This is a post for the Prichard, Webster, Ferrell, and Wynn families. i am posting it here rather than Facebook as many of my kin receive notice these posts through email and not all are on Facebook. i have numerous others of folks from the paternal side of Jewell relatives. i think these might hold interest for many of those kinfolks.
Last night, i sat outside and hurriedly wrote of Mike Dixon’s passing. As i noted, it was a tough night.
i think i have corrected all of the errors that were originally in that post.
This morning, i began to consider how to deal with Mike not being there when i go home (or perhaps he will be there when i really go home). i returned to a poem i have posted here before when other friends and family have left for the other side if not too soon, sooner than i hoped. This poem is for me, written after observing my parents in their early nineties.
There is one less of us waiting tonight. So my wait will be more difficult. Hopefully, repeating this poem will make it a bit easier:
Waiting Grace
the old folks sit in the too warm room,
television images blink randomly,
the mute button silences the room
although they do not know as the hearing aids
lie on their respective tables with other
paraphernalia required for the elderly;
they sit knowing the time will come soon:
waiting grace.
Noble,
Sad,
All is right with the world.
They and the remaining few of their generation
know how to demonstrate
waiting grace.
No threat, no fret, no fear
shows in their countenance:
they do what they can and
what they can decreases perceptively daily,
faculties fade and with the fading,
the joys of their industry escaping slowly:
waiting grace.
They have endured the test of time when
times were harder and
simpler and
they hold to those codes of right and
simplicity and
goodness to the neighbor, friend and
to service:
waiting grace.
Gloria called just after 8:00 p.m. PDT tonight. Mike Dixon’s number appeared on the screen of my phone. i was thinking Mike was going to give me an assessment of Vanderbilt football, basketball, or baseball when i answered.
When i heard Gloria’s quavering voice i knew before she told me that Mike died suddenly today. She told me she just wanted to be sure i heard this from her.
i don’t think i have my emotions in check enough to express my feelings about this news. Mike and i played sports either against each other or with each other from about 1956, perhaps earlier, until we spent our time on golf courses every time i came back home. And when we were there in June, we had lunch with Mike and Gloria at Five Oaks, laying out plans for when we would come back home next.
i will be coming back for Mike, but it won’t be to play golf.
We began at Castle Heights the same year, 1958. I was an incoming freshman. Mike and Jimmy Hatcher transferred from Lebanon High School to Heights that fall as sophomores.
Mike and i played baseball together at Heights, against each other in Little League and the Babe Ruth League, and together in an uncountable backyard versions of the game, including whiffle ball adaptations where we had to use the stances of our favorite Pittsburgh Pirate players, then again for Lebanon’s American Legion team.
We were huge Pirate fans, and the story our celebration of their 1961 World Series win has been documented here before.
We played basketball on Height’s junior varsity, and somewhere around a half-million hours of pickup games at most gyms in Lebanon. At Heights, we would have others join us on in the Heights gym at lunch and after some sport practice or military drill for more pickup games. And more times than i can count, he and i would play one-on-one in that gym until Ms. Fahey, who lived in the apartment in the front of the gym, would kick us out and we would both get our just due for being late for supper at home.
We were teammates on the rather remarkable Texas Boot Company fast pitch softball team in our high school summers. And i followed him as sports editor of the Heights’ award winning newspaper, The Cavalier. We continued our discussion of sports journalism until just last week.
i will not expand on my stories about Mike here. I’m just a bit too raw to go that deep right now.
i have many close friends back home. Mike was one of the closest. He, Jimmy Hatcher, Earl Major, Mike Gannaway, Jimmy Gamble, and Lee Dowdy were my closest running mates at Heights. They are gone. Lee Dowdy and i are still here. “Town boys” they called us.”
It is not a good evening.
Mike, i love you. You are a good man.
There are likely to be a number of posts like this one coming from me. Some, like this one, i may have posted before, but those earlier posts have either been forgotten or i liked the subject so much, i posted it again because i’m just too damn lazy to look up the old one and repost.
Summer, 1975. The USS Hollister (DD 783) was one of the destroyers in Destroyer Squadron 9, home-ported out of Long Beach. i was her chief engineer. The sea stories gathered in my time aboard, just shy of two years, are almost limitless. But this little radio “wire note” exchange and what generated it remains one of my favorites.
The reserve squadron deployed in the summer of 1974 to Hawaii and back to its homeport. En route, the U.S. destroyers conducted exercises with the British Navy, notably the HMS Jupiter, a British Navy Leander class frigate.
Upon arrival, i took leave, and my wife Kathie and our two-year old daughter Blythe flew over. We had secured an old housing unit on the back side of Fort DeRussy, the U.S. Army’s “rest and recreation” area on Waikiki. Our tin roofed house, complete with a momma cat, was adequate, which was all we needed as we spent a wonderful week on the beach and seeing the sights. It was quite rudimentary compared to the megaplex Hale Koa Hotel for military personnel that stands there now amidst the Hilton, Sheraton and Trump resort hotels. But boy, was it wonderful.
While we were enjoying our time, toward the end of our port visit, the Jupiter and DESRON 9 ships put together a picnic over on Pearl Harbor. i was not interested, but nearly all of the officers of the Hollister not on duty attended. There was the usual Navy picnic fare and lots of friendly competition.
The Hollister’s communications officer was Wendell Parker. He was very good at his job. He was also very gregarious. During the picnic, he met his counterpart on the Jupiter. They got along very well and spent nearly the entire picnic talking to each other.
His counterpart was Prince Charles.
The ships sortied together, standing out of Pearl Harbor. i was up to my neck in distillation plant problems (we called them “evaps”), another story. But as the Jupiter headed west and the Hollister with her sister ships turned toward Long Beach, the two comm officers traded this wire note:
It seems the prince possessed my kind of humor. i was sorry i didn’t get to meet him.
But you know what? i wouldn’t trade it for what i had:
It is after my underachieving Padres hung for a win in a crazy race for the last wild card spot that just shouldn’t be a part of baseball, engineered entertainment for money, and i find myself embarrassed for checking the scoreboards. It is quite a while after Maureen retreated to our bedroom to read a book on her kindle before falling asleep. The light is on so she is still working on completing her read. The animals are all put to bed.
i walked out to check the stars. They are still there in their place right along with Venus and Jupiter and Mars. So far, so good.
i began to wrap up when i stumbled across the post with the poem i wrote about Judy Collins a couple of years ago. It jarred another thought about her and another singer.
Back in the old days, the Subic Naval Station was a legendary spot for sailors, officers included. It was the doorstep to the bridge across “Shit River,” aptly named, to Olongapo, the city that was either the closest thing to Fiddler’s Green on earth, a modern reality of No Name City from “Paint Your Wagons,” or a den of iniquity. Probably a combination of the three and a bunch more. Wild until the U. S. of A. pulled out, and the world changed, at least in the Southwest Pacific.
There was this woman…Actually, there were two women.
Laverne Baker was one. She had become someone i adored when she came out with her 45 RPM “Jim Dandy,” even though i knew she wasn’t singing about me in 1956 when i was twelve years old. When she sang “I Cried a Tear” two years later, i was infatuated. In 1969, she was admitted to Subic’s Naval Hospital suffering from bronchial pneumonia contracted during a USO tour in Vietnam. According to Wikipedia, a friend suggested she stay in Subic as the director of the Marine’s NCO club on the base. She did. For 22 years until the base closed. If you were a good officer, you could be invited to the Marine NCO club, or if you were a sneaky officer, you could wiggle your way through the protocol to attend her singing her songs. i did that twice. i remained enamored, perhaps more so.
But the lady i’m relating to here was Baby. i do not know her last name. Everyone just knew her as Baby.
Baby was about five feet tall and to put it politely (i think) a bit rotund. But that young lady — actually, she was somewhere between 18 and 50. It seems like she was there forever, but i really don’t know. She was the stuff of legend. She sang. Lord, did she sing. She could cover anything. Incredible voice.
i first heard Baby sing at the Chuckwagon, the county music themed burger bar across the street from the more formal Subic “O” club. i was drinking a San Miguel while playing the slot machines just opposite the bar. The band in the dining area started up and Baby sang a Loretta Lynn song. Nailed it. i no longer can recall which of Loretta’s songs it was. And then Baby took me back. She sang Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces,” a song i loved so much i would play it amidst my rock ‘n roll songs on the WCOR top forty weekend shows.
i had not ventured from my slot machine and San McGoo, but then, i got up and walked around the wall of slot machines. She was in front of the band, a pretty woman in a mumu. She could flat sing, and boy howdy, she sang everywhere on that base. She sang at the Cubi Point (the aviator’s world) O’Club, and as i mentioned the Chuckwagon. She did not sing at the Quarterdeck, at least not when i was there. It was a small bar on the second deck of the Subic O’Club. They had a great jukebox and the waitresses would dance with the officers when they weren’t waitressing. But the Quarterdeck has too many stories of it’s own to delve into here.
But Baby was The Show in the main dining room, also ballroom of the Subic O’Club. The dining room was a vast place for formal dining. Great food. With a dance floor in the middle. One of our favorite songs of Baby’s in 1979/80 was “Send in the Clowns.” Stephen Sondheim wrote it and a grunch of folks sang it, but “Send in the Clowns” was Judy Collins’ song as far as i was concerned. And there in front of the dance floor ahead of the band was Judy Collins, about six inches shorter and about 25 pounds heavier, but if i closed my eyes, it was Judy Collins. That good.
The tables were full with couples who were stationed at the base and officers from the ships in port. The crazy perpetrators had their own table. Mike Peck, OW Wright, Pete Toennies, and yours truly. If i remember correctly, one of the more serious guys, Will Walls, was with us. It was December, just before we would spend Christmas in Hong Kong and New Year’s Eve and Day in Singapore as members of the staff for Amphibious Squadron Five. Bruce Brunn, the marine combat cargo officer could have been with us, but i don’t think so. Regardless, Baby was about half-way through her set. We knew one of the next songs would be “Send in the Clowns.” So the crazies plotted. Trouble.
As my song began, we slowly rose and moved to the side of the ballroom. When Baby reached the fourth stanza, she reached the lines “Send in the clowns / Don’t bother, they’re here. We waltzed, in line, around the dance floor.
As i recall (and i can recall just about anything, fact or fiction at this stage of the game as 42 years have rolled by, the O’clubs, the base, and Olongapo as we knew it are all gone), we received a standing ovation, along with Baby, of course, who stifled her laughter at us to get through the remaining lyrics.
Don’t know where Baby is. Judy is still around. Heard her sing “Send in the Clowns” at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco about three years ago. She is still the best.
And when i hear “Send in the Clowns” by anyone. i laugh while loving it…
i guess i’m still a clown at heart: Send in the Clown. Don’t bother, i’m here.