Memories of a Mentor

It is my understanding that the word mentor has its roots in Greek mythology.

It was the name of a contemporary and friend of Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) who befriended and advised Odysseus' son. Because of Mentor's relationship with the younger man, over the centuries his name has come to mean someone who shares what he has learned with a younger and less experienced comrade.

Well, that's my understanding, anyway. I really have only a modest background in mythology, and I could be wrong.

Nearly everyone has a mentor, I suppose — to some degree. A few of us thrive in spite of growing up in adverse conditions — including not having an older and wiser influence to keep us grounded and focused — but, thankfully, for most of us, there always seems to be a teacher, a minister, a professional role model.

Someone. Usually several someones.

In my case, it was a man named John Ward. He was the editor of my hometown newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat in Conway, Ark. I met him through my mother, who must have known nearly everyone in my hometown. I'm not sure when that was, but it was long before he actually became my mentor.

He actually became my mentor, I guess, when I was in high school. I had always been interested in writing, and my mother encouraged me to apply that interest to newspaper writing. As a result, she prodded me to seek John's counsel, and he was quite obliging.

Many were the days I spent in his newsroom office as a teenager, learning from him and soaking up the wisdom he had acquired. My memory is that John was a large, gregarious man, larger than life in many ways — although perhaps he only seemed so to me.

I know he was a presence in the community, helping to establish Toad Suck Daze, an annual festival in my home county that gets its name from an actual town along the Arkansas River. He was an accomplished musician and probably performed at the early Toad Suck Daze festivals although that would have been after I left Conway.

He was an admirer of Winthrop Rockefeller and played important roles in both his gubernatorial candidacy and statehouse tenure. John wrote two books about Rockefeller, the first of which I bought and gave to my mother. She enjoyed it so much that she asked me to get him to sign it, which I did.

After Mom died, I kept that book. John's inscription read, "To Mary Goodloe, a wonderful friend and a lady I admire very much. ... Glad you enjoyed this. I wish now I could write it all over again."

Those weren't empty words. When John said something, he meant it.

John gave me my first freelance assignments and showed me, when I brought him my earliest journalistic efforts, what I needed to do differently. Somewhere in some musty microfilm room — or wherever such data is stored these days — you can see (if you want to, that is) my first bylines.

Shortly thereafter, I got my first bylines in my high school newspaper followed by my first bylines in my college newspaper — and, after that, my first bylines as a professional writer. I like to think that the stories that followed those early bylines got progressively better; and, if that is so, it is in large part because of John's influence on me.

A life in writing had been launched, for good or ill, and John had been the one to smash the champagne bottle at its christening.

John died a week ago, and I have been trying to think of a way to honor him.

And I have concluded that the best way is what I've been doing.

For the last 2½ years, I have been an adjunct journalism instructor in the local community college system, sharing with my students what I learned in my years of newspaper work.

But I have come to realize that my students are getting more than that. They are getting the benefit of wisdom I acquired from John — and it is often shared, I have discovered, in the same words he used when he shared his wisdom with me.

Such are the often subtle ways a mentor influences.

For all I know, they may have been the same words that were shared with John many years before that. Who knows the lineage of a pearl of wisdom? My students don't know it, but what I tell them is never something that I was the first to discover. Journalism is like anything else. There are truths about it that remain constant.

Sometimes, I must admit, I feel like a bit of a plagiarist when I share things with my students that John or my college mentor, Roy Reed, told me — but I guess that's a reflection of my training. I always feel compelled to attribute that knowledge to my source (even if it wasn't the original source of the knowledge).

I feel I learned from the best. There are/were others almost as good — but none was better.

Thanks, John. Vaya con Dios, amigo.

They Call Him 'Chainsaw'

---

---

When I was a child, my parents took my brother and me on several summer road trips through the eastern United States.

I think that statement requires a little context.

In the years before my brother and I came along, my parents were missionaries in Africa. While they were there, they became close friends with their colleagues. I don't know if their friends returned to America before or after my parents did, but it turned out that all their friends were in the eastern half of the continent — so, for a time, vacations meant planning trips based on who lived where.

In those days, it was entertaining simply to watch my parents unfold maps on the dining room table and plot the routes from one friend's home to another with felt–tip pens. Our starting point was our home in Conway, Ark. Our destination was Vermont, where a couple of my parents' closest friends lived. We saved money by spending the nights with friends all the way to Vermont and all the way back.

(It was a rare treat in those days for us to stay in a motel. For my brother and me, it meant being able to swim in a motel swimming pool.)

I guess I don't need to tell you that our route was never a straight line — and we must have made that trip three or four times when I was a child.

The itinerary was never the same, but this might give you an idea of what our trips were like. One year, I recall, we took kind of a northerly approach, stopping in Kentucky, then Pennsylvania, then New York, on our way to Vermont, then we took a southerly route home, stopping in Virginia, then North Carolina, then Tennessee. Each time we stayed with friends (well, the stop in New York was to visit my father's sister and her family).

I thought it was kind of cool, actually. Because of those road trips, I figured I had visited more states than just about anyone in my class at school. And, because I was born overseas, I figured it was a sure thing that I had been to more countries than any of my classmates.

To put it in Charlie Sheen lingo, I felt I was winning.

But, if I haven't already surrendered my crown (and I may have — who knows how many states my former classmates have visited since we graduated from high school?), I would probably have to turn it over to a fellow who was actually a year behind me in school — but, before 2011 is over, he may have visited more states than I have ... and he's been doing it the hard way.

His name is Jeff. He teaches physical education in Fayetteville, Ark., the town where I earned my B.A., but he grew up with me in Conway. We knew each other as children. I don't remember if we attended the same elementary school, but I know we were in Cub Scouts together.

In high school, we kind of ran in separate crowds. I was always more interested in writing, working for the school newspaper, that kind of thing. Jeff was always part of the circle of athletes, the guys who could always be seen wearing their letterman jackets or their football jerseys.

Jeff acquired a nickname when we were in school. Because of his ferocious tenacity, he earned the name Chainsaw. No matter what might stand in his way, folks said, he would rip into it like a chainsaw. No holds barred. "Straight ahead" was his attitude about, well, everything.

Our families were acquainted as well. His father and my father were colleagues at a small private college. My father taught religion and philosophy there. Jeff's father was a coach, specializing in swimming. He built a successful program that included using the college's pool to teach children in the community to swim.

Jeff was one of the youngest in a rather large family, and he was always close to his father. I remember attending the high school graduation ceremony the year Jeff graduated. His father was a member of the local school board (the middle school in my hometown now bears his name), and, that evening, he was handing the diplomas to the graduates after someone else called their names.

He shook their hands, they smiled at each other, they might exchange brief pleasantries, then it was time to give the diploma to the next one. Pretty innocuous stuff.

When Jeff's name was called and he strode across the stage, father and son embraced to a thundering, spontaneous ovation. No one in that gymnasium that night could help but be moved by the sight.

Sadly, Jeff's father passed away in 1997. I don't know the details, but I believe he suffered from some kind of respiratory disease — an ironic way for an athletic life to end.

As I say, Jeff also is involved in physical education. I have no doubt he was strongly influenced by his father's example — as he was a year ago when he was diagnosed with cancer.

Jeff's admiration for his father is evident on his Facebook page, where he attributes (falsely) his favorite quotation to his father: "Be kind to everyone because everyone you meet is fighting a battle."

(I'm sure Jeff's father said that many times — it's the kind of thing I would have expected him to say to his children — but he probably never told them that it was really Plato who was responsible for it.

(That's OK, though. I don't think Plato would have objected if Jeff's father took credit for it.)

And Jeff appears to be winning his battle with cancer. In fact, he's doing so well that he's been trying to raise awareness of leukemia and lymphoma with a cross–country bicycle ride that began about three weeks ago in Oregon.

---

---

His friends and family have kept track of his progress through the updates and pictures he's been posting on Facebook.

An avid fisherman, Jeff has reported stopping at some rivers to do some fishing along the way. He appears to pitch his tent wherever he can — although, like my parents, he's been making some stops at friends' homes. He reported, for example, that he stopped in Boise for a few days of R&R with some friends around the Fourth of July.

Sometimes, the wind is at his back, and he makes more progress than he expected. His original goal was to cover 70 miles a day traveling at roughly 10 miles per hour, but he actually covered about 85 miles when he left the coast. "Great day in the saddle," he wrote.

"The coast of Oregon is a feast for the eyes around each bend."

Conditions continued to be favorable as he made his way through Oregon. A few days later, he wrote this: "McKenzie River. Gonna fish here today. Pedaled up the river from Corvallis yesterday 90 miles slight uphill. The weather is great. ... Slept in an old growth forest last night. ... This part of Oregon is very lush with lots of rain."

Then there are times when conditions are not so favorable. "Met my match today with the toughest climb I have had yet," he wrote last week.

"The ride down the main Salmon was nice and then once in White Bird the climb started 11 miles at 8% grade for 3200 vertical feet. The legs had a hard time responding after three days fishing in Boise, will begin my ascent over Lolo Pass tomorrow."

---

---

His latest post on Facebook says he is in Montana now. "The big open country of SW Montana makes one feel small," he writes. "In Virginia City now."

Montana, he wrote yesterday, "gave me all I wanted and more. Got hit by a hail storm, 40 mph headwinds and got a dose of the huge country with lonely roads."

In spite of all that, he observed, "This is beautiful country."

I've never been there, but, from what I have heard, it really is.

He closes each post with his signature line — "Straight ahead. Chainsaw."

My understanding is that Jeff won't be going clear across the country. Originally, his plan was for his ride to conclude around the Kansas–Colorado border — and if that is still the plan, then I expect that he will start to move in a more southeasterly direction now, probably taking him through Wyoming and Colorado.

But his plans might have changed. And, if they have, I would recommend that he stay in the northern half of the country. It's just too hot in the central and southern states for extensive bike riding.

Whatever his plans are now, though, I just say, keep going, Chainsaw.

Straight ahead.

The Guy Next Door

The other day would have been the 70th birthday of a man who lived next door to my family when I was a child.

I grew up outside the city limits, on a lakefront lot in what was then a sparsely developed area in central Arkansas. Many of the people who lived out there at that time had no one living directly next door — their closest neighbors might be half a mile away — but my family actually did have a neighbor.

Well, there was a house next door that we could see from our house. The identities of the neighbors changed from time to time.

For a few years, this fellow was the occupant — along with his wife and their children. He was a dentist, and he gave my parents good prices on dental work. As a result, most of my memories of him are of fluoride treatments, whirring drills, spitting and large, hairy hands reaching into my mouth.

(Well, there is another memory. He always had very voluptuous assistants in his dental office. I don't remember any of their names — but I do recall that they were far too shapely for a young boy entering adolescence.

(There is one occasion in particular that I remember vividly. I guess I was 12 at the time. A particularly well endowed assistant was poking around in my mouth, and her ample cleavage was — literally — inches from my eyes.

("My, you have active saliva glands," she remarked.)

As I say, we lived on lakefront lots. The lake was a manmade lake, and it attracted all sorts of activity in the warm months (of which there were many) — fishing, swimming, water skiing.

People from town often came out to the lake on weekends and during the summer. They would have picnics and wade into the water at the public beach. Some folks also brought their boats and went out fishing or water skiing — or whatever.

But the people who lived on the lake had no need for that. If you had a lakefront lot, you already had a private place to keep your boat, and you could go out in it whenever you wished.

My family kept a small fishing boat on the property; our neighbor owned a party barge that he used to entertain friends.

He may have owned a fishing boat, too. Whether he did or not, though, I know he enjoyed fishing. I don't remember how I became aware of that. Maybe I saw some fishing gear in his home. Maybe I observed him fishing from the shore.

I don't remember how long he and his family lived next door, either. A few years, maybe. But I know they moved away and someone else moved in to the house next door. And then someone else moved in. And then, a few years later, we finally moved out of the house in which I had lived since I was about 4 years old.

Well, to make a long story short, I don't recall hearing anything more about that ex–neighbor until about five years ago when I was looking at my hometown newspaper's website.

And there it was — a report that, following the conclusion of a church mission trip to South America, he and a colleague from Conway had joined eight other people in a fishing trip on a lake that is 100 miles long and 45 miles wide.

Apparently, he was semi–retired and had become very involved in mission work through his church. The fishing trip itself wouldn't have been especially noteworthy — except for the fact that the boat capsized. A pastor and his wife died, and their bodies were found fairly early. The six others survived.

But the two from Conway did not survive. For awhile, they clung to some kind of cooler with two of the pastor's sons, but at some point it became clear the cooler would not keep all four men afloat, and the dentist and his colleague pushed off from the cooler, one by one, and disappeared beneath the water.

"You need to live," they reportedly told their companions. "We're older and you need to live."

The story of how they died was greeted in my hometown with admiration for their heroism and sacrifice. The pastor of the church said the mission work probably would continue — although I don't know if it has.

And an annual golf tournament in my ex–neighbor's memory has been held for the last three years. It raises money for an interfaith clinic that provides medical and dental care for uninsured county residents.

Shortly after he died, the Arkansas State Dental Association established a humanitarian award in my ex–neighbor's name. The intention was to honor dentists who volunteered to serve abroad.

From what I can see, he has been honored and praised repeatedly in the last five years — and I suppose he, his widow and his sons are entitled.

And the last thing I would ever want to do is speak ill of the deceased.

But I can't help wondering something. Was his death really necessary?

As a child, whenever I went out in our fishing boat — or in someone else's boat — I always had to put on a life preserver. My memory is that everyone wore life preservers — I always thought it was some kind of law — and the accessibility of land was not a factor. The shoreline of the lake was always visible, no matter where you were, no matter what you were doing.

My ex–neighbor must have worn a life preserver when he lived next door and he took his party barge or a fishing boat out on the water.

Why wasn't he wearing a life preserver during an excursion on a lake that was 100 miles long and 45 miles wide?

Tributes

It never occurred to me before.

Last summer, as you may recall, my practically lifelong friend Phyllis died. She had been living with cancer for a few years, but then she was stricken with pneumonia, and it was too much for her body to withstand.

A mutual friend of ours participated in the funeral planning. He returns to our hometown at the end of each semester to participate in commencement ceremonies at the university there, and Phyllis' death came very near the time when he would be doing that at the end of the summer session.

He spent a little more time there than normal last August, helping with the arrangements.

Anyway, he is back there now. He just arrived yesterday. The university will be holding its spring ceremonies this weekend, and he posted a notice on Facebook.

A friend informed him that a "Relay for Life" is being held in a nearby town in Phyllis' honor this weekend. I gathered from his response that he had already spoken to Phyllis' family and had been told about this event.

And it all clicked.

Of course. I've seen this before. I knew a couple of people who died of brain tumors when I was growing up, and, at some point, folks organized special events like this "Relay for Life" in their memories. Likewise, I knew some people who died of other diseases, and similar events were organized in their memories.

I suppose these events have — almost always — been intended to raise money for medical research. They also — almost always — become annual events and carry the deceased person's name.

It's a form of immortality, I suppose — I couldn't wish it for a better person even though I still wish, perhaps for selfish reasons, that she was still around.

And I'm glad her name will be remembered — even when the time comes when the people who remember her name have no memory of her.

It's been nearly a year since she died, but in that time, there have been many occasions when I have remembered things about Phyllis that I had forgotten — or, at least, haven't given a lot of thought in awhile.

She continues to influence me, at times to inspire me, in ways that neither of us ever could have dreamed when we were children in Conway, Ark.

Neither, I suppose, could we have imagined, when we saw fundraising events being named for people we had known, that one of us — and, who knows, perhaps even both of us — would be remembered in such a way, possibly long after our contemporaries have joined us.

I am glad she is being honored in this way, but I am sorry she didn't know just how many fish were caught in the wide net she cast during her life.

I guess that is the thing I find singularly sad about such tributes.

Yesterday, as I wrote in this blog, was the 16th anniversary of my mother's death. She was a first–grade teacher when she died in a flash flood — admired and mourned by many.

(She knew Phyllis when I was growing up, knew her pretty well, as I recall. Mom knew all of my friends, but some she knew better than others. We lived in the country, and she knew the kids with whom I played every day, of course, but Phyllis, like most of my classmates, lived within the city limits.

(Mom didn't see most of those friends as frequently. She was acquainted with the kids who attended our church — but Phyllis didn't belong to our church when I was growing up. Nevertheless, Mom and Phyllis gravitated to each other and became friends. I'm not sure how or when that occurred, but it did. I remember that, by the time I was in high school, I noticed Phyllis and Mom seeking each other out at school functions.)

Anyway, the last children Mom taught are old enough now to have children of their own. In a few years, they may be first–graders in the school where Mom taught for the last 12 years of her life.

Those children, obviously, never knew my mother. But they will almost surely know her name. Less than a year after she died, the school dedicated a garden on the school property to her memory.

I don't know what the garden is used for today, but the original intention, as I understood it, was for it to be a place for contemplation, for reflection, for storytelling. A sort of a "quiet place," you might say, and that, I think, would have suited Mom just fine.

It was not a playground for recess. The swings and the slides could be found on the other side of the building.

There was a sign that identified the garden and on it could be found my mother's name. Even if you only ever walked past it and never stopped, you were almost sure to absorb the name from reading the sign — in much the same way that some people who perform heroic deeds say they learned the procedures for CPR and the Heimlich maneuver by casually glancing at posters on breakroom walls.

I haven't been on those grounds in a long time, but I assume that garden is still there. If it is, I am glad that it stands as a monument to Mom.

At the same time, I have a hard time thinking of my mother as a name on a garden wall or Phyllis as the name of an annual fundraising event. They were flesh–and–blood people for me, people who continue to influence my thoughts, my life, my memories.

When I think of my mother, I don't think of the honors she received for her creative teaching techniques. I think of her dedication, of evenings I spent sitting with her at the dining room table, helping her grade papers so she would have some free time to watch TV or play with the cat.

And when I think of Phyllis, I remember laughs and moments we shared, some with other people, some with just us.

I'm sorry they're gone. I miss them every day.

And, when all is said and done, I am glad they are remembered by others.

Even if those people never met them.

The Death of Innocence

Today is an odd day for me, a day that brings back a mixture of memories.

It was on this day 35 years ago that a sixth–grade girl from a small town in my home county vanished in broad daylight. Her body was found a few days later. She had been raped, murdered and left in a stock pond.

Her name was Dana Mize. Few of the people I knew had any idea who she was — until she was abducted. And, initially, that was newsworthy because her father was a candidate for county office in the upcoming primary.

I never met her. But I knew people who knew her fairly well. Her family attended First Baptist Church in my hometown, and "FBC," as it was called, was the biggest church in town. Still is, I imagine. And the congregation always has been tightly knit. A few days ago, I mentioned this upcoming anniversary to an old friend of mine who was a member of that church at the time, and he said he remembered feeling a terrible sadness for the family.

That was the prevailing emotion — at FBC and throughout the county and its communities.

It wasn't long after she disappeared, though, that the whispers began. Her abduction, people were saying, had nothing to do with local politics. If it had, the abductor(s) almost certainly would have contacted someone with a demand that her father withdraw from the race or something similar. But no such communication had been received.

It must have been sexual, so the reasoning went — and, it turned out, the reasoning was right on the money.

I didn't want to believe that. I guess most of the people in the area didn't want to believe it, but I had to admit that it made sense.

It's hard to describe what a shocking time that was. One of the reasons why it was so shocking, I think, was the fact that my hometown was still somewhat innocent and naive when it happened. The place often seemed to exist in a bubble. For whatever reason, people in my hometown seemed to believe they were immune to the tragedies of the world.

That conviction never really made much sense to me because tragedies happened there all the time.

Before I was in grade school, a girl I knew was diagnosed with cancer and died a short time later. When I was in third grade, a classmate of mine died of leukemia. A few years later, the son of some family friends was diagnosed with a brain tumor. A tornado ripped through my hometown when I was 5 and leveled several homes (took a few lives in the process).

And those were just a few of the tragedies that touched me personally. In the years when I was growing up, there were other tragedies that affected other people — like any other place.

I guess what made the Dana Mize episode unique was the fact that criminal intent was behind it. The other tragedies could be written off as being caused by disease or random acts of nature or perhaps sloppiness or stupidity. But this was deliberate.

In a large city, the disappearance of a young girl — and the subsequent discovery of her dead and sexually abused body — wouldn't have raised any eyebrows in those days.

But it was different in my hometown. Everyone who lived there had to accept a previously unthinkable truth: Sexual predators must have been living among us, as they do in any other city or town — and, based on statistics, I can only conclude that some of the girls with whom I attended school must have been abused — by their fathers, by cousins, by family friends, who knows?

In my hometown of Conway, Ark., it seems to me that there must have been sexual predators around — even in that seemingly innocent time.

There was nothing terribly special or unique about my hometown. It was a town much like any other town, I suppose. It was mostly a blue–collar town in a mostly blue–collar county. I'm sure young girls were molested, abused, even assaulted there when I was growing up, but those cases were usually handled quietly, away from the public eye.

What did make the Dana Mize case unique was the fact that the perpetrator didn't live nearby. Turned out, he had flown to Arkansas from his home in New Jersey, committed the crime and flown back.

I still don't know what drew him to Mize's tiny hometown of Vilonia — which was much smaller than Conway. To my knowledge, he had never been to that area before.

I have tried, many times over the last 35 years, to reconstruct his movements, and I have tried to figure out how he could just stumble onto Vilonia. I don't know what the odds would have been, but I keep coming back to the idea that — somehow — he must have known that Vilonia was there.

His plane had to have landed in Little Rock. He could have rented a car at the airport and easily driven to Conway, which is along the highway outside Little Rock.

If the trail stopped in Conway, you could chalk the whole thing up to randomness, I guess. But Vilonia is one of those out–of–the–way country towns. You don't just stumble onto it. You have to be going there on purpose.

And the stock pond where the body was found was, as I recall, even more remote.

A complete stranger to the area would be almost bound to get lost after being, to say the least, distracted by a life–and–death struggle, either before or after the sexual assault, and a search for a suitably secluded spot to drop the body.

It seems likely to me that he would have had to ask for directions back to the highway. And someone almost certainly would have remembered giving directions to a disheveled stranger in a rented car whose clothes may have been dirty and/or wet.

Yet my memory is that the perpetrator did all this in a single afternoon, returned to the airport and caught a flight back to New Jersey — and he didn't ask for directions and apparently wasn't connected to the crime until a few days later, when he confessed to his psychiatrist.

He's still alive, I hear. He was convicted of capital felony murder, which often carries a death sentence, but his jury sentenced him to life without parole. He was 34 at the time he committed the crime so he is about to turn 70.

I've heard he has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, the same mental illness that afflicts the man who shot Gabrielle Giffords back in January.

That would answer a lot of questions, I guess. But not all.

I suppose some questions will never be answered.

Perspective

The average price for a gallon of gas in the United States went up 34 cents in the last 13 days, according to CNNMoney.com.

That number made me think.

When I was a child, growing up on a lake outside Conway, Ark., my parents always stopped for gas at the same bait shop/filling station, and the price of gas in those days was so stable that the sign out front never changed. In my mind's eye, I can still see it.

The price was 34.9 cents — for years and years and years.

And now the price of a gallon has gone up by that amount in less than two weeks' time.

Yeah, I know, 34 cents sounds really good to people who are paying anywhere from $3.18 to $3.86 per gallon (that's the current range cited by CNNMoney.com).

Remember — minimum wage was about a buck and a half in those days. Even so, though, it seems to me that folks had a pretty good deal when I was a child.

Let's say we're talking about filling up vehicles with tanks that can carry 15 gallons. Compare paying about $5 to fill that tank from a gross weekly income of about $60 — to paying about $50 to fill that tank from whatever the average gross weekly income is today (for those fortunate enough to be working and not looking for work).

Gas prices today are about 10 times what they were when I was a child — so, for things to be comparable numerically, I suppose, one's weekly gross income should be about 10 times that minimum wage figure from four decades ago — or about $600 a week.

That sounds like a lot of money — and it is. There were quite a few people who were making at least that much before the recession — but if you've been out of work for a couple of years and your unemployment benefits have run out, you'd probably settle for half that today and be thankful for it.

You wouldn't have much buying power, but you'd probably be able to keep food on your table and a roof over your head.

I long ago got used to the idea that the prices I pay for everything as an adult are higher than the prices that were being charged when I was a child.

But do they have to be so much higher?

Stop All The Clocks

---

---

When I was a child, it was almost fashionable to say the Kennedy name and the word "tragic" in the same sentence.

No matter where one stood on the political spectrum, it was a conclusion with which everyone seemed to agree.

President Kennedy and his brother both had been assassinated. Their oldest sister died young in a plane crash, and their oldest brother died in World War II. And over the years, it seemed that tragedy continued to visit the Kennedy family disproportionately. It didn't always take young lives; sometimes it merely left them in shambles.

That is certainly tragic.

But the truth is, in a family that large (there were nine children in Joe and Rose Kennedy's family, and most of those children produced children of their own), there are almost bound to be a few cases of premature and/or tragic death.

I'm sure there have been other large families in America that have suffered such losses, but they didn't exist in a public spotlight. The Kennedys, of course, were and, to an extent, still are politically prominent. Their influence is reduced now, but they remain the closest thing America has to a royal family.

When I was growing up in Arkansas, a politically prominent family lived just down the road from mine. It wasn't what I would call a royal family, but there were times when it seemed to me that it aspired to be.

I have written about this family, off and on, for about 2½ years now. I first mentioned it (briefly) in the days following my high school class reunion (which I was unable to attend but I got on the class' e–mail mailing list). It was at that time that I learned that the mother in the family had died the year before.

I wrote about it here again slightly more than a year ago when the patriarch of the family, a man known as Justice Jim Johnson, died of a self–inflicted gunshot wound. He'd been suffering from serious medical problems and apparently lost all hope.

Justice Jim, as I observed at that time, was an old–fashioned segregationist who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Arkansas when his twin sons and I were in first grade. I was too young to pay attention to a politician's speech at the time, but I have heard that his rhetoric was, to put it mildly, fiery.

He hadn't really been a prominent figure in Arkansas for at least a couple of decades when he died. Nevertheless, I was stunned by the vitriol I encountered when I tried to find out more about the circumstances at Arkansas–based web sites.

I was even more stunned a few months later when I heard that one of Justice Jim's sons, David, had lost his own son in an accident.

It was the kind of pain I couldn't imagine, and I said so to David in a letter I wrote a few days after learning of his son's death from one of the members of our high school class who has taken it upon herself to notify the rest of us whenever someone dies.

At the time, it really seemed to me that the Johnson family had been visited by more tragedy in a short span of time than any family should have to face. But there were two truths, one of which was obvious (Mrs. Johnson had been in her late 70s and Mr. Johnson had been in his mid–80s when they died; I was sorry that those two people were gone, but they both lived longer than most people of their generation) and the other had yet to be revealed, even though it was partially revealed last summer when David's son died.

I don't know if that truth has been fully revealed yet, but I got at least a hint today that it is continuing to unfold.

Today, I received another e–mail from Dianne — who has done a remarkable job of keeping us informed of these developments these last few years — reporting that David has died.

I hoped that Dianne was wrong, but, in my gut, I was sure she was right. I haven't known her to be wrong about any of these deaths in nearly three years, and she wasn't wrong this time, either.

I have confirmed that, yes, my friend is dead. I don't know what happened, but I have heard that he died of liver failure or kidney failure. I suppose I will learn the details in the days ahead.

It's funny the thoughts one has at a time like this.

• I was remembering, for example, when I was in first grade. David and I were the only ones who had the same first name. Everyone else — Larry, Susan, Lisa, whatever — could be identified by their first names only, but there were two Davids and that was a bit of a problem.
  
  As an adult, I understand the dilemma the adults of that time faced. There had to be a way to distinguish between David Johnson and David Goodloe. And it was decided that David Johnson would be known as "David" and I would be known as "David G."
  
  Now, in the 1990s, having an initial attached to your name was cool. But, when I was a child in the 1960s, I didn't care for it. Being the only one in the class whose identity couldn't be expressed in my first name alone made me feel like I was being singled out.
  
  It's hard to explain any better than that.
  
  But it just didn't seem fair — or necessary — to me. Everyone called him Davy, anyway. I never understood why I couldn't simply be called David.
  
  Later in life, I called him David, and he was always gracious about it, but he seemed to prefer to be called Dave.


• It's a funny thing, too, about "identical" twins.
  
  I've never understood why people often experience a kind of confusion over the identities of twins. They look so much alike, people say.
  
  And Hollywood has done what it could to promote that concept of mistaken identity with some successful movies over the years.
  
  Well, I've known a few sets of identical twins in my life, but I can only think of one set of twins who looked so similar that it was challenging for me to tell them apart.
  
  I never had any trouble with Danny and Davy. I always knew which one was which. Their voices weren't the same at all. And one of them had a birth mark on his face, not nearly as pronounced as the one that actor Richard Thomas had but clear enough to me.
  
  No, I never had any trouble telling them apart. They were alike in many ways, but they were always two individuals to me, not parts of the same person.
  
  When I got older, I mused about that very thing. Why was it so easy for me to tell Danny and David apart? I saw a picture earlier today of the Johnson family that was probably taken around the time of their father's gubernatorial campaign.
  
  (I'm guessing it was printed originally in campaign pamphlets. Politicians often circulated photos of their families in their campaign brochures in those days.)
  
  Anyway, I couldn't tell from looking at the picture which twin was which. It was in black and white, and I couldn't see a birth mark on either of the twins. They were dressed the same and had crewcut haircuts (I remember those haircuts).
  
  So I wonder if maybe the fact that the three of us were so young when we first met played a role. It's been my experience that children are often more perceptive about things than adults think.


• And, in sort of a random, general kind of way, I've been remembering my childhood on a manmade lake outside the city limits of Conway, Ark.
  
  David, his twin brother Danny and I shared many of the same likes and dislikes. We loved the same popular TV shows, like Batman, and we incorporated them into the games we would play.
  
  David and Danny had a toy that was popular in those days called "Creepy Crawlers." You would pour a liquid substance (which you would get at a toy store, and these goops, as they were called, came in a variety of colors, which kept the toy new and interesting) into a mold and heat it on a hot plate. When it cooled, you had a rubbery spider or some other similar creature.
  
  We would combine those rubber bugs into our version of the Batman series and invent adventures of our own superheroes — Bugman and Buggy instead of Batman and Robin.
  
  Well, what do you want? We were only about 6 years old! The names we gave ourselves may not have been very creative, but I think our games were.
  
  I don't remember who was Bugman or who was Buggy. Maybe we alternated. I mean, this was kind of our version of Cops 'n' Robbers, and someone had to be the bad guy. My memory of our games is that we were always fair. We always took turns — and we probably took turns being Bugman, Buggy and the bad guy.
  
  Perhaps that is why, when I think of David and Danny and our childhood on the lake, I think of us as a threesome — the Three Musketeers, with a group identity — and not as individuals like Bugman, Buggy or the bad guy.

I'm sorry my friend is gone, I really am, but I wonder if maybe I'm grieving as much for the knowledge that that chapter in my life truly is over now. Forever.

Realistically speaking, it has been over for a long, long time. But it lived on in my memory, along with images of three little boys swimming in the lake or riding bicycles on a country road on hot summer days.

Or sitting in a sweltering Arkansas schoolroom trying to focus on multiplication tables while beads of sweat rolled effortlessly down our faces.

We experienced all things together — on occasion, we even got into trouble together — and, for some reason, I thought we always would, but now David has experienced something that Danny and I have not.

If there is an afterlife, perhaps we will speak of it some time in the future.

News From Home

I grew up in Conway, Ark. It was a small town when I was a child, outwardly not much different from many towns in Arkansas in those days.

Today, it is at least five times, maybe six times, as large as it was then, and it is noteworthy for having been the home, even if for a short time, of some prominent people. Actress Mary Steenburgen, for example, went to college there. So did Scottie Pippen, who went on to play pro basketball with Michael Jordan. Football player Peyton Hillis was born and raised there, then attended my alma mater, the University of Arkansas. Last May, I wrote about Conway when Kris Allen was a finalist on American Idol.

But before any of those people came along, Conway was known — at least in Arkansas — as the home of Justice Jim Johnson.

Earlier today, an old friend of mine sent me an e–mail. Justice Jim died yesterday at the age of 85. Authorities are saying that he killed himself. Reportedly, he had had some health issues, and a rifle was found near his body.

When he was a young man, Justice Jim was an Arkansas Supreme Court justice. That's where the "Justice" part of his name came from. He had twin sons, Danny and David, who were my age and my almost–constant playmates. They lived just down the road from us so, when we were kids, it seemed the three of us were always at the Johnsons' house or mine.

Justice Jim was part of the state Supreme Court until 1966, when Orval Faubus chose not to seek another term as governor. Justice Jim sought and won the Democratic nomination for governor, and apparently, he did so using the segregationist rhetoric that was all too common among Southern Democrats at that time (I say "apparently" because I was too young to sit through or comprehend a politician's speech so I never, to my knowledge, heard anything he said during that campaign).

That fall, I enrolled in first grade. Justice Jim's sons were in my class, and the camera crews from the TV stations in Little Rock were on hand to film the event. The reporters were interested in seeing Justice Jim's sons in school with blacks.

I don't recall if Justice Jim was there or if his wife handled the matter of enrolling their sons. I just remember the disruptive influence those reporters and cameras had. The kids, as I remember, got along fine. Eventually, my first grade teacher had to shoo the adults away so she could get down to business with her pupils.

Later that year, Justice Jim lost the governor's race to Winthrop Rockefeller, the first Republican elected governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction.

In those days, Arkansas elected its governor to two–year terms so, two years later, Rockefeller ran for re–election. Once again, there was a Johnson in the race. Only this time, it was Justice Jim's wife, Virginia. She was unsuccessful in her race for the nomination, but she was a pioneer — the first woman to run for governor in Arkansas' history.

At the same time, Justice Jim challenged Sen. J.W. Fulbright, who was seeking re–election. Fulbright was nominated, then re–elected, and the Johnsons returned to their home in Conway. I can still remember walking through their home in those days and seeing leftover yard signs from their respective campaigns.

Justice Jim was an ally of George Wallace. I remember sitting at his kitchen table the day Wallace was shot and a reporter from the Arkansas Gazette called to get a quote. Justice Jim gave him one. It was a "dastardly act," he said. After he hung up the phone, he looked at his sons and me, grinned and said, "That sounded like a bad word, didn't it?"

Justice Jim and I seldom discussed politics. He knew that my parents didn't agree with most of what he said, and that was OK. He was protective of me like a son. He didn't say things to me that he knew would create a conflict in my young head. He only said things to me that he knew would be all right with my parents. He told me to do right. He told me to be respectful and to be fair. He was always courteous, the very image of a Southern gentleman, to my parents and me, indeed, to everyone with whom he came in contact.

And I have tried to follow his instructions and his example.

I've heard that Bill Clinton once told Justice Jim, "You make me ashamed to be from Arkansas." I never felt that way. I have always been proud to be from Arkansas, and Justice Jim was a big part of that. Not because of his politics, but because of the man he was.

I can't help but think of the ironies, though. Justice Jim, opponent of desegregation, dies during the first presidential term that was won by a black man.

If I had ever speculated about when it would all end for Justice Jim, I never would have expected that.

I certainly never would have predicted that he would die by his own hand.

But I don't judge him for the choices he made — or that were made for him.

A couple of years ago, I was talking to one of his sons on the phone. He was telling me that his father had changed, that he had been a product of the times in which he was born and raised and that he regretted some of the things he had said in the heat of his political battles. I tried to reassure my friend that I didn't hold any of his father's political statements against him, no matter how much I may have disagreed with him.

And I don't judge him for choosing the option he chose. I've never had the gift of being able to look into a man's head and heart and know the pressure he felt or the demons he fought.

I pray for his sons — Mark, David and Dan — that they will have the strength to endure this ordeal, coming only a few years after Virginia's death. I'm sure they will.

And I also pray that Justice Jim has found the peace that eluded him in life.