Gone. And some jug-eared Texican was calling himself the president. LBJ used Randolph as a landing strip whenever he had a hankerin’ to visit the ranch, and we went to see him a time or two, but it felt like bullshit to me. This guy was the president? Says fuckin’ who?
In the October-November issue of AARP The Magazine, Bob Schieffer recalls covering the assassination as night police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He likens the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy to a key scene in “The Wizard of Oz.”
Remember how the movie started out in black-and-white, and then Dorothy opens her front door into this vibrant Technicolor? That’s how I think of the Kennedy administration. He brought style and grace, and inspired a generation to do something for their country.
I’ll carry that a step further. The assassination of John F. Kennedy revealed to some of us, for the first time, that there is a man behind the curtain, a shadowy, furtive figure that warrants our close and undivided attention, no matter what the Wizard says up front.
And while the Wizard loves to work his magic in rich, warm colors, the world often shows itself to us most truly in stark black and white.
• Editor’s note: As you might expect, Charles P. Pierce has some thoughts on this subject, too.
Marvin J. Berkman, performing in our living room back in the day.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been four years since Marvin J. Berkman packed up his guitar for the final time and took his music elsewhere.
Marv’ and his sweetheart Judy were the best neighbors anyone could ask for, so when he passed on, and Judy decided to move away to be closer to family, we decided to buy the house they lived in. Just couldn’t bear the thought of some stranger getting the place.
I’m no mystic, but I like to think that one of the reasons our guests enjoy their stays at the House Back East™ so much is that some small part of the old saloon musician hung around after closing time to play a quiet encore, help them feel at home.
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