RIPOSTE
by RIP RENSE |
|
EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
(Oct. 28, 2009)
In keeping with the spirit of El Dia de los
Muertos (Day of the Dead), the
Mexican holiday in which
deceased friends, relatives and ancestors are celebrated (Nov.
1, 2), I hereby take a very deep breath. . .and pay tribute to a
few souls I have been fortunate enough to know.
JAN HLINKA---Jan
(pronounced Yahn) was principal violist in the Los Angeles
Philharmonic Orchestra for about 150 years. I wish I had details
of his life at hand, but he is one of the lucky few to have
almost no information on the Internet. I can tell you something
more important, perhaps, than the usual dry tombstone-carve of
events and accomplishments. Jan was a pixie, a cherub, a minx
and a mensch. He was a sweet guy who loved and cared about
people, seemingly as much as music. Nobody in human history had
a merrier twinkle in the eye, not even Santa Claus, or Jerry
Garcia. He had a disarming dash of down-to-earth that was, to
my young self, a shock to discover in a fine, august
musician who played all those fine, august works with that
fine, august orchestra. I met him during intermission at
an L.A. Phil concert sometime in the early 70’s, as he strolled
around on stage, quietly practicing passages on his beloved (Guarnieri?)
viola. It was Jan’s habit, you see, to stay on stage, there at the
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and talk to anyone who wandered over
to say hello or ask a question. Amazing, eh? So one night my
pals and I found ourselves looking up in awe at the fine,
august musician, and answering many questions about. .
.ourselves: were we students, what did we think of the concert
(imagine being asked that!), were we musicians (my pals were),
and so on. We timidly asked a few questions about the
performance, and received winking, humble answers that made us
laugh. And this became a habit. “Let’s go and say hi to Jan” was
a sort of automatic suggestion at intermissions through the
years. Once he invited us all backstage after a concert---this
was, shall we say, not unthrilling---and challenged us to a
vigorous game of ping-pong. (He wiped me out quickly, and was
said to be the orchestra champ.) A one-time pupil (and ardent
admirer) of the composer, Paul Hindemith, Jan soloed with the
Phil one memorable night on Hindemith’s “Trauermusik,”
written on the death of King George V (good score for Dia de los
Muertos.) It was a big moment for him, and for us, his personal
fan club, and we made our hands sore with applause. In short, it
was a very splendid and magical thing for young people to have
an actual member of an orchestra take an interest in them,
welcome them, make them feel at home, encourage them (one of us
went on to chair the music department at the University of
Pennsylvania, another to play flute and piccolo with the Duluth
Symphony.) You know, much ballyhoo is made about Disney Hall
being “L.A.’s Living Room,” as L.A. Phil GM Deborah Borda says,
but you don’t see orchestra members hanging around on stage,
talking to young people there---partly because tickets are far
more expensive than they were in the Pavilion, and partly
because Borda did away with student tickets when Disney Hall
opened. (Jan would have rolled his eyes.) Jan helped make
the Pavilion feel like, if not a living room, an extension of
home. He was not only a superb musician, but a fine metallurgist
and jewelry maker, with a relentlessly active mind, easy grace,
and real kindness. I found a Youtube clip of the L.A. Phil from
1977 under the great Zubin Mehta (that orchestra really sounds
burnished, rich), and there’s good old Jan in the front of the
viola section, with his handsome gray hair, playing emphatically
(check 4:56 into the clip.) Seeing him again after so many years
brings tears, and
warmth, and gratitude.
WILLIAM D.
LOCKRIDGE---Well, it was “Mr. Lockridge,” to me, for this tall, stern
looking man was the principal of my elementary school. In fact,
he was principal of my elementary school for several years
before my elementary school was even built. The district
assigned students to him when they were still housed at other
schools, so little did we all know that in 2nd and 3rd grade,
Mr. Lockridge was watching over us, getting to know us. And when
our school---Meadows School in Thousand Oaks---was completed in
1962, he knew our names, grades, potential, deficiencies. Bill
Lockridge got his teaching credential from USC, and he was one
of those people who brought extraordinary investment of self to
his job. Far from being just an administrator, he was the
pater familias of our little school. We were all frightened
of him, of course, and we should have been, given that we were
squirrelly little savages given to foul deeds that he was tasked
to correct. I “got in trouble” a couple of times, and Mr.
Lockridge adjudicated things with exemplary fairness. Once, when
I teased a classmate about his troubled older brother, the
classmate valiantly took a poke at me, which I reciprocated, and
we both wound up in “the office.” By the time Lockridge finished
with us, we were tearfully shaking hands and vowing to be
friends (a vow we kept.) In fact, when I was whacked in the head
with a baseball bat in the 8th grade (ah, that explains it, you
exclaim), that same classmate placed his baseball mitt under my
head, and Mr. Lockridge put me in the back of his secretary’s
station wagon and rushed me to the doctor’s office for stitches.
Years later, this dedicated and selfless man stood up to a
parent who tried to muscle a student away from one teacher and
into another class (apparently because the desired teacher
shared her religion), and for that was removed from his job by
the cowardly school board. Never mind---he got to teach math
again, and did such a good job that former students attended his
funeral last spring---almost 40 years after the fact! Bill was
blessed with a grand, long life, a great many friends, and
eventually, new hips and knees. We kept in touch a bit in recent
years---he was very supportive of my work---and I was one of
hundreds of people lucky to receive his annual homemade
Christmas cards, and occasional phone call. The thing I liked
best about him, though, was that he was an independent thinker
and straight-shooter, never fooled by fraudulence, never one to
subscribe to doctrine or dogma. And his sense of humor was
ever-abiding. Get this: a loyal USC football fan to the
end---and beyond---Bill’s ashes were placed inside of a football
at his own request(!) The corny old adage holds: he was a prince
who was a pal.
CAROLE BAILEY---I
didn’t know Carole the longtime, much-loved administrative
assistant at the UCLA Library School. I just knew Carole who
lived a couple blocks away, Carole who gave my Annie a little
black kitten, B.C., that wound up staying with her for almost 20
years. Carole was a gentle, giving person who adored cats and
flowers and home-baked cookies and cakes and reading. She did
yoga, and bestowed Christmas goodies on many a friend, and lived
with cats on her couches, mourning doves on her balcony, and
books on her shelves. She was ardent about political causes,
with various posters denouncing Bush and the Iraq invasion in
the windows of her well lived in one-bedroom apartment, and she
was ardent about being kind. She was in her ‘60’s, and looked
it, yet did not seem at all old---like a college student in old
woman disguise. Carole wound up fighting one of those hideous
chemotherapy battles with ovarian cancer, and she did so with
resolve and hope. Her mind stayed sharp, inquisitive, and her
spirit generous. She worked at being a note of goodness in a
generally disturbing human cacophony. One of her parting
messages: “Remember the cookies and smile.”
PAUL "P.J." CORKERY---I
wrote a column about Paul when he
passed away last year, and frankly, I think he deserves a column
a week. Just an extraordinary person, Corkery was first of all,
absolutely brilliant, possessed of an acuity marked by Herculean
memory, Renaissance Man erudition, facile analysis, sense of
humor inherited from leprechauns. One-time editor of the Boston
Phoenix (where he gave breaks to two now rather well-known film
critics, Peter Rainer and Michael Sragow), he went on to various
newspapers before landing in San Francisco as a diabetes
outpatient in the late 1980’s. As he fought an unimaginably
painful and heartbreaking battle to keep his right leg, which he
gradually lost, year by year, Corkery never once complained. Not
once. Instead, he lost himself in San Francisco history and
lore, ultimately establishing contacts and expertise that begged
comparisons to the legendary SF columnist,
Herb Caen.
In fact, P.J. aimed to step in for the late Caen at the
Chronicle, and was at one time promised the job, but it fell
apart as did the paper’s editorial hierarchy at the time. Never
one to be daunted (“Onward” was his motto), he wound up writing
the column anyhow for the remains of the San Francisco Examiner.
Paul so ingratiated himself with The City---from the recovering
addicts of Delancey Street (where he frequently went for coffee)
to the power-elite---that his enormous public funeral drew a
comment from Mayor Gavin Newsom: “He knew the heart and soul of
this city. He knew what made it great and he believed in the
nobility of good reporting.” God, who is certainly anything
but merciful,
decided that diabetes was not punishment enough for this good
fellow, and saddled him with a two-year fight against lymphoma.Yet P.J. did not let this stop him from
ghost-writing Willie Brown’s critically favored best-seller,
“Basic Brown,” or from general indefatigability. Ever a
realist, I heard that when his body began to shut down, the man
went on-line to look up “signs that you could be dying.” How
unapologetic is life, to subject humans to such preposterous
horror! I am proud to have been Paul’s friend for many years,
humbled that he thought well of me, and privileged to have been
the recipient of much encouragement from him. His
picture has a place on my
desk, and his spirit a place in my day. Onward.
DELMAR CONLEY---Now,
explaining Conley in one long paragraph is like trying to
explain string theory in twenty words or less. The Conley story
is as strange as all the roles of Dwight Frye and John Malkovich
combined. I’ve never written about it, at least factually,
because it is just too damned weird. But here’s a thumbnail.
Conley was nutty as a fruitcake, dealing without a deck, bathing
without a tub, whistling without Dixie. He looked like the
offspring of Walter Brennan and Bela Lugosi, grizzled. How I
came to know him has to do with his letters to the editor of
the Valley News, back in the ‘70’s when I worked there, and my
youthful taste for the oh, arcane---well shared by some
journalism chums at the time. At first, Conley seemed nothing
but a garden variety crazy old coot who wrote crazy
old coot letters to newspapers. Endless ramblings about, oh,
the symbolic intersections of Greek mythology, sex, American
politics, sex, world religions, and sex. But it seems that
Conley was well known by the newspaper librarian, who kept files
of his letters (apparently because they were so amazing), and I
came to piece together the story of a man who once earned a
degree in philosophy and became a bonafide minister. Somewhere
along the line, wiring frayed, or circuit boards burned out. I
learned from newspaper clippings that Conley’s only son had been
mortally injured in a high school football game, and that as the
boy lay in a coma, Conley went madder and madder, charging
doctors with all sorts of wrongdoing that might or might not
have had a basis in reality. This was when I stopped finding his
rantings entirely comedic, and began seeing traces of something
reminiscent of logic in them. As my pals and I pored over the
letters, and eventually began having highly amusing phone chats
with Delmar (“My name means ‘of the sea!’” he was wont to
declare), we came to realize that Conley was a deeply broken man
who reviled all authority and had manufactured an astonishing
alternate universe which he inhabited as the “Shaman-Pope of the
Spiritual Kingdom of God, domiciles spiritus et sexualis.” There
was some kindness hidden away in his insanity, and definitely
some humor, and over time this ridiculous, bawdy figure
gradually incurred our sympathies and affection. We even went to visit his
broken down house in a remote, largely deserted part of the San
Fernando Valley, and joined him in on a chorus of “My Old
Kentucky Home” as he accompanied on off-key fiddle. (We asked
before going to meet him what his favorite beer was, to which he
jauntily declared, “Beer!”) So in this improbable way did a
prankish bunch of semi-stoner
young reporters come to befriend a solitary old madman, and
Conley got a real kick out of the company (especially his
friend, the Hindu seer Raj Bavnani.)
I’ll never forget the high school senior class photo of his son,
faded and framed on the mantelpiece of his crummy,
chocked-full-of-junk living room. And I’ll never forget one of
his little quasi-religious leitmotivs: “You are your own
reincarnating ancestor!” Perish the thought.
SARAI RIBICOFF---This
brilliant, effervescent girl was
executed by a gang punk after dining at a Venice restaurant
in 1980. She was only 23, and it seems impossible that she has
been gone almost thirty years. The story of her murder is well
known, and was covered nationally, as she was the niece of U.S.
Senator Abraham Ribicoff. She was also a reporter at the L.A.
Herald-Examiner under the late Jim Bellows,
and eventually an impassioned and precocious editorial writer
there. I often think of her, and I know that this is partly
because of the despicable way that she was denied the life
before her---but it is also because of just who she was. It’s
funny, I can picture her exactly, and that is not the case with
various other ex-colleagues. She had an earnest and unabashed
way of smiling, her face essentially taken over by affection,
joy, with an unrestrained, musical laugh. I can see her curls,
and her curvy figure, and I can hear her voice. But here’s a
little story about her that perhaps best tells who she was.
Thanksgiving was coming up---it would be her last---and she
wanted to attend this ritzy sit-down dinner in Beverly Hills
with friends, so she was asking staffer after staffer to trade
shifts (she worked four to one.) There were no takers. At last
she came to me, Mr. Anthropia, and hit the jackpot. I liked
nothing better than to work holidays, as it took my mind off my
lousy family situation, and having to spend Thanksgiving at home
with the “Twilight Zone” marathon, a Van Kamp’s pumpkin pie, and
a joint (and if I was lucky, my friend John Rogers showing up
late), and having to turn down sympathy invitations for holiday
wallflowers. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll work your shift.” Sarai was
shocked, and thanked me profusely and repeatedly. I tried to
explain to her that it was no big deal, and that I liked the
camaraderie of a holiday newsroom skeleton crew. I could see
that she found this a bit hard to believe, but I assured her it
was true. You can guess what happened next, I’m sure. At about
11:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving, as I sat with four or five other
quietly working reporters and editors, Sarai showed up at the
office. She had left her party and driven downtown with a full
turkey dinner for me, and goodies for everyone else. She was a
real sweetheart.
CRAIG SKINNER---Craig
was a nice kid who grew up in the impossibly nice country town
that Thousand Oaks was back in the 1960’s. He was a great
softball player, and had a sort of soft way of speaking and
carrying himself that made “the girls” crazy. He was handsome,
with a kind of thick and flowing head of strawberry blond, and
I’m pretty sure blue eyes. He and I were not close friends, and
I sometimes had the impression that he didn’t like me too well.
Yet one day when I was thrown out of my house into a driving
rainstorm by my step-parental unit (because I had deigned to sit
in my room and watch television), I was welcomed at Craig’s
house. I remember it smelling of fried eggs, and being warm and
pleasantly stuffy. We spent the afternoon watching a bad Abbott
and Costello movie (I think) and "Wrestling From the Olympic" (Haystacks Calhoun!)
until I reluctantly headed back home after dark. By 8th
grade---Craig and I had been together since 3rd---we were
friends. In fact, in our all-male production of “The Wizard of
Oz,” Craig played---was it Glynda, the good witch?---and I
played Dorothy. (Really.) He had matured into this genuinely
nice guy who seemed to have malice toward no one, and I later
learned that he spent a lot of introspective time writing poems
for a girl he loved. Still, there was a kind of melancholy about
him that I noticed deepening in high school. I think the guy
felt things too much. He died in a car wreck before he
graduated.
MA RENSE---I
never knew my grandmother, an immigrant from the Tyrol area of
Austria and northern Italy. Her maiden name was Rose Luther, and
I’m told she spoke German and Hungarian, as they were the
languages of her village. Relatives “introduced” her, by long
distance, to one Joseph Rense (sometimes spelled “Rensi”), who
lived in Ohio in America and was said to have a successful
business. So off she went on a boat to Ellis Island, and
eventually a new life as the mother of seven children (not
counting several who did not survive.) By all accounts, Rose was
nothing short of heroic in her dedication to her six boys and
one girl. My father, the youngest of the lot, idolized her. Why
he never bothered to take me to Ohio to meet her before her
death in 1964, I have no idea. I would have loved that. She was
downright beautiful in her
youth, and very much a stout matriarch in maturity. I have a
fuzzy, out-of-focus photo of my father with his arm around her,
taken in the mid-40’s, on my bookshelf, and I like to think she
might have liked me. One of my late uncles did present me with a
most treasured keepsake: Ma Rense’s German cookbook, now frayed
and crumbly, from which she apparently served a household for
decades. Not long ago, I met one of my cousins for the first
time, Will, and he passed on an anecdote about our grandmother.
When he was a boy, he went to have dinner with her and the son
with whom she lived, and elderly Ma went to great lengths to
bake a cake for the occasion. But something went wrong, and the
cake did not turn out right. As Will told me, “She cried and
cried. She was just the ultimate German hausfrau.”
BOBBY---He
weighed about 16 pounds, had a huge head, and what is known as a
“bullseye” stripe pattern, in bright orange. I suppose he was a
classic American tabby, but his personality seemed much too
large to be contained in a cat. As my father used to remark,
“That goddamn cat is almost human.” He had a loud, musical
voice, and a very extensive vocabulary of meows. You could
almost have conversations. I found him while out hiking in the
hills one day after a rain, took him home, put him in our
garage, and meowed loudly. Yes, me---I meowed loudly. Then I hid
and watched my step-parental unit open the door and exclaim, “A
kitty!” and I knew I had secured Bobby a home. (Clever, I was.)
The cat was a great hunter, and I once watched him consider
going after a large hawk that was repeatedly swooping at him (he
wisely thought better of it.) I did see him actually charge a
large boxer dog that had invaded his territory, and wrap his
arms around the dumbfounded dog’s neck, driving him away. He was
my great friend for many years of my childhood, until I heard while in college
that neighborhood dobermans had taken advantage of his
increasing slowness, and had just about torn him apart. (That
pesky merciless God again.) Funny how you can miss someone more
and more as you get older. Especially someone covered with fur.
BACK TO PAGE ONE |
Riposte Archive
