###

This is how huge Jim Hayes factored in our lives:

Nancy and I didn't tell him when we decided to leave news reporting. Having cast ourselves out of Eden, we were ashamed.

Sure, it sounds like sacrilegious hyperbole, but that's how we felt.

As a result, we wasted many years not hearing his wise words, of friendship as fellow adults rather than idealistic and naive journalism students, of addressing each other as  Jim and Nancy and Shawn (she and I met at the school newspaper) rather than Mr. Hayes and Nancy and Shawn.

facebook®©™, God love it, reclaimed some of that time.

Jim Hayes passed away this week, of complications from cancer. He was 88.

He was The Guy at Cal Poly's journalism department in San Luis Obispo. Our other professors came from the profession, too, but Jim Hayes was the reporting instructor at the time. He came from the horseshoe-shaped copy desk in the clattering newsroom of all our film-fed ideas of what a newsroom looked and sounded and smelled like. He was what we wanted to be. What some of us thought we wanted to be, anyway.

Funny, as a student I never once asked him his news background, where he came from, what he had done in life. You'd think a future news reporter would think to ask. I never did.

Besides, the guy scared the hell out of me.

So kindly and gentle, yet so frustratingly enigmatic, so apt to saunter while all of us students seemed to be running all the time — that was Jim Hayes for me.  I was always waiting for his fangs to spring and his skin to change color.

We all wanted Jim Hayes' attention, because he Knew Things, and he knew that we knew it.

He used this mind trick on us onrushing journalism students, seeking counsel as he sauntered about campus. Jim Hayes would respond to our questions with a story, a parable having nothing to do with what we asked — or did it? — and then would saunter through the fog he had just loosed in our brains, and disappear.

We wanted to be reporters. Jim Hayes was The Way, and we followed.

It was not easy. His fangs, in fact, came out. They flashed for our sin of misspelling, of not checking facts, of using the wrong punctuation.

Carelessness can be Fatal. Sorry. See me. Ask not for whom the F tells …

Fangs with a capital "F." Big, red, boldly, juicily branded in PaperMate™® pen that hemorrhaged at the top of your typed and stapled news story — "F!" Any ink left in the pen was used to write: See me.

(To be accurate, the juicy letters were just as likely to be black ink as red, but they hurt the same. "Don't let facts get in the way of a good story," as Jim Hayes never would have said.)

I don't want to remember what I remember, but I believe two "F's" on stories filed during the quarter meant an "F" for the course. See me next quarter. See me If the course is available. See me, and we'll see.

My friend David Middlecamp, a photographer at The Tribune in San Luis Obispo, dredges up worse, reminding me that Jim Hayes also showed your work to the class. He made transparencies of your story and projected it onto the wall. Your story remained anonymous; he blotted your name. The room was also dark during this dark time, concealing glee and utter shame alike, so Mr. Hayes was not without his mercies.

For days on end, it seemed, Mr. Hayes and the class shared in excoriating your work and eviscerating your confidence. For nanoseconds, by comparison, your fluky good story won praise and admiration, and it seemed months sauntered by before that happened again.

I remember now. I remember that moments before Mr. Hayes projected my story, I could not be sure whether damnation was at hand. Usually it was.

Jim Hayes also gave us current-events quizzes. One wrong answer and you failed, as I remember. No Internet, no Google®, no Yahoo™© news feed, no Huffington Post®™ or Buzzfeed™, no bell curve, no gimmes. You had to devour the newspaper and Time® and Newsweek™ magazines. On top of your zoology and geography and whatever other burdens you carried. Or else.

My first year at Cal Poly, I hyperventilated all the oxygen in San Luis Obispo. I questioned my existence and purpose. I took every pain, every long night, to report my stories to perfection.

And failed anyway.

Carelessness … Quote leads should be avoided, at least until you
learn how to handle straight summaries … Wrong possessive …
This means nothing if you don't know where it is … etc., etc., etc.

A wild circuit of felt pen ink emanated from the F, lassoing the offensive misspellings in the third graf. Plenty of  ink left: See me.

Nothing about bringing my own cigarettes and blindfold. I inferred that much from his violent dance of penmanship.

Perhaps this is the "F" story (left) that signaled my doom in his class. I sweated that visit, imagining the implosive end to my brief time at college:

"It's clear this isn't for you," I imagined Jim Hayes telling me. "You can't seem to avoid mistakes, and a reporter can't make mistakes. A reporter's readers are counting on him for the truth. You can't handle the truth.

(That's right: I imagined he predated Aaron Sorkin.)

"I know some people," I imagined him saying, after the deathliest pause. "I suppose I can find something for you in another department. What else do you think you wouldn't be bad at?"

I think I had already told my parents I was probably coming home to start over.

Nerve-wracked news story in hand, I saw Jim Hayes, and what he said instead was, "Come with me."

He led me down the hall to the Mustang Daily offices, where students produce a newspaper all on their own.

"Andrew," Jim Hayes said to the editor, Andrew Jowers, who towered over us. "This is Shawn Turner. He's going to be reporting to you from now on, and you'll turn his stories in to me to grade for reporting class."

Jim Hayes turned to me, looking over his half-rim glasses. "OK?" he said.

"Thank you!" I said. "All right," he answered, and sauntered back to his office.

Andrew didn't seem unhappy at the news. If he was, he hid it well, and gave me a story. I could not hide being stunned at what just happened.

And that's how I passed reporting I and II classes. I can't say the stories were perfect — student editors, I'm sure, saved my ass from Jim Hayes' scarlet brand many times — but I felt capable under this different pressure. Maybe it was being among peers, maybe the incentive of seeing my words in print the next day, the obligation it presented. I really have no idea.

But Jim Hayes had an idea, and I'll always be grateful.

I didn't become the news reporter I imagined, partly because I hadn't fully imagined that life. I had no long-range plan beyond getting a job, and once I got a job I also got a life, and the life I got (the life I enjoy now) made being a reporter difficult. Also I found out the hard way I didn't like being a reporter and wasn't all that good at it.

Nancy and I eventually departed for public relations, two words we couldn't say without wincing when we were students.

And we felt we had fallen from grace.

In his gracious way, Jim Hayes again entered our lives through facebook®™. He kindly commented on my blog posts, reminding me by his comments that I wasn't writing for myself, that other people were reading … that Jim Hayes was reading. He never mentioned my spelling or my transitions that never would have passed in his class. He never questioned my wayward ways over the years. He just relayed kind words even when I had been ranting.

He told us to call him Jim. I had to force myself.

Then his comments stopped, and eventually through facebook®™ we learned he had become ill.
One of his former students started a facebook®© page, "We love Jim Hayes," and at his passing this week, 385 people had joined, daily extolling his guidance and inspiration.

Most of them, to my shock, told my story on that page, the story of failure. I wasn't the only one who had gotten an "F" on a story, as I had long believed, or even one of the few. Many had failed, many were summoned to his office. I had been embarrassed to tell my story, except to marvel to a few close people how Jim Hayes had turned my failure into opportunity. I'm surprised I still had my bloody old newspaper stories; I found them in the bottom file drawer at the very back.

"F" instead became the badge of honor worn by reporters who learned their craft under Jim Hayes. That's the real marvel — he set so many people on their careers. People who sing the same praises as a kind but uncompromising man who made his students hold the profession to the highest standard, his standard.

Not just award-winning heavy-duty news people around the world, who are legion and his legacy — and who kept a vibrant relationship with their mentor, whom they called "Hayes." He inspired schlubs like me who found other things to do and tended to call him Mr. Hayes.

In his last days I learned he had been a Navy frogman during World War II in the Pacific Theater, that his dad had been an Associated Press bureau chief. In his last days I traced his long and storied career. In his last days I learned he had a family, a vibrant family that has reached out to Jim Hayes' many followers through the facebook™® page made for him, family that was with him at his death.

Jim Hayes' legacy for me will be his love of words, made beautiful by their economy.

In his honor, I end this post the way we ended our stories for him — old school:

###

(Donations to the Jim Hayes Scholarship Fund at Cal Poly are accepted online at www.calpolylink.com/giving.)

"Monterey, California?!?!!!" Our creation story

"Tell the story," someone will say, on rarer and rarer occasion, and we tell it.

Most people and families, I expect, have the story. The fundamental tale, the progenitor, the what-if-it-hadn't-happened? story.

On the 27th anniversary of Nancy being willing to marry me, this is the story of how we became one.

It took place two years before our wedding — we have been together as best friends now more than half our lives.

Our friendship began when we worked together as journalism majors on The Mustang Daily at Cal Poly. I met Nancy while she was busy on deadline (to write the only story, she will add here, for which she won an award for student journalism). Soon that year we had more leisure time, and spent every moment we could together at Poly Royal, the May weekend when the entire campus turned into an open house (which is what it's called now anyway, since alcohol-fueled riots in 1990 nearly killed the event; another story for another time).

The school year ended. "Maybe I'll see you over the summer," I said. As soon as I said it, I wanted to make it true.

I had just gotten a shark-nosed Volkswagen squareback with my parents' help, so now I had motive and means. The opportunity came around my birthday. My loving family often and inexplicably felt need to mark my birthday by going to the Santa Barbara County Fair, which was held not in Santa Barbara (too picayune for that crowd) but in Santa Maria, in the north county. The fairgrounds was a glorified parking lot behind a JC Penney store.

Even if it was the fairest fair of all — which it wasn't; maybe 40th out of 58 counties — it was not the appropriate birthday destination more than once, not for anyone older than nine, anyway. For this birthday, I needed to escape.

Time to do something different, I told my parents. Just take a daylong drive, maybe. Being a lifelong Goody Two-shoes paid off: My parents said OK.

Get out of Lompoc by, oh, 8 a.m., make it to Auburn by lunch, say thanks and 'bye and drive back by around dinnertime. That was my plan — my deluded, naive, star-dusted plan.

The drive, we have learned over the many years, really takes more than seven hours, one way.

Lunchtime came and went on that first trip north, and I wasn't even halfway, having just dipped out of the Kettleman Hills into the San Joaquin Valley. Though not a stranger to this strange land — we'd gone through on many family trips to the Sierra — this was the first time I had a front row seat and had to pay attention to it all.

I might as well have been walking in space.

The miles droned on. The gray-white hills never seemed to move, nor did Auburn ever seem to get closer … until many, many hours after lunch, somehow I navigated my way through the macramé of freeway cloverleafs that was Sacramento, and ascended the foothills in the softening summer night.

Finally, Auburn! Now, how in the world to find Nancy?! In the dusk! I had packed neither telephone number nor address, just a map and memory of the city name. Of course, the only solution was to drive around in search of a miracle.

It came soon enough in the last of daylight, in the form of a green Volkswagen beetle, which crossed in front of me at an intersection. Who was at the wheel? None other than Nancy … well, maybe Nancy … unless it was her identical twin, Carol (sounds like a bad soap opera by now, doesn't it?). In the absence of any other sign or clue, I followed the VW to St. Joseph's Catholic Church, parked near her and followed her inside, taking a pew behind her and waiting until she finished her prayers to say:

"Excuse me, you look so much like Carol Lewis, it's scary." Clever me: If it was Nancy, she'd laugh and we'd hug. If it was Carol, she'd say something like, "I am Carol Lewis," and I'd explain everything. See!

(Later, Carol would say she thought I was a stalker intent on taking her tires; such innocents we were …)

Nancy was at work, Carol said, and Carol was on her way to work after Mass herself, but she would lead me back to her house and introduce me to their family.

All but two of the Nancy's 10 brothers and sisters were living at home then; older brothers Tim and Phil were out on their own. Without Nancy to guide and interpret, I was immersed in the chaos of a regular evening in the household — two small brothers, Stephen, just two or three years old, and Greg; a sister, Sharon, and brother, Joel, in the middle grades (I was like an insect in a jar, a thing of intense curiosity, to them); three more sisters, Kathleen, Joan and Susan, in high school (maybe Joan was home from college then?) futzing mostly unseen in the downstairs part of the house; and their mom and dad, all of whom welcomed me with warmth and expectation, and not a hint of trepidation that this guy who knows Nancy from college just drove nearly the length of the state unannounced to see her.


They would not let me leave after I saw Nancy. Stay the night, ridiculous child, they insisted.

I called my mom to say I'd be home the next day. "All right, I figure everything's OK," she said, not too put out that I deflected her pointed questions.

Carol returned from work and drove me to the pizza parlor where Nancy worked. I hid behind my cowboy hat as I walked in, but Nancy somehow suspected it would be me.

"How funny!" is what she said mostly, over and over. Back at her home, she reintroduced me to her family.

Next morning was my induction to the sophisticated choreography of getting a baker's dozen of people ready for early Mass. It was a process I'd join for many years.

After breakfast, we spent a final few hours down at the American River. Nancy accidentally threw her shoes into the water while throwing pebbles and had to wade in, in her Sunday dress, to retrieve them.

"Do you need some money?" she asked, saying goodbye. Nope! I said. I had my checkbook (This is a plot point; pay attention).

Off I went for home, only the roof of the car keeping me from leaving earth's orbit, a happy, happy guy. Since this was my first time driving the great continent by myself, I veered toward San Francisco, eager to go home by another way. With the last of my cash, I paid for gas in Pinole and turned west.

It turns out The City is blocked by toll bridges, each requiring toll. A strange and inconvenient concept. No cash in the ashtrays. Not a penny in sight. When you can't pay toll at a toll bridge, you don't get a just-this-once pass: The bridge keepers shut down all lanes so you can drive sidelong across lanes that aren't meant for driving sidelong. So the westbound mass of humanity, backed up near Oakland, watched me rattle along to the bridge headquarters building, where I wrote a check for 75 cents.

Beautiful city, though, San Francisco. Undeterred — reinvigorated, in fact! — I thought, Why not head to the coast and keep driving home along Highway 1? Yeah, why not? I'm king of the world!

The gas needle dropped. I was unafraid. I let it go to a quarter of a tank and pulled in to buy gas — where I learned that just that summer, the entire world decided it would no longer accept checks for gasoline purchases. This was not a matter that anyone would have thought I'd find newsworthy, apparently.

Vast quantities just waiting in my checking account to pay for fuel. OK, not vast, but enough. A fair exchange, check for gas. Can't you just take one lousy check? Just this once?! I'm good for it!

No! Also, no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

The needle dropped to empty as the miles passed, the inviting coastline turning lonely and cold and menacing, the hard sun shooting longer and longer glares, refusing to abate.

The needle dropped below empty when I coaxed the ter-pocketing car into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel in Monterey at sundown. Clothes askew, sweat dripping from my body, my face red from screaming at humanity's blindness to my needs mile after mile, I looked like I ran all the way.

In those days:

(1) Pay phones existed,

(2) You could make a collect call for a dime, and

(3) The desk clerk at the Hilton wanted the dime back after I completed the call home. Hilton, above all, must balance its books.

"Where are you??" My mom asked.

"Monterey."

Pause. "Monterey, California?!?!!!"

Appreciate, if you will, my nanosecond of restraint as I consider the wisdom of lightening the mood with the snappy, "No, Monterrey, Mexico (Duh!)" I settled on, "Yes," letting my mom have the funniest moment of the whole misadventure. I finally had to let them in on what I had done.

Since I was due in early the next morning to my summer newspaper job, my parents and sister had to make the three-hour trip from Lompoc to Monterey to retrieve me. Well, they didn't have to, but they did, bless them. Three hours and many miles served to soften my parents' mood (though my sister came along with the expectation of witnessing my evisceration), so that by the time they found me at 1 a.m., they were contemplative and maybe grateful that my absence was just a lot of fuss over a girl.

I rode with my dad for part of the way home, then switched cars with my mom at about Soledad, and attempted to deflect any lingering anger by asking them about their childhoods, filling in gaps about things I've always wondered. It worked: They were in a mood to talk, and I never had such uninterrupted time before or after.

After a couple of hours' sleep, I went to work and called Nancy later that day to tell her the whole story. I know that's hard to believe, but that's what the world was like without smart phones and facebook. News and trivia sometimes actually had to wait an entire day.

We married two years later in the church where I had met Carol on that first trip, 27 years ago this weekend. I proposed along the coast in Monterey, not far from where I borrowed 10 cents in hopes my parents would rescue me.

If you see us, pull up a chair and we'll tell you the story, complete with gestures and interruptions, maybe even song — a whole show.

Happy anniversary, Nancy!

What I was trying to say …

Oy, did I blow it!

Lord, how I know Stephanie Eisner must feel!

Until last week, Stephanie was a staff cartoonist for The Daily Texan, the campus/city newspaper for the University of Texas, Austin. Then she drew her take on the Feb. 26 shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a teenager in Sanford, Fla, and the newspaper discontinued her services. (Here's another view of her take.)

You know the Trayvon Martin story, because we're all awash in the fallout of its controversy: George Zimmerman, described as a white Latino and a Neighborhood Watch captain in a gated community, told police he shot the unarmed Martin, who is black, in self defense. What really happened remains in dispute; critics say that Zimmerman chased Martin down and shot him, which may have violated "stand your ground" laws designed to protect citizens under attack. Zimmerman says Martin attacked him. Protests demanding Zimmerman's arrest spread across the country.

The incident is a newflash point over race relations, racial prejudice, lingering unresolved issues of institutionalized injustice, and general angst over the safety of children and teens. The hooded sweatshirt quickly became its symbol.

Stephanie Eisner was trying to add a meaningful tangent to the fierce expanding dialogue over the shooting. Her attempt backfired, went viral and public, and only fueled more rage.

The cartoon — which The Daily Texan editorial board approved — depicts a mom (?) reading a story to her child (?) from a book, "Treyvon (sic) Martin and the Case of Yellow Journalism."

"AND THEN the BIG BAD WHITE man killed killed the HANDSOME, sweet, innocent COLORED BOY!!," the mom tells the child, aghast.

Eisner was trying to say — at least, I infer — that many of news and entertainment media went immediately to stereotypes in the early going, typical in a rush to report. Rather than exhibit patience and care, or an examination of nuance and uncertainties, the media made this a simple black-and-white (literally and figuratively), good vs. evil story. Thoughtful, thorough reporting and meta-reporting comes later, as in this case, but often too late to ameliorate the results of the first news.

Pundits opine on the first news, sometimes idiotically, as in this case. Other pundits opine on the idiocy of the first pundits, and so it goes. Anger lingers.

Many readers regarded Eisner's point as endorsing the perpetuation of racist stereotypes and slurs — because she used slurs and stereotypes to make the opposite point.

I know how she feels, having drawn a cartoon for the Mustang Daily, my college newspaper — freelancing after I graduated. The 'toon blew up in my face and embarrassed the newspaper. That's the awful thing at the top of this post.

What I was trying to do — and the fact that I still have to explain it means I could and should have done a much better job — is restate George Santayana's aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it:"

If we don't study the effects of racism that happened before us, if we don't appreciate the harm our discriminatory thought and action — and inaction — can do, then we are not prepared to improve our communities and are apt to continue harm.

That's what I was trying to say.

I even ladled on the irony by having one of the vandals run off to a history test. No specific incident prompted this cartoon; more likely I was trying to employ the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as a spotlight on ever-lingering issues of racial tension and the potential for the college audience to ignore lessons of the past. I trusted readers to realize I was exaggerating to make my point. No one at Cal Poly was burning crosses or painting racist rants on walls at the time.

In my cartoon, Martin Luther King is supposed to be an ethereal figure formed out of the smoke of the burning cross. But the way I drew him, he looks more like a flesh-and-blood giant, inexplicably plugged waist deep into the earth, the smoke sooting his skin and suit.

But the thing that gutted this 'toon — the tiny detail that made its message the opposite of my intent — is the graffiti on the wall. Well, really just n-word.

The newspaper ran the cartoon. Students and faculty wrote letters, all of which I probably tossed long ago. The letters said what you would expect: How dare he! Is this the kind of person we should have at this university? Fire the cartoonist! I'm boycotting the newspaper! Fire everyone involved with this disgrace.

I understood this much about their anger: I hadn't been clear. It's as if the writers saw only those small words at the geographic center of the cartoon, and regarded all the other elements as a doodly, meaningless frame. They received those words — that one word — as my message.

I wrote an apology at the editor's request. The fact that I had to write an apology meant I had not done my job, which was to be so crystalline in my opinion that the work stood on its own. Probably my relationship as a guest cartoonist for the Mustang Daily ended shortly after.

Why did I toss the angry letters? Pain, I guess. But if I was going to become an editorial cartoonist, I had to be ready for rock throwing, and gather up all the rocks thrown. Good editorial cartoonists want people to react to their work, maybe to get angry, maybe to laugh sardonically, but in some way to be moved to act — to write a harsh letter to the editor, to support the candidate or cause, to consider another argument.

Like Stephanie Eisner, though, I wanted readers to react to what I meant to say.

RIP: Rex Babin, editorial cartoonist for The Sacramento Bee, passed away last week at 49 from stomach cancer. He had a unique sketchy, stoccato drawing style, and was adept at exposing President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for what they were.

'Twas ever thus*

Editors at The Mustang Daily, where I had worked as a Cal Poly journalism student, agreed to let me draw editorial cartoons shortly after I had graduated in the 20th Century, in my effort to land a full-time job at it.

Though funding for higher education is truly in crisis now, and public education increasingly goes to the highest bidder, and students are staying in school longer (if they can still afford to) just to get the classes they need to graduate, affordable higher education has always been screwed, and screwed with, as this 'toon reveals.

Although, considering how little we had to pay for our education compared to students now — and how much we got for so little — maybe I should be too ashamed even to post it. I said maybe.

*cite whomever you want on this one: R. Crumb, John Keating, Wm. Shakespeare, et. al.

The road taken

Our card: I'm afraid that in my bumbling I will
tatter, besmirch or even lose this artifact, so finally
I committed it to digital posterity.

Long ago, burning with creative spirit, uncertain of our future paths, and deciding we might as well just blaze our own — in fact,  the same place where my own children are now — my college classmate and former roomie David Middlecamp and I launched a freelance business.

Maybe launched overstates it. Fervently dreamed about and planned with bursts of enthusiasm is closer.

"Questing Unlimited" comes courtesy of the courtly days of King Arthur, when the knights of his and other realms were always gallivanting about the countryside in pursuit of adventure.

From a piece David shot for The Mustang Daily
about a San Luis Obispo ranching family,
demonstrating his excellence as a photographer.
This is old school: He produced these postcards
himself, on special cards with photo paper fronts.

(Now that I think of it, the quests were merely tools for Sir Thomas Malory and other writers of the Arthurian legend to plot stories; kind of like when the cell phones ring on any one in the Law & Order franchise episodes just when the chase grows stale.)

Somewhere in my readings of the Arthur legend (perhaps in John Steinbeck's preempted attempt to retell the Malory version, The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights), I think I learned that for a quest to hold meaning, it must go in a great circuit, never to cover the same ground.

The advice, whether from those pages or from my fevered brow, informs me still. I loathe out-and-back backpacking trips (oh, I'll make them, if it means not going at all), and tend to drive in great, gas-wasting loops on errands.

So would it be for us and our budding business.

David and I wanted unfettered wandering, making stories of our serendipity. I wanted to be like Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, except I would be discovering what he was re-discovering. I'm speaking for David — and this is the first of many invitations for him to fill in the gaps or correct me — but I imagine likewise that he wanted to chronicle our travels and travails much as Dorothea Lange did.

We had already begun training, and maybe got the idea for it, by teaming up on feature stories for The Mustang Daily, Cal Poly's student-run daily newspaper.

Our feature stories filled our own craving to move beyond Cal Poly's and San Luis Obispo's geographical borders, and the newspaper's daily need for copy. As long as we could sell even the weakest link to Cal Poly — whether our subjects had graduated from there or visited or merely heard about the campus — we could do the story for the college newspaper. We didn't leave the county, but imagined Questing Unlimited to be our ticket hither and yon.

David with all those postcards, all those
hoped-for assignments, set out to dry.

Then, life got in the way, or I let it get in the way. I got an internship at my hometown newspaper the summer after we hatched our dream. David, in San Luis Obispo, took the burden of nurturing the business — more likely, I let my end drop for David to pick up and carry my share with his — and continued researching story ideas.

When last we worked on the business together, we were just beginning to develop queries, which are story outlines that we'd pitch to magazines whose contacts we had yet to gather. Or maybe I have forgotten that David had already amassed editors' and publishers' names.

(I just discovered a stash of captioned photos David produced as part of a portfolio we'd send to editors seeking writing assignments. The photos are from a feature we wrote about Janita and Robert Baker, who make guitars and mountain dulcimers from their rural home in northern San Luis Obispo County. Wonderful, engaging, talented people, the Bakers were exactly the kind of subjects we wanted to chronicle; I'm happy to find the Bakers are still doing their thing at Blue Lion Dulcimers & Guitars.)

We had our marketing campaign almost ready to unleash upon the world, with a logo made the hard way.

To build the logo today, I'd probably buy the needed typeface from a Website, import it into Adobe Illustrator, type out the words I wanted, convert the word to shapes, then manipulate the shapes at will on my computer screen. Click, tap, click. It sounds involved but it might take an hour tops, no muss, no fuss.

Not so way back then. If you wanted anything even remotely exotic in type treatment, you went to Letraset, and any newspaper or graphic design shop would have piles of these transparent plastic sheets of letterforms lying in storage, usually with just a handful of letters removed from the sheet. I'd either transfer letterforms by burnishing them onto a surface, or cut the letterforms and painstakingly expose a thin adhesive backing. Want the typeface bigger? Smaller? Assemble the type and then throw it into the overhead camera for enlargement.

I spliced "Questing" across the bottom with an X-acto knife, then used thin 2-point black adhesive tape to restore the letterforms into complete shapes. In this case, the job took multiple precise angled cuts. Just before I'd get the last tiny end of the tape to stick in place, my shoulders would invariably kink up, or the tape would stick to my fingers and pull the whole job askew — death of a project by 106 cuts — or the letterform I needed, the only one left on the sheet, would get stuck on the bottom of my shoe. Good times. Good times.

We must have convinced someone over in the print side of The Mustang Daily into typesetting "Unlimited" and the contact information for us. David might know who printed our business cards for us.

That's as far as our quest went. David and I pursued divergent journalism paths, though we went on to lead roughly parallel lives. David's career explored depth over breadth, nourishing his roots in San Luis Obispo County. He became the envy of most Cal Poly grads — one of the few to find a lifelong excuse to stay and thrive in beautiful San Luis Obispo, as an excellent photographer and storyteller and historian/archivist for The Tribune.

He's even a gentleman farmer, nourishing olive roots on family land. Someday I'll write about the day long ago when I "helped" him buck hay.

I'm lucky to have been able to reconnect with David and his family, and talk about now and then.

Officially in mid-life or past it, I can't help but think about then these days. My wife joined me in wondering: What if we had pursued our quest? The words "hungry" and "hardscrabble" come to mind, but also "happy" and "simple" and "who knows?" It might have been a precarious existence, likely requiring us to invest our dreams from other sources, like parttime jobs. It might not have endeared me to my in-laws or pleased my parents, because Nancy and I were planning marry soon; it might be why I didn't give the idea the time and energy it needed. I was afraid.

Certainly I missed out on the people we would have met, missed the stories they would have given us, missed some countryside I have yet to see, missed the memories of epic trips on roads less traveled by, that might have made all the difference.

Put an X in the box for Cox

He was good at everything he did. Correction, he excelled.

He never lost an election, from junior high to high school, even winning office as chief justice of the supreme court at Boys State, in a short week winning the hearts and minds of some of the best and brightest among high school Californians. I imagined, right about now, he would be a U.S. Senator. He might even have employed the same mnemonic slogan he used every single time he ran, trumping complex and conniving political strategies: Put an X in the box for Cox.

My friend, Greg Cox, passed away Dec. 5. A life lived fully, and ended too early, is encapsulated here.

Regret sucks wind out of my chest. Greg and I hadn't spoken for more than 20 years. The last we met and talked was in Solvang, near our hometown of Lompoc. He joined my wife and me for Long Island iced teas — we felt so grown up — and I don't remember what we talked about. Life story stuff, probably. It was the first and only time he had met Nancy.

Greg had just finished law school, another in an amazing beaded string on his academic legacy: 4.0 grade point average (we came in advance of Advanced Placement courses) and valedictorian at Cabrillo High School, where he was also student body president; 4.0 GPA as a Stanford University undergraduate, earning degrees in political science and economics; 4.0 GPA, I'm told, at Stanford law school. And what I didn't know — among the many things I didn't know — an MBA from Stanford Business School.

Everyone who knew him would say of him, "It figures." He was our equivalent of a golden boy, the best at almost everything he did, almost entirely by his own hard work, but also by benefit of what Seneca said: "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity."

President Greg with me as
everyone's favorite genocidal
mascot, Juan R. Cabrillo …

"Golden Boy" diminishes him. Though intelligent and gifted, he took almost nothing for granted, and harnessed his gifts with hard work. Many, many school mornings I found him already sitting at the trigonometry or physics teacher's desk, his textbook and homework laid out, going over in detail the concepts he didn't understand, until understanding ensued. It was a lesson I took with me, though I rarely applied it myself, misguidedly relying on my wits in hopes of understanding what I still don't understand.

I repeated Greg's example for my own children, with spotty success. Our teachers probably remember Greg most for his early-morning doggedness.

Besides excelling in school — and still being blamed for skewing the curve — he played varsity basketball and golf, lettering most of his high school career. In our junior year, with the addition of a talented kid who transferred from an overseas Air Force base, Greg played on one of the state championship basketball teams.

Greg just made it look easy.

He was so smart. In our introductory addresses in seventh-grade speech class, when everyone else said he or she lived at such-and-such an address, Greg said he "resided" at his "domicile." None of us knew "resided" or "domicile" or how to use them. He was an only child, his dad a judge, his mom kind and gracious; I imagine he got a lot of attention, but he also rose to high expectations. I remember even in elementary school he had a four-drawer file cabinet in his bedroom, where he kept his schoolwork organized.

Part of Greg Cox' high school legacy, courtesy of a Flickr
photographer. Trees obscure the whole phrase, "Cabrillo
Spirit Conquers All." Greg pushed for this as student body
president. I remember lengthy, sometimes bitter debates
about the wording — Cabrillo's motto is "Our Spirit
Conquers All," after all — and about whether to pay for
such a monument at all.

Wit lightning quick, he could also plant a barb deep, and mock without mercy, and box you in during an argument, smiling just before you realize you were doomed to lose. I imagine some classmates still remember with reddened faces some fierce debates during student body government meetings.

He was a Boy Scout, and had we another opportunity — one in which I likely did not badmouth Boy Scouts — I might have joined the Scouts and fulfilled my passion for backpacking way back then, rather than waiting more than 30 years when my son wanted to be a Boy Scout.

Greg as ASB president, leading
the sometimes sharp debate
over that same monument.
This and above, from
Tierra Royal, Cabrillo
High School's yearbook.

Where Greg went after Stanford, I wasn't sure, until his obituary filled in some gaps. South Dakota for a while, I heard. South Dakota? Something about venture capitalism. He was a principal for a Pacific Northwest investment firm, when he died, near Seattle. His obituary also says he worked for one of the Silicon Valley's premier law firms, in Palo Alto, before that. These are just some of a long list of achievements.

My memory of him, I'm sad to say, is stunted, locked somewhere in the late 20th Century.

In high school it was the three of us — Greg, John Bingle and me. Mr. Johnson, one of our math teachers, called us The Triumvirate; I'm not entirely sure it was a compliment.

When we had time and moments to break free from the various and sundry vagaries of high school life — girlfriends (John), jobs (Greg), term papers (all of us) — we went into default mode: Driving downtown, usually in Greg's green Mercury Cougar, just driving around town and talking, talking, talking, about things far away.

Almost always, we'd end up at Winchell's Donuts near the crosstown railroad tracks on H Street and East Laurel, each of us with a bag of doughnut holes and chocolate milk, talking more under the blanching fluorescent light until we went home.

Annoyingly taciturn now — jabbering instead with my fingers — I wonder how we could have talked so much.

Once in my senior year, I came home late (still before midnight), and my mom went into a fit and started clapping me hard on the shoulders. All the time she was punctuating her anger with her open hand, I found it funny that the worst we were doing, the worst we had ever done, was waste Greg Cox' gas and scarf doughnut holes and chocolate milk.

The stuff of legend, that was us.

On one final drive around town, our conversation comprised what I imagine so many longtime friends talk about on their last meeting: That this was not the end but the beginning, that we would always stay close, that whatever mysteries awaited us, whatever adventures, whatever families and jobs, we would enfold them into our friendship. Our future selves would radiate from this center, this foundation we had built. We wrote the same to each other in our yearbooks.

It was, in retrospect, a jinx. Greg went famously to Stanford, John to Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology ("What?" we ragged him. "Where's that? An all-male university? What?"), and I stayed nearby, at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. John and Greg went on to amazing careers that early outpaced my capacity to imagine that such careers were possible.

But of course we were not the center of our forthcoming mysteries and adventures and lives. The center dissolved immediately, and off we went, rarely to reconnect.

(Now I remember that this was part of our conversation over drinks in Solvang! Greg mocked our conversation in his car that August night after our senior year; even though he was part of the treacly heart-felt conversation, his recollection almost made it sound like he was outside the car looking in, scoffing. But that was Greg as I knew him then, and I'm sure I had my snarky moments too; I also know I've changed in many ways, good and bad, over the last 20-plus years; I miss the opportunity to discover how we've changed.)

I have talked with John more often — unfortunately not much more often — the last time forgoing my high school reunion to attend John's family's memorial for his mom the summer before last.

John said later he talked with Greg during that memorial weekend. We should get together and celebrate our 50th birthdays together, Greg told John. It's been way too long.

Regret wracks me. I'm the absolute worst at doing something about catching up, looking back, revisiting, even though those impulses nag me on occasion. Facebook, thank goodness, enables effortless connections at those moments. I wonder how and when I would have learned of this bad news without it. 

How appropriate this week that I remembered our last adventure. The subject was hypothermia, because I was talking with a swimming friend who I join twice weekly on cold-water swims.

Somehow Greg, John and I talked our parents into letting us go on a week-long fishing trip in the eastern Sierra, to streams Greg fished with his dad since he was little. Somehow, I talked my parents into letting me take our truck with the camper shell where we'd bunk. Somehow, I talked myself into fishing.

For the early part of the week, we stood in jeans, waist deep in wildly rushing icy June streams, pulling out trout almost as soon as we had dropped our hooks. I know enough from having been a Scout leader that we were doing a really stupid thing.

Greg and John stayed in until sundown some days, long after I had gotten out to read or watch the landscape change. They gutted fish well into dark, stopping only when one of them realized aloud that they could easily have cut into their frozen hands and not known it with all the fish blood spilling over the rocks. It was one of several ways in which we could have gotten hurt or died on that trip, of self-inflicted knife wounds or hypothermia or car wreck or pneumonia.

Small wonder I would not have let my own kids take such a trip. I'm glad they never asked.

Before going home, we headed south out of the Sierra to Magic Mountain, talking about everything and nothing the entire way. On the homeward leg, we tired of one another for reasons that befall most people trying to have the time of their lives in close quarters, and spent long final stretches of the journey in crushing silence. Home again, we were fatigued but at peace. We were ready for wherever we would go. We were ready to move on.

That's what I choose to live on in my memory. I pray for Greg and his mom and dad.