Requiem for Jack

(There are some losses in life that you do not recognize until much latter. This is a story about such a loss. This was originally written in August 2004, and published here July 2009 under the title “We Hardly Got to Know Him”. In recent weeks, I was given news archives and other information which fill out the story which I’ve included in this edition.)

When the muse is upon you what else can you do? You write the story that flows from the memories of time, penning words that paint the pictures you see in your mind so well as though it was only yesterday, but in reality was ages ago; in this case, a whole lifetime. When your years add up past the "threescore and ten", how is it memories can go so far back; memories that seem as fresh as yesterday, though so very long ago?

What tides of history have come and gone since those early days of our lives. The Berlin wall was yet to be built, but is now battered to dust. Wars were to be fought and lost or won. Mankind had not yet gone into outer space and walked on the moon. The Internet and personal computers were the stuff of science fiction, not the reality they are today Such were the days of that school year of 1955 - 1956.

As you came into the sleepy little rural town from the north, you would have seen the site where work was just commencing on the new high school building. Turn left at the main four corners, and a few blocks east you would see the then red brick school building setting on the north side of the street next to the Wesleyan Methodist church building. Behind the church, on the side street was Martin’s feed mill, abutting on the school property. To the east of the school was a house, then another feed mill, after that the railroad tracks and the local grain elevator.

The school building was a two-story brick affair, typical of many local rural school systems in the early part of the 20th century. A gymnasium at the back was connected to the main structure by a hallway to which also was attached two classrooms. It was in one of those classrooms where we who were fresh out of kindergarten, now sat in first grade as Miss Laser began teaching us those beginning basic reading and writing skills that were to be the foundation of our entire academic endeavor over those next twelve years of our life.

Many of us had been in the same Kindergarten class the year before. Of that particular class, eight of us would go all the way, K through 12, graduating together in 1967.

There was another elementary school in a little town about five miles north. Another first grade class was there, and in the seventh grade our two classes would become one as we came together at the new high school building. Many in that other Elementary class would also go though all their school life together. Over those years, in that inevitable camaraderie and shared experience, we together would forge a life long common bond with one another; becoming as it were, a band of brothers and sisters.

Of most of those who started with us, but did not finish with us, the reason was pretty simple. For whatever reason a family would move out of the area, and the one who had been our classmate would be gone, starting life in another town and school system. Over the years from time to time you might see this one or that one, but the shared experience and the resulting common bond was not there like it was with those still there. So over the years, here and there, we would lose a classmate, and usually another would move into the area from another school and take their place.

In all of that inevitable and understandable loss and gain, there was one loss of a very different nature. It was a very early loss in our first grade year; a loss that remains embedded in memory more than a half century latter. It is of this loss I would now speak.

They lived out on the Territorial Rd. south of town, just down the road from Shanour’s apple orchard. His name was Jack. He had an older sister Beverly. I have it in mind he may have been with us the year before in Kindergarten, but my memory may be foggy on that point.

Yet for all that, there is so much that I do not remember about him. At only six to seven years of age, we were still developing our social relationship skills. Though acquaintances, we had yet to develop the deeper relationships of friendship that would come later with growing maturity and age. For whatever reason, in my six-year-old mind I was wary of Jack. I had not got to a point where I was comfortable with him. It was though we were still sorting each other out, and needed more time to figure out how we related one to another, and what our individual place would be in each other’s life.

One time, someone sharpened a crayon in the pencil sharpener. That was a real “no-no”. I was asked if I had done it. In reality I was the “guilty” party, but had in the moment, not realized what I had done. I sought to shift the blame to Jack, who rightfully denied it, and testified that I was the culprit. Thankfully, Miss Laser didn’t “whoop” me, or get all over my case for messing up the pencil sharpener. I know now that a primary prerequisite for being a first grade teacher is a great deal of patience and forbearance. That’s why at that time Miss Laser was such a good one.

Some sixty-five years later, I wonder what would have happened between us as we grew older and moved on in to the upper grades. Would he and his family have stayed in the area? Would we have become friends? Very possible when you are at an age and place where most everyone was to some degree or another a friend. What things might we have done together? What parts of our lives might we have shared with one another, if not as close friends, at least as friendly acquaintances forging that common bond of shared experience as we went through our school years together?

But such was not to be. Whatever the answers may have been, only God Almighty knows.

I did not remember very well exactly when it happened, but now know it was in mid January. We were on the bus on our way to school. From somewhere, from someone the story came. Jack had been playing in the basement. He had lit some candles or something and there was a fire. He was burned badly and was in the hospital. His sister Beverly had run down into the basement and somehow had put out the flames that had been seeking to devour her little brother.

That was all we ever knew. A few days later his sister Beverly was back at school; both hands and wrists in bandages. In my simple six-year-old mind, I was expecting Jack to soon be out of the hospital and back in class. We as a class continued on with our studies.

But the weeks turned into a month, At one point during that time, I was with my parents at a store in Hillsdale. I overheard a lady in the store say she wanted to buy a toy for the little boy in the hospital who was badly burned. I thought of Jack. Was he the boy she was speaking of?

As his classmates, we had no idea how badly hurt he was. I do not remember that Miss Laser ever talked to us about what had happened to him. I think that was an honest decision on her part. She probably thought we were to young to understand, and it would be better not to bring it up or dwell on it. And who is to say she was not right in that judgment? There were some stories in the local newspaper about Jack’s accident, but we were far from being at an age and reading level to peruse the newspaper.

Back then there were not the medical advances that would in future years bring about specialized burn units, skin grafts, and all the other advances in medical care and pain management from over the past sixty some years that have saved lives that once could not be saved.

I remember, it was sometime around early March. Once again from somewhere, from someone we heard that Jack had died. A few days later a substitute teacher came into the room so Miss Laser could go to Jack’s funeral. That was it. Jack was gone. He didn’t come back.

If we had been older, perhaps we would have gone to the funeral too. But our impressionable and perhaps fragile six-year-old minds were not exposed at that time to that reality we would later face and grapple with in other circumstances of our life. I doubt any of us at that young age really understood the full meaning of what it meant to say, “Jack died.” We did not know enough to really miss him and mourn his loss.

We went on through school. As the years rolled on, I do not know if those of us who had known him gave much thought to him; perhaps a fleeting memory here and there. And from time to time after I graduated from the high school and left the area to go to college and the rest of my life, I would occasionally remember Jack; the vague picture in my mind.

Jack was the only classmate we lost by death during all our years of school. One classmate later lost his little brother to congestive heart failure. While in high school, a younger junior high student was killed in an automobile accident. One of our married high school classmates lost her husband in Vietnam. But of all of the Class of 1967, Jack was the only one so taken from us. We hardly got to know him…

How did any of us survive our childhood and teen years? How many naïve innocent risks we took. Add to those the calculated risks we took, along with the absolutely stupid risks we sometimes took, and all of that along with the normal risk of ordinary everyday life. We survived. We lived. Jack died. Why?

Miss Laser eventually retired from teaching. Over the years she taught, hundreds of kids got their start in reading and writing from her. Her legacy will be passed on in the lives of those of her students who went on to be teachers, lawyers, engineers, nurses, farmers, housewives, factory workers, and etc. She eventually passed away, her long journey of life completed. I have to believe that over the years, from time to time, she probably thought about that little seven-year-old boy she once had in her class; the little boy whose journey through life was so tragically brief.

I have a picture in my mind. Yes, it is an apocryphal picture, but it is a picture that will not easily go away, if ever. In that picture is a beautiful place where the sky is blue, the sun shines softly, a gentle breeze brushes the leaves of a green tree, and green grass provides a gentle turf. There is a school desk in the shade of the tree. A little boy sets at the desk, pencil in hand, working through his writing workbook. His teacher stands besides the desk watching, smiling, and encouraging him. There is joyous contentment in the faces of both student and teacher. Those lessons, abruptly interrupted so long ago, are resumed once more…

R.I.P.

Jack Dean Tuttle died March 2, 1956 in Washtenaw County, Michigan. He was buried in the Maple Grove Cemetery in Hudson, Michigan. His sister Beverly went on to marry her high school sweetheart, Floyd Allion. She passed away in 2004 from injuries sustained in an automobile accident.

Acknowledgment: News archives and other source material relating to this story were made available to me by Phyllis Rickard and her friends. My thanks to them for their help.

January 8, 2021 Copyright (C) January 2021. All rights reserved.

"Goodby to All That"

One of the top WW-1 memoirs is Robert Graves' "Goodby to all That" in which he details his experiances as a British Officer in the trenches of France. Graves' memories are compelling in and of themnselves and your WW-1 library is not complete without this work.

Of all the phrases and words Graves uses, the most memorable to me is the title itself; "Goodbye to All That". I supoose most of us at one time or another have reached a point in life when we said, or wanted to say, "Goodbye to all that".

Last week I said, "Goodby to all that." regarding my Facebook account. I haven't totally deactivated the account, but am taking a much needed sabbatical from it.

For some reason the Facebook platform has a way of amplifying all the good,the bad, and the ugly of social media. The bad and the ugly are even more amplified during this American Prsidential election year coupled with the COVID 19 pandemic.

Yes, I see the same kinds of stuff on Twitter, but my Twitter list is not primarely built around freinds, families, and aquaintences, and it has been easier to ignore or block obnoxious tweets and people.

Social media has created a platform for all sorts of half-baked conspiricay theories, mis-information, selective data picking, etc, so on, and so forth. It gets to be nauseating and when you see professing Christian people engaging in those things, it is depressing.

Goodby to all that...

...and maybe I'll have more time for blogging here.

"Willie Stark Syndrome "

It was probably Monday, June 19, 1972 when I first heard the news reports that there had been a break-in at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC.

My immediate thought at the time was, “That was stupid and totally unnecessary.” Of course my immediate presumption was that somebody related to the Nixon Republican campaign was probably involved.

It was stupid because by all accounts Nixon was projected to whoop the Democratic Candidate George McGovern by more than a healthy margin. And in November that is exactly what happened. There was nothing to be gained and a lot to to put at risk by snooping around the DNC offices.

But of course we know what happened. More and more facts came to light. The evidence brought the investigation closer and closer to President Nixon. Evidence implicating higher ups and a White House connection had been destroyed in a blatant obstruction of justice. In the end, evidence came to light that implicated the President himself. President Nixon’s support in Congress suffered a bi-partisan collapse pointing to impeachment in the House with a subsequent trial and conviction in the Senate.

President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974; the first POTUS to do so in our country’s history.

Those of us who had supported his election and campaigned and voted for him were betrayed. It was like being kicked in the gut. The rest is history.

In retrospect it is clear President Nixon was betrayed by his own insecurities and pride; pride which the ancient Greeks called hubris, and of such was the subject of the Greek tragedies.

In the 20th century, the updated version of the Greek tragedy plays is found in Robert Penn Warren’s novel “All the King’s Men” published in 1946. It was in this southern tragedy we are introduced to Willie Stark.

Wille Stark comes to power by riding a populist wave of discontent with the current political establishment. As governor of his deep south state, he institutes programs and reforms, playing to the populist base on which his political power was built. And he plays hardball with his political opponents; digging up dirt and blackmailing them into subservience.

In the end Willie is undone by his own conniving and pride. His life ends in the bullets sent his way by one who had been a ally, but whose trust had been betrayed in the bed.

In a YouTube video entitled “Gods and Devils Aplenty: Robert Penn Warren's Civil War” (https://youtu.be/e-JxArcSyYg). Historian David Blight comments that when he asked Warren who “All the King’s Men” was about, Warren replied that it was about Julias Caesar. The Romans had their issues with hubris too.

Hubris, pride, the corrupting influence of power; It’s all there; the "Willie Stark syndrome".

In December 2019, 47 years after Watergate and the events leading to President Nixon’s resignation; once again a sitting POTUS is facing impeachment hearings. As I watch events unfold, I am unable to avoid a sense of deja vu; we’ve seen this before. It remains to be seen how much current events will parallel those of over 40 years ago. It is not so clear how current events will eventually play out. What is not to hard to see though, is that we may well be observing another case of “Willie Stark syndrome”.

The Dancing Street Light

For some reason there were not any light poles as we know them today. In those days of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, to illuminate the streets of the small rural town, lights were stretched across the streets; wires would go from a pole on one side of the street to another pole directly across the street and the street light would dangle there suspended in the middle, the metal fixture including a shade that directed the light from the incandescent bulbs downward, illuminating the street and immediate adjacent sidewalks and lawns.

It was the end of October, the Halloween time of the year. The local fire department had put on their annual Halloween party for the kids of the area; bobbing for apples, the “haunted house”, and we in our varied Halloween costumes. Along with the fire department festivities we also did the usual trick or treating; a time to fill the sack with candy, popcorn balls, cookies, and other goodies. This was a whole generation before sick psychos used Halloween trick or treating to intentionally put harmful things in the treats handed out on Halloween. That year was going to be my last year of trick or treating. The general rule of thumb was once you were in junior high, your trick or treating days were over. So it was I headed out from the school were the firemen's Halloween party was held, to hit the town and pick up a few treats.

The first street of houses I worked that particular night was a cul-de-sac running off of the main street. At the corner of the main street and the cul-de-sac was a street light stretched across the main street as previously described. I had hit all the houses on the cul-de-sac and was ready to head back to the main street. There were was a good steady wind blowing, and I was struck with how the street light was swaying back and forth, dancing in the wind. It was there that a sort of magic took hold of my imagination.

Oddly enough the sense was not a foreboding fear of some evil supernatural apparition coming to life an All Hallows Eve. It was more a sense of being alone in a deserted place. There was no traffic on the street. There was just the street light dancing in the wind. For those few brief moments the only living things in that town were myself and that dancing street light. In those moments, the image of that dancing street light was forever indelibly imprinted on my mind and in my memory.

In the years that followed I would from time to time come across a few literary descriptions that reminded me of that image.

In Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” the point comes toward the end of the book were all the Earth people who settled on Mars are called back to Earth at the outbreak of war. The Earth colonies and settlements on Mars are abandoned, but a few people are left behind; left behind to wander over the surface of Mars from deserted town to deserted town living out the rest of their lives alone. In that narrative the image of the dancing street light comes to my mind.

I sat in the theater as the movie; “To Kill a Mockingbird” was nearing its end. The fall harvest festival at the local school is over, and Scout and Jem are about to walk home and into the dramatic climax of the whole story. It is night and we see the street lights of that small rural town through the eyes of Scout as she peers through the eyes of her ham costume. In that image, I see the dancing street light of my youth.

Over fifty years later as the fall of the year comes around and the leaves on the trees are changing color, and the corn is ripe for the picking, and the days grow colder, I think back to that autumn night so long, long ago when the street light danced, sparking the imagination and stirring the feelings; one of those magical moments that stay with you for a life time; those moments in life that give hints of stories to be told, other worlds to be discovered, and adventures yet to come.

~ The Billy Goat ~

The Party

I was just a few years out of high school. I was working a summer job, having finished another year of college, and needing money for the resumption of classes in September. One of my co-workers at the shop was also a college student, a year younger than me; an acquaintance from high school; one of those small rural high schools where everybody knows just about everybody.

Sometime in the course of that summer, this acquaintance made it known to me he was going to have a party at his house. His parents were going to be away for an extended period of time, and he was going to take advantage of the opportunity to have a beer party.

The context of this intended party would involve a number of people like him and me who had recently graduated from our local high school, but were not yet of the legal age of 21 which, in our particular state, was the minimum age for the legal possession of and/or consumption of alcoholic beverages. Understand dear reader that one of the reasons for waiting for over forty years to tell this story is that the statute of limitations for any violation of the laws of the state detected in this saga has long since ran out. Nevertheless, names will not be used so as to protect the guilty as well as the innocent.

The other context coming into this story was a personal one for me. Over the past several years of college I had encountered that existential crisis of philosophy, life, and faith that in the end, much to my own surprise, took me into a conscious embrace of the Christian faith. There was much about that personal world view change that I had yet to work out in my own daily life.

The appointed day came. Through the provision of some legally of-age friends of my co-worker, the stage had been set. I cannot remember if I ever really thought about just not going at all. It would be an occasion of seeing some people I had not seen since high school. At the time I more or less left the whole under-age alcohol thing in an ethically grey area; a place that at this point in my life over forty years later, I would not be able in conscience to go to.

It was late in the afternoon when I drove down the dirt road to the farmstead where my acquaintance lived. I suppose looking back, the location was relatively ideal for the purpose intended; a dirt road with not much traffic; the farmhouse some distance from any neighbor’s ears and eyes. I turned in the driveway, parked off on the lawn by the barn. It was a warm summer evening, but not overly humid or hot; the sky clear and blue with a few fluffy clouds here and there; the sun slowly sinking towards the western horizon. I don’t remember how many people were there. The people who were there were familiar faces; some I had known most of my life. There we were, young adults pushing the boundaries in a way many of us had not done up unto that time. There was a keg of beer there. There was some bottled premium beer. There was also some hard liquor, Crème d’ menthe, and what else I do not remember; probably whiskey and rum or whatever.

I sampled the brew from the keg. I walked around and watched what was going on. Imagine a bunch of little kids greedily grabbing for some chocolate candy. Add ten or so years to their lives, and substitute the alcoholic beverages for the chocolate. I will admit my memory could possibly have distorted some things over the past forty pluse years, but that is how I remember it.

I don’t know if I stayed there even a full hour. At some point as I was watching it all, the question hit me right between the eyes.

“What am I doing here?”

Looking back later, I could see that the purpose of the whole affair stated or not, was to get soused; that is out right drunk. And even if those there did not consciously have that intent, there was a certain inevitability that such was where many of them would end up, unless they had more discipline over their alcohol intake then I gave them credit for.

At that point of epiphany, I knew I did not belong there, and needed to just leave. I went into the house to the kitchen. The teakettle was on the stove. I made sure there was water in it, and set it on the burner and switched the burner on. In a cupboard I found the instant coffee.

One of my acquaintances made a surprised comment, “Bill’s making a cup of coffee!” Another friend replied to him, “He’s the only smart one here…”

I finished the coffee, rinsed the cup and set it on the counter. I went out into the yard, got into the car and drove away.

Thankfully there was no public fallout from my friend’s booze party; no automobile accidents on the way home by inebriated guests; no surprise visit to the farmstead by the local constabulary with resulting embarrassment and public scandal. As far as I know most if not all who were at that party went on to become responsible and mature adults. Oddly enough, the guy who hosted the whole affair ended up in the Christian ministry. Such are the mysterious ways of grace.

~ The End ~

Copyright © June 2014 by J. William Newcomer All rights reserved.

Patterns

Over the years of my life there have been certain recurring themes or patterns to my dreams. These patterns have to do with places; certain sections of different roads or highways, particular rivers or a lake, a particular small town, a house filled with bookshelves loaded with books, and other such places. Over the years one gets used to seeing these particular places in our dreams, and we develop a comfortable familiarity with them.

In this past year I began to notice a shift which marked the fading away of those old familiar dream patterns. I woke up one day recently and realized it had been months since I had seen any of the old familiar places in my dreams.

I know when it changed, or it may be more accurate to say I think I know when it changed.

Last November we knew Mom was not doing well, and very well may not make it to the end of the year. The story of our last visit to see Mom while she was still living has been told in another place.

This particular dream happened around that time. In that dream, Mom was in what appeared to be a car. The car window was up, and though I did not clearly see him, Dad was in the drivers side. In my dream I yelled out, "Momma!" She turned her head and smiled at me through the window. Then the dream faded away.

A very short time after that dream, Mom died and a few short weeks after that, Dad was gone too. The two people who had been a central and vital part of the pattern of my life were gone. The whole pattern of my life was irrevocably changed. A link in the chain of the collective memory of my family has been cut off, and now it is my brother and sister and I who carry what we can of that collective memory.

My more recent dreams, the ones I can remember anything about, no longer have those familiar patterns of places, or events. It is if in the land of sleep, a certain degree of anarchy prevails in the universe of my dreams. Perhaps new patterns will eventually emerge, I do not know.

I do know that significant life events touch one 's being at many different levels. I am not one to spend a lot of time trying to understand dreams. I believe there is a reality to dreams that resists the prognostications of soothsayers and psychoanalyst alike. If He who is the giver of dreams wants me to understand a particular dream's meaning, He will make it clear in His own good way and time. I make no claim to prophetic dreams, and reserve a certain skepticism for any who claim so.

God has created us as complex beings. We often focus on the parts of our being and tend to lose sight of the interrelatedness of those parts. I am not so sure how well we as humans understand the fullness of the organic being of our humanness. I am coming to realize more and more just how deep and complex the patterns of our being and life really are. As the Psalmist put it, we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made.

Soli Deo Gloria!

Strike Three!

He was a young Freshman pitcher from Flint. He came to Michigan State University to get an education with a major in history, and to see if he could get on the baseball team as a walk-on. If he could make the team, the prospect of an athletic scholarship could become a reality. He could very probably have gotten a scholarship at another school, but family tradition and the prospect of studying Civil War history under a noted professor among other things, brought him to Michigan State. This young hurler also happened to be by the cast of chance or design of providence, my dorm roommate.

So it was in that Spring of our Freshman year, one afternoon between classes, I went over to the ball-field where the University Freshman team was playing a game against the baseball team from a local community college. It was the bottom of the inning and the Spartan's turn at bat. It also happened Dave was coming up to bat.

It is a maxim of baseball that pitchers do not get very much batting practice. A pitcher's batting average will usually be one of the lowest on the teams. I don't remember what the exact count was; there may have been a ball or two, but Dave was quickly behind with two strikes. It also bothers me to this day that I do not remember if they were called strikes or came on a swing and a miss. But now the fun was about begin.

The pitcher wound up and threw the next pitch. Dave watched the ball go by.

"Strike three!" called the Umpire.

But as he was calling the 3rd strike, the ball hit the catcher's mitt, dropped and rolled a few feet away. Dave saw the muffed catch, dropped the bat and ran for first. The catcher was caught off guard by Dave's movement, but then recovering, grabbed the ball to throw to first to insure the out. He over threw the 1st baseman's glove, and there was Dave, safe at first!

What a whoop and holler erupted from his teammates! What would have been a strikeout, was by application of the 3rd strike rule and the catcher's error, a man on base. It was a real heads up play on Dave's part that turned a negative into a positive.

I don't remember anything else about that game, and as it was, it was the only game I saw Dave play in. He never did get that athletic scholarship and a year or so later, dropped baseball and concentrated on his studies. After those undergraduate days at Michigan State, he eventually went on to get a Masters and then a Doctorate in history with emphasis on the Civil War and Reconstruction.

If you are ever in New Haven, Connecticut, and wandering around the campus of Yale University, you might peer into a classroom and see David delivering a lecture on some aspect of the Civil War or Reconstruction. I don't know how much the Doctor remembers of his undergrad baseball days, but that one memory remains forever etched in his old roommate's memory.

For Love of A Mother

"What's the story with these chickens?"

"I don't know... We came down to visit Mom and Dad one time and they were here..."

Such was the reply I gave the dear little elderly gray haired lady standing next to me.

"I'd like to have those chickens. I really like them. They remind me of when we use to have chickens..."

The two fowl in question sat there on the lawn motionless as most lawn and garden ornaments and figurines are. They were part of all the accumulation of a marriage of almost seventy years that had reached its conclusion when my Mom passed away in early December, and Dad followed her a short two weeks latter.

Here we were four months later. All the odds and ends and household stuff to be sold off in the estate auction had been scattered around the yard, the garage, and the barn waiting to be bid off to new owners by the auctioneer. It was getting on into the afternoon, and the majority of stuff and already been sold off to whatever bidder was willing to dig deeper into their pocket then the other bidders.

"I really would like to get those chickens." the elderly lady said again. "I wonder if anyone else will bid on them?"

"Mom, if you really want those chickens, there is nobody here who is going to be able to outbid you for them..."

Those words of assurance came from the younger man standing with us; the elderly lady's son who was a friend of mine going way back to another lifetime ages ago when we had been in high school together.

It was going to be another ten to fifteen minutes before the auctioneer got around to bidding off the chickens. A few more times in that interval the conversation was repeated. The mom expressed her desire to get the chickens and also her fear someone would outbid her for them. The son again quietly assured her that if she wanted those chickens, no one was going to have enough to outbid her.

Finally it came time to auction off the chickens. I expected that at most they might bring twenty or thirty dollars. The bidding started. The son was bidding for his mother. I don't know how many bidders there were initially, but very quickly the bids were much higher then ever expected.

At that point the two remaining bidders were the son and another woman who I did not recognize. The woman would make a bid and the without batting an eye, the elderly lady's son would immediately raise the bid. The bids continued on up past all reasonable expectation. The other bidder stared over at my friend in frustration, then finally gave it up.

I smiled in my heart. Mom and Dad's chickens were going to a good home where they would be loved and appreciated by a kind elderly gray haired lady who has a son who demonstrated that you do not and can not put a price tag on love for a mother.

Copyright May 2013, J. William Newcomer, all rights reserved.

The Last Ride

A little ritual had kind of developed between Dad and I over the last several years before his passing. We would go down to visit Mom and Dad. Sometime during the visit, I would take Dad for a ride. Usually those rides were around the more immediate rural area of the Michigan-Ohio border where they lived. The trips were of varying length, but served several purposes. It was a chance for Dad to get out of the house. It was a chance for us to talk about things; to have a father-son time. It was also an opportunity for me to see what was going on around the stomping grounds of my youth; to see how so many things had changed and how a few things had stayed the same; a way of reconnecting with my roots.

Those rides became more important as Mom's health and mind began to fail. On those rides Dad would tell me how Mom was doing. I could get first hand from him what was going on as the two of them aged and that aging slowly sapped their strength and vitality. We would discuss what some of their options were. It was a chance for me to reinforce some of the concerns and issues my sister had discussed with me regarding Mom and Dad's health and care. Dad needed the time out of and away from the house. He needed the respite from the care and worry over his now invalid wife.

It was this past November (2012) and the Thanksgiving Holiday was coming up. It had been more then a few months since our last visit to Mom and Dad, and I knew we really needed to make that two and half hour trip down to see them. The Friday after Thanksgiving would be the best time to go, and so it was the plans were made. That Friday morning my wife and I made the trip down to see Mom and Dad.

Mom was laying in the hospital bed set up in the living room. She was not able to stand at all. She was at the point where an aid was coming in just about every day , and Hospice was checking in a couple of times a week. She was not fully "there" in her mind though able to carry on limited conversation. She was still at the point where someone would move her to a wheelchair and bring her into the dining room to eat at the table with the rest of us. As it was, we would have to help her eat.

At some point in the afternoon, Dad and I went for our drive. As usual, I would drive and dad would sit there in the front passenger seat. We went to town and drove around the village. Dad had me drive around by the grain elevator so he could see the new office and scales, and the new grain silo bin that had recently been erected. We went through the cemetery by the stone marking my oldest sister's grave, and the stone with Mom and Dad's names on it, but at that time with only the years of birth.

We drove out north of town, swung east a mile then north again to the other near by village in the area that was also part of the local school district. In that small village we passed by the old school building where I had gone to kindergarten. The decrepit condition of that abandoned school building was an indicative statement of how the whole area of that broader rural community had changed. We turned west at the main corner and wandered through the country side until we found ourselves back at Mom and Dad's house.

I played the memory game with Momma. "Do you remember when we would go to the Britton reunions at the old Grange hall?" "Do you remember when we would go up north to the lake for vacation?" Yes, she remembered, and she remembered those things happened a long time ago.

My last meal with my mother was that evening's supper. I sat there and was spoon feeding her, much like she had done to me so many years ago when I was the baby. After supper my wife and I left for the two and half hour trip back to our home. A week and a half later we got the phone call. Momma had died at the age of 92. That Thanksgiving Friday had been my last visit with her.

Two weeks and one day after Momma died, Daddy died at the age of 95. I got to see him two days before he died and that was good. But then he was invalid and there was no thought of going for our ritual ride together. It dawned on me today, some few weeks later, that the Thanksgiving Friday was not only the last time I saw Momma alive, but it was also when Daddy and I went on our last ride together.

RIP Mom and Dad...

(Cross posted to The Neukomment Files.)

Imagination on a Magic Moonlight Night

As a young lad, I grew up on a farm in rural southern Michigan. Our farmhouse stood on the north side of a country road. We lived in that house from the time I was five years old until the summer I turned fifteen. During those childhood and early teen years, my brother and I shared a bedroom in the southwest part of the upstairs of that house. I still remember the Davy Crockett wallpaper that was on the walls of that room.

Our bedroom had a window which faced south, and out of which we could look across the road to the neighbor's fields. The general geographic nature of those fields was the long ridge of a hill about 100 yards or so off of the road, and running more or less parallel to the road. Along the top of that ridge was a fence row. It was the fence row that provided the stage for the magic that I saw there, and of which I now share with you.

The other necessary ingredient of the magic I wish to speak of, was those clear nights, preferably during the time from late spring to early fall when the window would be open, when the moon was full or nearly so; those nights when the moonlight shines so bright that things stand out quite clearly, especially in open spaces such as our neighbor's fields.

On those magical nights I would lay in my bed and look out the window across to the ridge where I would see the magic happen. It was on those nights when a low solitary tree in the fence row on the ridge of that hill would magically come alive; the moonlight bringing it alive as its outline could be clearly seen against the backdrop of the night sky behind it.

I would look out the window and gaze at the image of the outline of that low tree up on the far hill. In its shape I saw an Arab riding over the crest of the hill on his magnificent Arabian horse; Lawrence of Arabia riding across the desert sands.

Another image that would sometimes come to mind is that of the tragic highwayman riding across the English countryside.

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

In the course of life's changes, we moved from that house. Though the hill with its ridge is still where it always has been, the fence row and that solitary low tree are long gone. Those nights when I looked out that window and watched the magic of the moonlight on the ridge are a lifetime ago, but still cherished and not forgotten.

~ footprints

I looked at the picture... I turned it over to see what had been written on the back. The handwriting was neat and precise; easy to read. She had given me this wallet size copy of her high school senior picture forty six years ago; her senior year which had been my junior year. I had forgotten I had it. It was a bittersweet moment in seeing her image on the one side and reading the note on the backside.

She was gone. She died this past February. The last time I saw her was so long ago, just a few years after high school, and then nothing for over 40 years. Some things had happened back then. She had experienced a crushing loss. Then there was no contact. Now she was gone.

I did not realize way back then the footprint she had left in my life. We had worked together on the high school newspaper. We had been casual friends. I thought about that as I read the note she had written to me on the back of that picture. I realized, yes, she had been a casual friend, but she also had been a good friend to me.

She had a part in sharpening my mind; exposing some of my naivete and provincialism. In our own peculiar way we had affirmed one another's existence and worth at an awkward time in each of our lives.

I had thought about her over the years; wondering how she was doing; praying that where ever she was, that she would "live happily ever after."

Now she is gone. As I looked at the picture, I felt a grief and sadness. I don't know if she ever realized the impression for good she had left on my life. In a way, for that time we had known one another, she had been a friend; as a sister.

So as I mourn, I also ask myself a question.

What kind of footprints have I left in the lives of those I have encountered, even ever so briefly,through my life?

Requiem for Ronnie

It is now February, 2012, some twenty years after this story first began to gestate in my mind. Another chapter has unfolded. I found out that this past week Marilyn passed away. She too is now gone. I never had an opportunity to talk to her again; to tell her that if she wanted to, I would dance with her one more time; to tell her that her life had meaning and purpose; that she would not be forgotten... May she indeed finally rest in peace...

It has taken me a number of years to write this story, as over the years revisions would be made and the story continued to unfold. One of those earlier revisions can be found on this blog. This past week the final chapter unfolded and fell into place so that now there is a sense of closure that before, the story did not have. I also included in this revision a separate but related story published here earlier.

So it is gentle reader I now present it to you in what I believe will be the final form. Click on the link above for the full story. Read and handle with care the baring of another's soul...

Shalom...

The Letter

You wrote that letter to me 40 plus years ago, and I have not seen nor heard from you since then, but it gave me joy to re-read that letter tonight. Wherever you are, may God's blessings be upon you and it is my prayer you live happily ever after...

Peace...

A Decade Ago Already?

I have had occasion to ponder some of the events in my life that happened 10 years ago this month. Has it been that long already?

It was a time of change for myself and my family; significant major change. Those events were a culmination of things that had been churning and gestating and fermenting for a number of years before they reached the point of critical mass and our world shifted.

Yes, it was only a few months after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York. But what was going on in my life and the life of my family at that time was not the stuff of newspaper headlines.

Looking back at that time, in all our personal turmoil and tumult, what I remember most is how God's hand guided us through the darkness, and how in those personal and family events of November 2001, that point of deepest darkness was actually the point when the light of dawn began to break upon our weary hearts and souls.

In the end we were free. Truly and really free...

God is good... "Hereto has the LORD helped us..." To Him be all praise, honor, and glory foever and ever. Amen!

A Letter to Jack

Hi Jack, It been about 55 years ago when you left us... A lot has happened since then. Some good... Some not so good.. Some just outright bad... I need to ask you to forgive me for trying to blame you for messing up the pencil sharpener when somebody sharpened their crayon in it. It was me... At the time I didn't realize what I had done... I'm really sorry about that. You missed some wars and stuff. Some of the guys you knew went to Vietnam. A few came back in body bags. And there was all the anti-war crap, and drugs and the false gods of the so called "Age of Aquarius". We haven't exactly blown up the world yet, but we keep working on it... There's been some good stuff along the way too... Little League baseball, Cub Scouts and then Boy Scouts, 4-H and the county fair. High school plays and sports. A wife, kids and grand kids and good times with friends... Sunsets, ocean beaches, and all that kind of stuff is pretty nice... We've had some good music, art, books, and film along the way too. A lot of good things have happened medically... Ironic that if we had had some of the stuff we have now, you might have been able to stay and go on through life with us. I've wondered over the years about what might have been had you not left us. Maybe we would have had a chance to be friends; if not close friends, at least acquaintances sharing a period of our life together with our other classmates... But... You were gone... They didn't talk to us about it hardly at all. Miss Laseer went to the funeral and that was it. It was only years latter with the experiances of a lifetime under our belt that we found in our remembering that there was a loss. The last 55 years have gone by so fast.. The years are adding up... The autumn and winter of life are upon us. Eventually if the Lord tarries, we also will die. Jack, there is a lot about life and death that I do not pretend to understand. It could have happened to any one of us. When I think of it, I wonder that any of us survived to gorw up, graduate from high school, and go on into life. You were not forgotten. Somehow, someway, your life, as brief as it was, had meaning and purpose. Well... That's about it... Only God Almighty knows what the future will bring. I really want to beleive that just maybe... just maybe... Lord willing... someday we will see each other again... That would be really nice... Regards, Bill

Has It Been Forty-Seven Years Already?

It has been a lifetime since those shots rang out on a Dallas street... We still remember... Also, on the same day, writers C.S.Lewis and Aldous Huxley died; President John F. Kennedy the Catholic, C.S. Lewis the Evangelical Anglican (or whatever he really was), and Aldous Huxley the classic skeptical secular humanist.

I've already told the story of that day in a previous post. It was a day that in retrospect marked a distinct turning point in our lives. That day marked the passing of what was left of the innocence of our childhood of the 1950's.

I've learned over the years to mourn the death of all people. If I can not mourn for the life they lived, I mourn for the life they should and could have lived... Even God Himself takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked¹...

Peace,

~ The Billy Goat ~

(¹Ezekiel 33:11)

Requiem for Ronnie

[I thought I had already published this on The Billy Goat Blog in the past, but realize I haven't. So here it is...]

They lived down the road from us. Ron, his two brothers and three sisters and I with my brother and two sisters would get together and play; play in the woods by their house; play back by the river that was on our farm. There were the times of hanging May Baskets on one another’s door in celebration of the coming of that month when winter’s blast was finally a memory.There were the games played and little plays acted out. There was the time one of Ron’s sisters had a serious illness, I believe it was Rheumatic Fever, and she had to stay in bed along time, and we were finally able to briefly visit her and give her a little get well gift. There were the “Daniel Boone” and “Lewis and Clark” expeditions back along the river and in the woods. Yes, the romps and play of childhood, a happy and an innocent time of life in that decade of the 1950’s.

On Sunday, our church had an early service. Their church’s service was a later service. Often as we came home from our church service, we would pass Ron and his family as they were going to their church’s service. That passing of one another became a rite in itself: a familiar cycle and pattern of our lives from week to week giving a sense of comfort and stability.

For a few years Ron's father worked the farm right across the road from ours. When they were working there, my brother and I would sometimes go over to visit and lend a hand if needed. Sometimes my dad would do custom farm work for his dad; opening a field of corn, combining a field of barley. So it was we grew up together, and in that small rural community, being neighbors meant you were friends.

Eventually Ron's father got out of farming, and they moved to town. A number of neighbors came together to help with the move. When they moved out of the immediate neighborhood, contact with the family was diminished.

In our small rural school you pretty well knew who everybody was. So what words do you use to describe the relationships you have with people in a place like that? In high school I got to know Marilyn. She was older, and in my brother’s class. We worked on the high school newspaper, we were casual friends, and her younger sister was the first of several girls that would break my heart. She was intelligent, capable of seeing through my naïve intellectual presumptions, and at times telling me so. Marilyn had a reddish tint to her hair and a hint of freckles that gave her a more subtle kind of attractiveness. Those features apparently were inherited from her Irish mother. While in high school, Marilyn’s mother died from cancer. She shouldered responsibility for her father and two younger sisters.

A few times at the high school dances, she would ask me to ask her to dance. I can still see in my mind’s picture, the look in her eyes, the turmoil of fear, pain, and frustration; the fear of being “left out”; or of being left behind in life. Most of the guys were probably intimidated by her intelligence. Only a few would ever dance with her. It did not bother me to oblige her request at those times. I struggled with my own feelings of not quite “fitting in”. It was as if in those times together on the dance floor, for a few brief moments we affirmed one another’s existence and worth.

Ron and Marilyn were in my older brother's class. Ron was not an outstanding academic student, though he was intelligent enough, and did graduate from high school. On the other hand, Marilyn was the class' s valedictorian. Somewhere along the line they began to date. At first glance, it was kind of an odd match. Ron came across as a simple kind of guy, but Marilyn saw some of those good things under that quiet exterior that others might tend to overlook. I don’t know that Ron ever dated any other girl before he dated Marilyn, or that she ever dated any other guy before Ron. In either case they had each other and were no longer “alone”.


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The war. It was increasingly in the news. It increasingly became a part of our conversation. More and more it came to loom in the back of our minds; a dark cloud off on the horizon that keep drawing nearer and dominating the horizon of our thoughts; that war going on in a small Southeast Asian nation called Vietnam. We didn't understand it. Why didn't we just go in and clean up on those guys and get it over with? We thought of it in terms of the conventional kind of war fought by our fathers’ generation only a very short time before. We thought we were right being there, but people were getting killed over there, and there were anti war protests. How could this be? It was very bewildering.

There was in the school an older teacher whose son was in college. His son visited the school one day. He wore insignia clearly indicating he was against the war. There was some uproar by some of the students against his wearing that insignia in the school. Some of us found ourselves torn between our patriotism and our firm commitment to free speech issues. The stable, comforting world we had known was starting to un-ravel.

The first local Vietnam fatality occurred; a guy recently graduated from the high school and married to a girl in my class who was still in school. Our whole class went to the funeral, and afterwards to the cemetery for the burial. It was a clear cool day; the sun shining, the sky blue with a few white clouds here and there, the young widow weeping.

Guys were continuing to be drafted right and left. If you didn't get a college deferment or some other deferment, you were in. A lot of guys ended up going in. I had a deferment for college. There I would sign up for the required ROTC classes.

Ron was drafted into the Marine Corps. I think it was after boot camp he and Marilyn were married. One night, shortly after they were married, a few of the family and friends got together and we shivareed them. Ron had to haul Marilyn in a wheelbarrow the short distance down to the main four corners of town. Marilyn had to haul him back in the same. The rest of us accompanied them, beating on pots, pans, old farm tools, and whatever, making all sorts of noise and racket.

That fall I left for college. Back home I had been a relatively larger fish in a very small pond. In going to a major state university campus, I barely registered at the plankton level. It was a strange new world to me. The culture shock was at times almost overwhelming. It is only in looking back that I see how provincial my view of the world had been up to that point. Eventually I settled in best I could, and managed to get passing grades in my courses.

I didn't hear much news from back home. I knew Ron was in 'Nam. Then in May 1968, the news came. Ron had been killed: a casualty of "hostile small arms fire". Being away at college, I wasn't there for the funeral. It seemed un-real to me. It didn't sink in as to what it really meant. I was becoming caught up in my own bewildering emotional turmoil of what it meant to grow up and become an adult. With all that focus in my mind, what happened to Ron seemed as far away as Vietnam or the moon.

In my sophomore year of school, I was finally able to come to grips with much of the emotional turmoil of the year before. The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I was back home, working at the local factory. It was then that Marilyn came back into my life.

Why did she come to see me? To this day I’m not entirely sure. Marilyn came by the shop when I had my lunch breaks. She looked terrible, real thin, having lost weight, grief and pain written all over her face. She wanted to talk. I was very new in my faith. I tried to help best I could, but felt totally inadequate. I didn't know really how to help her, but in looking back, I wonder if she was really just looking for someone to listen. Could it be that in the pain of her face and words, there was once again that fear of being alone?

She told about going to church, and praying Ron would safely return. But then he was dead. Her unspoken question being, “Where was God in all of that?” Even now, so many years latter, I am not entirely sure how I would answer such a question. In the space of a few years she had lost two very close people in her life, her mother and her husband. I could only in a very inept way tell her what God had done for me. From her verbal and facial response, I realized I was far from making any apparent connection to where she was in her grief and pain.

After a few of those lunch time visits, she stopped coming. I never saw her again. I heard a few years latter she had re-married and had several children. Apparently, somehow, she had been able to go on with life. Later, her father passed away. One time, when visiting, I saw her youngest sister singing in the choir at a local church. I didn’t have a chance to talk to her. She had been youngest of the three sisters, and I’d never really got to know her. That was the last time I saw any one from Marilyn’s family. From time to time through the years, I wondered how Marilyn was doing: if she had come to knew some measure of happiness and joy in life.

Early my junior year the draft was being changed to a lottery system. If your birthday was drawn with the short number you could kiss your college days goodbye, and plan on forwarding your mail to Vietnam. On our dorm floor we all put a bit of money in the kitty. The guy ending up with the lowest number would take it all.

I don’t remember his name. He was one of the boys from Flint. A group of those Flint boys had kind of ended up living in the same dorm floor. This guy had just gone through a hassle with his local draft board regarding his student deferment. He had just had that deferment restored. We gathered together to watch the drawing as it was broadcast on TV. When that first lottery drawing was over, he had the lowest number of any of us. He got the kitty. I can still picture his dropping shoulders, the dejected look of dismay on his face. My own number was one of the highest of those on the floor. He’d be going. I’d be staying. What could I say to him?

In the spring of my junior year at college, the Kent State shootings happened. Since I was attending a major state university, it was no surprise when the campus erupted with anti-war demonstrations. When passing by one rally, I saw the demonstrators handing out posters with the names of the men from Michigan killed in Vietnam. I looked for Ronnie's name. I had the idea in my head that if l saw anyone with it, I was going to take it away from them even if it met a fight. After all, I was the one who had known Ronnie, and in my mind there was something profane and obscene about his name being used in such a manner by a total stranger. I never did see the placard with his name.

I sat with one of my friends on a low hill along the main street running along side of the campus. The marchers went by, led by the acting University President who has just gave a speech declaring his opposition to the War. They marched by carrying their banners and signs. How many of them I know not, but clearly a number in the thousands. It was the high point of the protest movement, the apex of the radicalism of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the “Age of Aquarius” with its false hopes and empty dreams.


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I graduated from college, and the years began to roll by. When down home, from time to time I'd visit the local cemetery. There were the gravestones standing silently in rows arranged amidst the neatly cut grass; monuments to the remnants of the memory of lives lived; people who had lived and breathed, worked, loved, and at the end of their days, had been laid beneath the sod to await the Great Day of all days. People I use to know were there, older people including my grandma, people who had been alive and I had known when growing up as a child. And back in the center of the new section was Ron's grave, marked by the bronze plaque.

One time I was there for a Memorial Day ceremony. There were the usual appropriate comments and rituals; the sober faces of those there to remember fallen loved ones. There was the familiar sound of the bugle playing the familiar notes making up the Taps. Ron’s sister was there... I think she was crying, but couldn't tell for sure... If she was not crying, she sure looked like she wanted to. It was in those years I started to hate that war, that miserable war. Nixon had resigned... Saigon fell...What was it all for?

I have visited the Gettysburg Battlefield, and stood at the place of Picket's Charge. I have stood on the battlefield at Antietam where blood had flowed like a river. I have visited the Wilderness Battlefield in Virginia, and could only begin to imagine the horror that had raged among that now quiet and peaceful wooded land. Whatever else war is or is not, it is indeed "hell".

The years continued to roll on. In the last part of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was said that Hussein had gas and a whole bunch of nasty things. As the year turned to 1991, it became clear there was probably going to be some kind of military action. As civilians, we had no idea what lay ahead. I had visions of body bags all over the place, and I very much feared it would be another Vietnam all over again...

Wednesday, January 16, 1991, the Gulf War started. For some reason I started to think about Ronnie... The memory pictures of those long ago years played across the screen of my mind. I found myself weeping, weeping for Ronnie and all the guys who died and were going to die. ...I hated war... There have been and will be wars that need to be fought, but nevertheless, to this day I hate war.

The images of those we use to know in our younger years are frozen in time. The picture of Marilyn and Ron carried in my mind is the young Marilyn and Ron I knew back in high school. If I passed Marilyn on the street, I probably would not recognize her, or she me. Time takes it’s toll on all of us. Also, a lifetime separates those who once knew one another. How does she remember those days so long ago in light of all she has experienced since? How were the passing years molded in light of the fire she went through back then? That is another story not given to me to write. It may be a story never told. My hope and prayer is that the final chapter of that un-known story will somehow read, “She lived happily ever after…”

I worked on family genealogy for some years. I knew one of our distant cousins had married Ron’s youngest brother. The day came when I received the information on that family. There in the list of the family’s children was the name “Ronald” with the notation he had been named after his Uncle who had been killed in Vietnam. Ron was not forgotten.

Cruising the Internet, I came across the “Virtual Vietnam Memorial”. I did a search and found Ron’s listing. There was a place where those who had known him could leave a note. A Marine comrade had left one note, Dan had left another note: Dan, another neighbor kid who had lived around the corner from Ron and his family and remembered. I added my own note. Ron was not forgotten.

Recently when down home, I visited the local library. A lady with a teenage boy came in. They wanted to use the scanner, and my sister, who is the librarian, asked me to show them how to use it. As we talked, I thought this woman looked vaguely familiar. I asked and she told me her name. She was Ron’s youngest sister, and the young man was the younger of her two sons. I had not known her very well. She had been so much younger then the rest of us. She was scanning pictures of the family to use in making a calendar. I looked at the familiar faces. I thought of this story sitting in my notebook back home. I didn’t say anything to her about it. It just wasn’t the place or time to… the place or time to let her know… to let her know Ron was not forgotten.

Someday I'll go to the Washington, DC and visit "the wall"... I'll look up his name and see it engraved there along with so many others, others I never knew... But I did know Ronnie... I know when I see it; I'll probably cry my fool head off...

RIP

(Postscript to a Requiem)

(If I Could Dance With You Once Again)

(Written by J. William Newcomer, Copyright March 2001, J. William Newcomer, all rights reserved. )

One November Day

As I remember it, that autumn had been relatively mild. By mid-November most of the corn fields had already been picked. The leaves on the trees had dropped some weeks before. It was a time in that interlude when the high school football season, for better or for worse, was history, but the basketball season was yet to start.

For those of us in our relatively quiet rural Southern Michigan community, it was a time of routine leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday. Our community was somewhat off the beaten path; a good hour away from any big cities, and not on any major highways. There was a certain degree of isolation. TV, radio and the newspapers were the vehicles that brought the outside world into our midst. There were the vacations that would occasionally take us outside our normal boundaries. Also from time to time there might be a day trip to Toledo or Jackson, or maybe even Fort Wayne, but for most of us growing up in that rural area, the rest of the world was "out there".

That Friday started off like any other normal Friday. I got up early and went out to do what farm chores needed to be done. Sometime or other in the course of the usual morning ritual, I had breakfast, and got ready for school. Then it was off to school. The morning classes went by, and the lunch hour came. So far it had been a pretty ordinary normal day, one among the many others at that time of our lives.

Sometime around 1 PM or so, I and my fellow high school Freshmen classmates were in our Science class. For some reason our regular teacher was out for the day. Mrs. Welling was filling in as the substitute teacher. Mrs. Welling and her husband were retired teachers. Sometime in her life Mrs. Welling had received a certain amount of musical training. She directed one of the local church choirs, and occasionally sang special numbers. She was a petite slender lady which contributed to the nickname of "Mrs. Canary Legs" which we students sometimes callously called her, but not ever to her face or in the hearing of other adults. In truth she was a pretty nice lady. In all the times she substituted for the teacher in any of my classes, I never remember her saying any unkind words to any student, or ever in any way speaking sharply or roughly to any class at large.

I do not remember what the exact time was. It most probably was around 1:45 PM our local EST. I have no memory of what we were specifically doing in class at that time. Mrs. Welling may have been speaking to some aspect of Science, or we may have been doing some in class study time. We heard the school PA system come on. The PA system was always used for announcements of some kind or another related to school activities. In my mind, that was the expectation at that time. However, what we heard was something much different then anything we had ever heard on that PA system before. We realized the voice we were hearing was not that of the high school Principle, or the Superintendent, or any of the teachers. It was a voice on a radio. I don't remember the exact words, but to the best of my recollection they were:

"......We repeat. President John F. Kennedy has been shot while riding in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas.... At approximately 12:30 PM local time, the President of the United States was shot...."

We sat there as the radio broadcast continued over the PA system. It took several minutes to process the meaning of the words we were hearing. Assassinations are things that only happen in history, such as in the Lincoln assassination. They are not suppose to happen in our United States of America of 1963. How could this be? What was going on? Even then there was a certain detachment from what we were hearing, as though listening to some kind of fictional account.

But it was not fiction. It was real. It was actually happening! Any thought of continuing with the Science class was totally erased from everyone's mind. We just sat there listening. It was about 20 minutes after we first heard the news of the shooting when the voice on the radio announced a news update bulletin had just come in.

"President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 p.m. Central Standard Time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain."

We were stunned. Mrs. Welling had tears in her eyes. In the wisdom and perspective of her older years, she much more fully comprehended the meaning, importance, and impact of what we were hearing. She had already in her lifetime witnessed December 7, 1941 when the shocking news came through that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. In contrast, we as students in our youthful inexperience and naivete could hardly comprehend the tragic historic moment we were listening to over that PA system.

At some point the buzzer rang to signal the end of the class session. We left the classroom as in a daze. Any conversations in the hallway were subdued. We were struggling to comprehend what we had heard, what it all meant, and what was going to happen.

My last class of the day was Phys. Ed. We went to the gym, but no one bothered getting ready for gym class. We just sat there on the bleachers or wandered around the gym aimlessly, talking quietly among ourselves. At one point one of my classmates, in a demonstration of youthful folly, made a smart-aleck remark about cancelling school because the President was shot. The Phys. Ed. teacher angrily and curtly told him to just shut up.

Finally the school day ended. We headed home. My mother was a teacher at the school, so she had heard the news in the same way we had. My dad had also heard the news. The normal afternoon TV shows we liked to watch were cancelled. All the TV and radio stations were focused on the assassination. We started hearing the name Lee Harvey Oswald mentioned. He was now in the custody of the Dallas Police Department. President Kennedy's body was being flown back to Washington, DC aboard Air Force 1. Lynden Johnson had taken the oath of office, and was now President of the United States.

Saturday morning dawned. We did our usual farm chores, but I don't remember doing much else that day. The news came that President Kennedy's funeral would be on Monday, and there would be no school that day. Lee Harvey Oswald was still in the custody of the Dallas Police Department. The only thing else I remember about that Saturday was that it was sunny with mostly clear skies.

In looking back at that time, it's the routine details of your life you don't remember. Sunday morning came. I had probably gone to church that morning, but have no memory of it. I would have got back home a little before Noon, our local EST. What I do remember was watching the TV coverage of the assassination, funeral preparations, the public viewing of the closed casket in the rotunda of the Capital building, and all the rest.

Then the network broke away to the coverage in Dallas, Texas where the Dallas police were about to transfer Lee Harvey Oswald from the police headquarters to the county jail. There on the black and white screen in front of me, I saw police officers escorting a man into the basement of the police headquarters. Then another man stepped quickly forward and shots rang out. It was 11:21 am local CST, Sunday, November 24, 1963. As he was about to be taken to the Dallas County Jail, Lee Harvey Oswald was fatally shot before live television cameras in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters by Jack Ruby. I was watching the whole thing on TV. I along with millions of other Americans saw it happen right before our eyes. It was surreal, as if in a dream.

Ruby was immediately taken into custody. What was going on? This stuff happens in fictional movies and TV shows, but this was real life. Two murders in two days! I don't remember watching any more TV that day. I may have, but that scene from the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters remains etched forever in my memory.

Monday November 25, was President John F. Kennedy's funeral. In our part of Michigan, it was another sunny day with mostly clear skies. I may have watched bits and pieces of the funeral on TV, but I remember very little. A few years in the future, in 1969, my college roommate and I would visit Washington, DC. While there, we would cross the Potomac River to the Arlington National Cemetery and visit the grave site where the eternal flame was burning. But that is another story for another time.

After the President's funeral, at some point school resumed. The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays came and went. A new year began. We would go on with our lives, but for each of us who lived through that tragic historical time, our lives would never ever be the same after that one tragic fatal November day in 1963.

(J. William Newcomer, Copyright © April 2010. All rights reserved.)

Remembering Mickey Mantle's Big Hit

Early September 1960, it was the summer between 5th and 6th grade. That day all us Little League ball players from our small rural Southern Michigan town packed into the school bus and were off to Tiger Stadium in Detroit to watch our favorite Detroit Tigers take on those NY Yankees.

That small rural town was several hours from Detroit, and as such, it was a rare treat for any of us to see a Major league baseball game first hand. We listened to the Tiger games over the radio with George Kell and Ernie Harwell calling the games. Those were the years when Al Kaline, Rocky Colavito, Norm Cash, Jake Wood, and Jim Bunning, among others were our heros.

When we got to the stadium we were seated out in the center field section of the stands. The Yankees were out warming up, and there he was right in front of us; Mickey Mantle! And over in right field was Roger Maris!

We started yelling "Hey Mickey!"... He turned and waved. He caught a ball, (it must have come from Yogi Berra in left?). We called out to him to throw the ball up to us. He made a motion like he was going to do just that but that ball returned to his glove and Mickey returned to his warmup. We were in awe. What a guy!

The game started. In the course of the game both Mantle and Maris hit home runs. I don't rememeber what inning it was when Mickey was at bat and hit that 2nd (as I rememeber) home run. I can still hear in my mind the crack of his bat hitting that pitch. We heard that crack all the way out in the center field stands. We watched the ball rise as it headed out towards right field. It keep going up and up and up. It was over the outfield fence and still going up. It cleared the stands and even then was still going up.

Was it going to hit the wall? No!!!

It cleared the wall and was out of the stadium! Mickey Mantle had just hit a home run out of Tiger Stadium, and from our center field seats we had the perfect view of it all the way up and out!

As I recall, the Yankees won the game and afterwards we climbed into the school bus and headed back to our small rural Michigan community. The memory of Mickey interacting with us during the warmups; the memory of that "out of the stadium" home run remain in my memory to this day. We had seen someone who was to us, one of baseball's larger then life heros. And even though most of us remained loyal Tiger fans, Mickey Mantle had a special place in our hearts and memories.

I am well aware that in latter years, after his retirement from baseball, Mantle had some struggles and failures in his personal life. For myself, those things do not take away from who he was as a major league baseball player, nor from what his presence met for the game. For us who as youngsters saw him play the game, Mickey Mantle was and remains a great baseball player and hero.

RIP

Official Mickey Mantle Website

(Up to 1961, the Detroit stadium had been known as Brigg's Stadium. 1961 was the first year it went by the new name of Tiger Stadium.)

The Smashing of the Idols

What follows is a spiritual autobiography. In July 2000, I wrote a letter to a life long friend detailing how I had come to embrace the Evangelical Christian faith. Later I published an edited version of that letter on a now defunct internet site. Over the years this has gone through several edits and updates for publication. (Latest revision May 1, 2021)

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"In an age of relativism, orthodoxy is the only possible rebellion left." ~ Peter Kreeft

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t go to church. At that time my parents seldom went, but sent us kids regularly. I had a childhood friend that I invited to church also. At this church of our youth we learned all the basic stories of the Bible narrative. Knowing that outline of basic Bible narrative was one thing. Understanding what it meant for me personally in relation ot God and life was quite another thing.

One time when we were about 11 years old, we were at a church camp, and my friend and I talked about looking for the Garden of Eden. Indeed we were looking for something back then. Little did we realize what we were to eventually find. Thus it was at that time in our looking, we were baptized; thinking that in doing so, one became a Christian; the implication was we were earning our way to God’s favor by our own keeping and doing. I still remember the church camp sermon on the steps to heaven; all things we had to do. I don’t remember the word “grace” being used.

In high school my friend began to drift away and started walking on the wilder side of life. At that time my own walk was something of the respectable hypocrite. For some reason I didn't stop going to church. I think in some sense I was seeking something I had yet to find. I could never be an atheist. Growing up on the farm so close to nature made it almost impossible not to believe in something much greater.

I did become a deist of sorts, someone who believes in God, but not sure He is relevant to anything in this world. And I was certainly not at all sure how Jesus fit into the whole thing, if He did at all. My life became one of being "good" enough not to get into bad trouble, but being "bad" enough to get along with the world.

During my high school senior year, there was a New Year Eve's service at the church. A guest speaker was leading the service. He had us write on a piece of paper any concerns, burdens, questions, or etc. we wanted God to take care of in the year to come. He then collected the papers, and putting them into a collection plate, burned them up; a symbolic act of giving those things to God. On my paper I had written, "Are you really there?" Little did I know how, in the next few years, how that question was to be answered.

That fall I was off to Michigan State University. I was a relatively larger fish in a real small pond back home. At MSU I barely registered at the plankton level. I also quickly realized that for all the amount of intellect at the University, there were still some areas where the Professors, with all their doctoral degrees, learning, and knowledge, really didn't know anymore than the rest of us. Whatever claims they might make, they were only guessing about the meaning and purpose of life, and one guess was as good or bad as another.

In one of my freshman classes, in a test essay question dealing with Thomas Paine’s virulent attack on the virgin birth of Christ, I found myself defending the virgin birth. After all, Thomas Paine didn’t know any more about it than anyone else, so why should I believe him?

It was in that context I was seeking my own meaning and purpose. I was carving out and sculpting my own idols; those things I thought would give me purpose, meaning, and comfort in life. I believed God existed, but believed He was far away and didn’t have much time or inclination to worry about my life.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, my brother got married to his first wife. Even though I had known of and expected my brother's wedding for some months before, the actual event was something of a shock to me. It was hard for me to handle that we had "grown up", and were taking on adult responsibilities. Even back in high school I had felt at times an acute loneliness and emptiness; a loneliness and emptiness that I thought could be filled by the "good life"; finding a special someone to share life with, a good paying job, and a nice house in a nice community. It was in those growing materialistic expectations that I was looking for ultimate purpose and meaning in my life. In looking back, that those things, as legitimate as they can be, were at that time in my life, becoming my idols.

In my sophomore year, the Lord started drawing His net around me. God is a jealous God. He will not put up with us having any other gods in His place. That fall I attended a concert on campus put on by a Christian musical group. At the end of the concert there was a gospel presentation. As the salvation prayer was presemted, I remember something clearly saying in my head, “That’s something you should do.” I repeated the words of the prayer silently to myself. I then signed a card that had been provided, and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

In the spring of that sophomore year, God began in His providence to deal with me and proceeded to smash my idols. These events left me bewildered and at a loss.

It was shortly after I was invited to a meeting of a campus ministry group. For some reason, I went... I was supposed to get a term paper done, but I couldn't concentrate on it, so I went to the meeting. After the meeting I went up to talk to the speaker about some of the things he had said. He proceeded to go through a Gospel presentation. I knew enough of the Bible to recognize the truth of what he said. I knew I fell far short of living up to what I knew was right. I needed grace, mercy, and the forgiveness of sins. Though I did not fully understand it at the time, I needed to turn from myself and embrace what Christ had done for me in His death, burial, and resurrection. It was then I confessed to the Lord I was the fool, and in so doing acknowledged that He, Jesus Christ, was Lord and God. Somewhat to my surprise, I found I believed. I was surprised by faith...

The skeptic may say, "He got religion on the rebound from from some of life’s disappointments.” That is an understandable response, but it is a superficial kind of analysis that misses deeper root issues. The real issue was not “me” centered, but God centered. What was to be the object of my hope and faith for meaning and purpose in life? The object of a person’s hope and faith is what they will worship. My heart had been shatterd because I sought in my idols that which God alone can give. God smashed my idols so I would seek Him, and in Him alone find all I really and truly needed or wanted. And how does that kind of superficial analysis explain why, after all these years, I still believe?

From that point, old things started passing away, and new things came in their place. I went home at the end of that school year a different person then what I had been when the year had started. Someone gave me a copy of the New Testament in Today's English. That summer I read through it, and the Word of God was alive like it had never been before... I found I wanted to be with God’s people...

There is much more I could probably say about the last 50 plus years since that time. I did marry a really nice Christian lady, was able to have a decent job, and we have a nice home in a nice suburban community. Over the years we have attended and been involved in several local churches. In those churches we have seen both the good and some of the bad of church life, but our confidence is not in any specific church or group of churches, rather it is in Him who is head over all the church.

At one point I thought to enter the ministry, but the Lord providentially led me otherwise. I did take several years of seminary classes and learned enough Greek and Hebrew to be dangerous. More important, I learned more about God Himself and who I am in relation to Him. I learned more fully about His sovereign grace and mercy. I am a saved sinner. I am a sinner still being saved. One day I will be fully saved. Jesus Christ is my all in all, my only hope in life and in death. Anything I have is a gift of His grace and mercy alone; certainly not at all deserved or earned by anything I could do. All I can do is respond to His love by loving and seeking to serve Him.

For the child of God, nothing is wasted in His sovereign economy. It is from the ashes, broken wreckage, and debris of our lives that He perfects His image in us.

Whatever God's providence brings our way, His promises are true and He remains faithful. The light afflictions of this poor world are nothing in light of the weight of the eternal glory that is waiting for those who love Him.

So it is that I affirm and confess that Jesus Christ is LORD, and that He is my LORD and my Savior.

I believe....

..in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth,

And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from where He shall come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit;
the holy universal Church;
the communion of the saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting.

AMEN!

(~ The Apostles' Creed ~)

Solo Deo gloria!