…we know our streets and days slowly opening into the
time he is not alive, filling with our footsteps and voices;
we know ourselves, the bearers of the light of the earth
he is given to, and the light of all his lost days;
we know the long approach of summers towards the
healed ground where he will be waiting, no longer the
keeper of what he was.
-Wendell Berry
You can divide your friends up into two groups: the ones you remember meeting and the ones you can’t.
The friends you can’t remember not having are the friendships made in childhood.
I can’t remember not knowing Dick Ellis.
Dick was a member of that Hall of Fame and Shame kindergarten class Mrs. Hemenway herded into the academic pen at United Day School in 1953. Some of you venerable All Stars will read this, and to you I send a heartfelt abrazo and a hearty Qué paso?
Half a lifetime later, that is, in 1958, Dick and I were rookie teammates of the titans of the powerhouse American Little League Yankees, worshiping Victor Woods, Larry Link, Robbie and Johnny Snyder, Jimmy Powell, Danny Nieto, and Chester Long… from the bench. Dick and I went on to start at the Yankees’ infield corners, Dick at third because he had such a strong arm and me at first to minimize the inaccuracy of my throwing. In the 1960 season Dick had the ninth best batting average in the American League, .442.
American Little League Yankees
About the same time we were Cub Scouts in Esther Dickey’s den at her house on Gustavus, along with Freddy, Richard Goodman, Bill Leach, and George Goodwin.
And then we were at Wednesday night meetings of Boy Scout Troop 131 at the hut next to the tennis court of the First Methodist Church on McClellan. Dick and I went on all those camping trips to Camp Richter on the Zapata Highway, where we played Capture the Flag with cheeks full of Red Man chewing tobacco and sat around campfires enjoying such gastronomic delights as tins of Libby’s vienna sausages and Van Camp’s pork & beans. So did Joe Barrera, Stuart Temple, Frank Elder, Eugene López, Lyle Perkins, Billy Swisher, Mike Barrera, and Wally Weatherford. Spring brought the annual camporee at Camp Knolle near Kingsville, and summers, weeks of swimming in Lake Corpus Christi at Camp Karankawa.
Troop 131, February 19, 1962
It often happens that childhood friends lose track of each other after high school when different forks in the road are taken.
That happened to Dick and me.
I knew of Dick’s successful career as a news anchor in Austin, another those beautiful voices from our Laredo generation, along with Richard Goodman, John Dromgoole, Bucky Vair, and Robbie Snyder. But we lived far from each other, and our friendship was on hold for 50 years. Then thanks to the magic of Facebook, Dick and I reconnected. There were hour-long telephone calls for remembering Laredo days and catching up on what we’d been up to on those diverging paths. Once he asked me for my mailing address, and a week later I got a DVD in the mail. Dick had arranged to digitize the 8mm movie his older brother had made of the 1960 Yankees, and you can watch it on YouTube here:
Four silent minutes of eleven- and twelve-year-old boys playing baseball is an acquired taste, like truffles or kimchi, but for some of us connoisseurs, it’s an exquisite delight.
To others I must leave the task of telling Dick Ellis’ achievements as an adult.
There are many versions of the funeral oration Thucydides invented in quirky Greek to put in Pericles’ mouth. My favorite adaptation has these lines:
“The whole Earth is the Sepulcher of famous men; and their story is not graven only on stone over their native earth, but lives on far away, without visible symbol, woven into the stuff of other men’s lives.”
No matter what honors Dick’s memorials will tell with pride, his childhood friends from Laredo, who “know the long approach of summers toward the healed ground where he will be waiting,” no matter how far away, carry his story with us “woven into the stuff of our lives.”
Dick, dear friend, you are no longer the keeper of who you were.
We are.
