TERRY MOSHER
Editor’s Note: This column was written in May of 2011 for the print edition of the Sports Paper, but I think it’s interesting and am repeating it here. Hope you enjoy.
I don’t know why I go back in time and tell the stories I do. All I know is that it’s tough for me to forget my past and the people in it that are no longer in it or have been largely forgotten by the events that crowd into our headlines today.
Which reminds me that recently I was going to do a historical story of one of our local legends and after starting out answering my questions he suddenly stopped and refused to go on. This came after he agreed that it was important to tell the stories of the people who made a difference in our community over the years.
Sometimes, I guess, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed.
What inspired me to start writing all this is hearing the voice of Sam Cooke singing “You Send Me.” I got chills at hearing the song again. Cooke was one of my favorite singers in the late 1950s and when I heard he was shot to death (in 1964 in California at the age of 33) I was in college at Western Washington trying to muddle my way through political science courses, mainly with Dr. John J. Wuest, and bob and weave myself to a degree in one of my final quarters at the Bellingham school.
His shooting death stopped me cold for a while. I had already lost Hank Williams, who was a major comforter in my “Dark Ages.” Williams died in 1953 and I played all his old recordings for many years after that because he seemed to understand how sad life could be some times, which I fully understood by that time.
Cooke was like another Williams for me. And when he died it affected me for a long time. I could relate to some of what he said in his songs. I just heard him sing, “Don’t know much about history,” and for whatever reason it brings me back to a first love and ultimately rejection. If you have gone through such turmoil as a youngster, you know what I mean.
“Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be”
Many of the friends that were around when Williams was ringing in my ears and Cooke was crooning to me are gone now. I was going through my dark ages and started attending Western Washington when this was all going on.
One of the gang, Ray, died in 1971 after graduating from Western and teaching a few years in the Bellingham School District. He was married for a short time before a genetic disease that felled several other family members took him at a too-soon-of-a-young age.
I can remember the hours Ray and I and others spent in the gym at Ferndale High school playing basketball on cloudy and soulful blue weekends. One of us ‑ usually me – would climb through a window into the boys’ lockeroom and let the others into the gym. We’d break out the basketball balls and play for hours.
Ray was the only one among us who could dunk. He was about 6-feet ball, but had exceedingly long fingers that allowed him to palm the ball, making it easier to attempt a dunk. I was much taller but for some reason could not palm the ball and had to use two hands for a dunk attempt. The best I ever did was to bounce the ball off the back of the rim.
I was telling somebody the other day that I measured my vertical jump one day back about 20 years ago in the Seattle Mariners’ clubhouse and the best I could do was 12 inches. If I did it today, I told him, it would be about two inches. Maybe.
By the way, little Rich Amaral led the Mariners that day with 35.5 and Ken Griffey Jr. was second at 34.
Another one of the gang was Frank, who was the funniest guy I ever was around – he was funny even when he wasn’t trying. Frank died 34 years ago after settling in as a vice principal at a high school near the Los Angeles Forum. He was on our semi-pro baseball team back in the early 1960s. Frank had tremendous power and was proud of his ability to hit.
His pride over his hitting almost led to blows with me one day. I showed up late for one game because of my summer work schedule and replaced Frank in the lineup. Frank had gone 2-for-2 with a double and I managed to fly out high and deep to leftfield in my only at-bat.
The next day’s Bellingham Herald had me going 2-for-3 with a double. There was no mention of Frank in the story. Frank about went crazy. He thought it was my fault and was ready to take me apart limb by limb.
It’s the only time I can remember Frank not being funny.
The scorekeeper for that game was Ed Perdue, who later would work sports for the Bremerton Sun and the Port Orchard Independent. Ed, or Easy Ed as I called him, is also sadly gone.
My high school days at Ferndale were non-descript. I was a lost soul walking the hallways. I loved being in school because it gave me some meaning, but I contributed very little to the culture, and I never remembered opening a book to study. Yet, I managed to graduate – somehow.
I went back east after graduation, still on the loose and still very blue about my life. I worked at K-Bar Cutlery for a couple summers and attended Alfred Tech (now Alfred State College) ‑ a two-year school on the same campus as Alfred University.
Somehow I got pretty good grades in my major – accounting – but mainly remember the capacity crowds in the gym during basketball games, The Beacon, and dorm life, which as might be expected was full of the unexpected, including a fire hose drill one night without the required firemen but with plenty of water gushing down the halls.
The Beacon was a beer joint just outside Hornell, New York – my father was born in Hornell – that used to be packed on Friday and Saturday nights with students from Alfred. It had a tall beacon standing alongside the building in case a student got lost. That’s a joke. But there was a beacon.
My recollection is of elbowing my way into the building, getting a beer, and then elbowing my way back outside where a mob of fellow students milled about. By the time I got back outside the beer was gone and I had to elbow my way back in to get another one. I don’t know why such mayhem has stayed with me for so long, but it has.
College life was great for me. I think it was because it gave me an excuse to be away from an unpleasant experience around the new home my father created with his new wife he married a year after my mother’s death. I would rather be anywhere but home and being in college gave me mental and emotional relief.
I went to California for a while in the first half of 1960 and then spent five years at Western, which I loved. I couldn’t wait to get to school and hated to leave at night. Wilson library on campus became my safe harbor, where I leafed through countless books, gobbling up any bit of information and history that I could.
On November 22, 1963 I was in the Wilson library, minding my own business, deeply engrossed in a book on the World War II Battle of the Bulge when the shots heard around the world echoed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Those shots ended the perceived innocent world we had lived in and were the beginning of change in our country.
Martin Luther King and RFK would also get gunned down five years later. By then I had lost track of our college gang. One of them – Pete – would wind up vagabonding around Canada and the U.S and be lost not to just his friends but family. I googled him a few months ago and came up with “Deceased, 2008.”
Peter and I were close in our high school days and through most of college at Western. Unlike Sam Cooke, he knew a lot about history. He majored in history at Western, married just before graduating, got divorced and then disappeared. I would find him years later at James Madison University, working in the kitchen.
Then I lost him again.
I never did discover why he didn’t use his history credentials. Instead he did odd jobs here and there, never staying too long in one place. And I never did find out why he ran from everybody and everything. For a time I thought maybe he was D.B. Cooper, the mystery man who in 1971 hijacked a plane in Portland, Ore, collected $2000,000 and then parachuted somewhere over southwest Washington.
But that was just my writer’s fantasy dreaming up a story about a friend who disappeared from my viewfinder just as mysteriously.
Now, just like Sam Cooke getting shot that terrible night in 1964 when he and his voice were stilled by gunshots, I have forever lost Pete.
“Don’t know much about history
Don’t know much biology
Don’t know much about a science book
Don’t know much about the French I took
But I do know that I love you
And I know that if you love me too
What a wonderful world this would be”
Have a great week.
You are loved.