That well-respected gentleman, Mr. Fred Dickey Jr., had a laugh unchanged from the one the boy Freddy had, an explosion of gusto released from deep strata of humor

“The child is father to the man.”

Wordsworth’s line comes up when we talk about how our adult selves can be seen foretold in our childhood.

But the paternity metaphor is a stretch.

As I remember the childhood of my dear departed friend Fred Dickey, it’s clear that a man’s identity as a grown-up has a more complicated than simple father-son relationship to his early years.

That’s because the Freddy Dickey I knew sixty-five years ago at United Day School, when it was across from the mayor’s white mansion on Clark Boulevard, had only a small family resemblance to the 74-year-old Fred Dickey Jr., who died a couple of weeks ago.

The Freddy in those ancient classrooms was more like a crazy, black sheep uncle than a father to the man who grew up to be a family patriarch, friend to many, successful entrepreneur, and admired citizen of Laredo.

Whatever happened to the Freddy who was inevitably at the center of all the schoolboy trouble I ever got into?

Fred Dickey Jr.

I can make out the family resemblance between that boy and the man. A lot of Freddy lived on in the sexagenarian (one of the off-color-adjacent terms that always delighted Fred) I could call on the phone anytime for an hour of laughter and fun. As the child of his younger self, grown-up Fred told the funniest jokes and the most lurid tales of life set in the old Laredo geography, which is now unrecognizable in a twenty-first century border megalopolis. He sketched in all the terra incognita of the old map I hadn’t updated since 1968 and conjured up for me all the instantly recognizable Laredo character types.

Dan Clouse, 4th grade

After all, Freddy was the boy who tutored me in the perennial boyhood curriculum of taboo expressions in both English and Spanish, the f-bombs and chi-bombs. He was the professor of anatomy who taught me unforgettable – many of which proved to be false! – notions of what the birds and the bees got up to.

We’ve all had friends like Freddy Dickey, Virgils guiding us Dans on tours through the varieties of sin that fire-brand preachers with sweaty brows promised from Sunday pulpits would make us burn in Hell.

Together, Freddy and I penciled in a short list of four-letter words we knew on the wall in the boys’ bathroom during recess one day in fourth grade.

The trouble he got into over this only confirmed the roles we’d already established: Freddy took the rap.

Somehow, I understood before he did that when the sheriff arrives, and you are standing there with a smoking gun in your hand, you hand it to the guy standing next to you as quick as you can. How many times did the United Day Principal, Miss Dalziel Cobb, enter the rolling-on-the-floor-laughing chaos of a schoolroom riot to find Freddy brandishing the proverbial smoking gun, while I concealed my complicity under a camouflage of phony innocence?

By the age of enjoying grandchildren and enduring the indignities of old men’s malfunctioning bodies, Fred and I had both become almost as much wiser as we were older. Neither of us had performed a hold-my-beer stunt in decades.

When we talked on the phone, Fred would be puffing a cigar outside, sipping his 1-a-day single malt. Out there, Fred could speak as Freddy would.

On my end, I would be out of earshot, too, and the classic Laredo humor that made us laugh so hard sixty-five years ago could be indulged again without raising eyebrows.

And that well-respected gentleman, Mr. Fred Dickey Jr., had a laugh unchanged from the one the boy Freddy had, an explosion of gusto released from deep strata of humor.

Once, as I was driving into Gig Harbor with him on speakerphone, Fred told a joke that was so hilarious, I almost drove off the road, blinded by laughter’s sweet tears. I returned the favor the time he made the mistake of answering his phone as he waited in line at Costco. The poor folks behind him had to wait there with their shopping carts in the checkout queue while the older fellow in a paroxysm of laughter struggled to extricate the credit card from his wallet.

Unfortunately for him, Freddy’s raucous laughter was often the very smoking gun that convicted him of felonious classroom misbehavior. What fun for us seventy-year-olds to laugh again, this time with impunity, at the same jokes without having to whisper all the bad words.

My old accomplice suffered no disciplinary consequences, however, for his peculiar coughing. Poor Freddy had severe asthma, which gave him coughing attacks. Occasionally, these seizures turned his face an alarming (to adults) shade of blue, as he gasped for oxygen. Clever us, frugal with every opportunity for disrupting the peaceful quiet of class, we realized that the teachers couldn’t tell Freddy to stop coughing, and that the cough could be faked.

Freddy practiced different fraudulent cough sounds on the playground and after school. “Danny, listen to this one. Hack hack hack arg arg vroom vroom hack!”

Soon he’d perfected unique fake coughs. I can still hear him coughing that sounded like an old truck starting or a TexMex diesel locomotive, a flying propeller plane from the airbase, a Laredo Transportation passenger bus, a horse neighing, a burro braying, a dog choking, even a rooster crowing. There were many other coughs, I’ve forgotten, all imitation racket. Whenever assignments got too boring, in other words, always, I could catch Freddy’s eye, and he’d oblige with a spectacular cough.

The free pass to interrupt class was a winner for Freddy, if not for me. As the asthmatic victim, he couldn’t be punished for the medically excused sound effects, “I’m… cough-cough… having… cough-cough… an asthma… cough-cough… attack!”

Poor healthy me, my uncontrollable laughter could be and was punished. “Danny, don’t laugh at Freddy! What if you had asthma? Come up to my desk.”

Freddy’s funny coughs were some of the few capers in which I got my hands spanked with Mrs. Underhill’s 12” wooden ruler, and Freddy walked free, smiling at the rare justice of the outcome.

He got himself in real trouble, though. for a fourth-grade crime that led to a follow-up summons of his parents for a consultation with Miss Cobb.

It was the celebrated time he messed with the hand-spanking routine. Freddy had broken the rules in one of the myriad possible ways, and, as he shambled up the aisle toward Mrs. Underhill’s desk for the stinging manual punishment, Freddy winked at me.

I knew it meant, “Watch this!”

He did not disappoint.

Just as the exasperated teacher had raised her arm with the ruler as if she were to split firewood with an axe and was swinging the Ruler of Justice down for a mighty blow to his outstretched palm, Freddy jerked back his hand. Mrs. Underhill couldn’t stop the swing in mid-flight, broke the wood ruler in splinters, and bruised her knuckles on the desktop.

The entire class can vouch for the good woman’s self-control, just ask one of us surviving members!

The upright woman uttered none of the blasphemies or monosyllables spring unstoppable to the lips of the rest of the world, and only yelped an “OW!”

Freddy’s epic exploit has been recited in awe by generations of schoolboy Homers.

Okay, maybe not quite the wrath of Achilles in the Iliad, …but close.

Freddy and I had been friends since September 7, 1954, the first day of kindergarten with Mrs. Hemenway at United Day School. We’d end up doing five years of hard time together breaking rock in that penal institution, and that September was a perfect predictor of what would follow in the years to come.

Early in the day, not long after names were reviewed and cubbies were assigned, Mrs. Hemenway went over the ground rules for recess out on the dirt playground. There was particular attention paid to the rule about using the water fountain near the fence on Mendiola St.

The original plumbers had failed to install a proper pressure reducer on the fixture, which was nothing more than a little hooded nozzle atop a 24-inch-high pipe with a round on-off knob near the top. If you carefully turned the knob just a little, a perfect ¼-inch stream of drinking water squirted out in a small arc. Just like a regular water cooler, minus the refrigeration.

On the other hand, if you turned the knob all the way, the water made a different but equally perfect arc, this one ten feet high. The thick stream of water cascaded down with a big splash in the dirt and made a puddle twenty-five feet away.

Freddy and I were thirsty at morning recess, so we tried out the tricky water fountain with its interesting rules of use.

Yes, as had been explained, it did make a nice stream of water for drinking.

However, since we were thirsty for more than water, the two of us stood there in Eden thirsty for the Knowledge of Good and Evil, fascinated by the prohibition against the big water arc.

Charmed by the attractive suggestion that other classmate and our constant companion, Lucifer, I turned the knob all the way. Just as the authorities had described, the water shot up in the air and came down on the dirt yards away.

Freddy elbowed me aside to confirm the results of our new knowledge, just as a girl from our kindergarten class ran right across the small puddle where the stream of water had just splashed down.

The snake offered Freddy a new temptation.

A few seconds later, another girl ran carelessly toward the puddle. With untrained but still perfect aim and timing, Freddy twisted the knob, the water shot up, descended, splashed the innocent girl with mud, and drenched her brand-new school outfit with water.

We were frog-marched at double time to Miss Cobb’s office, where the Principal explained to Freddy in the sternest tones just what a bad boy he had been. For whatever reason, (was it my “Who, me?” look?), the scolding was all directed at Freddy, and I was more witness than defendant.

The pattern set that first day of kindergarten was repeated many times during the next five-and-a-half years: the snake providing all the ideas, Freddy in trouble, Danny the innocent bystander.

The pattern lasted until the fifth grade.

Our teacher that year (to abuse an honorable vocation by calling her such; apologies to all you wonderful teachers reading this), Mrs. Stanley, was so old that she was also known as ‘Mother Stanley.’ In fact, she looked a lot like Whistler’s portrait of his elderly mother.

To use a kind understatement, she was incompetent.

Mrs. Stanley disliked Freddy.

Of course, she’d been forewarned, since Freddy’s notorious behavior issues had been deplored sequentially by our previous teachers, Mrs. Hemenway, Mrs. Swift, and Mrs. Underhill as we moved up through the grades.

Mrs. Stanley took the familiar animus against him much further.

Halfway through fifth grade, just after Christmas holidays of 1959, she got Miss Cobb to expel Freddy. In the ignominious conference with Mr. and Mrs. Dickey, Mrs. Stanley informed them that their son was “incorrigible.”

All the fun of our well-rehearsed classroom disruptions came to a sudden, inglorious end.

I never had the pleasure of getting in trouble in another class with Freddy Dickey.

It was a fork in the road. I continued plodding along on the United Day track to Lamar Junior High, while Freddy was placed under the stern supervision plus abundant corporal punishment of the Marist Fathers at St. Joseph’s Academy.

At least for a year or two, there was still the fun of Cub Scouts in Pack 131 at the Dickey’s house on Gustavus. Freddy’s mother Esther was our Den Mother. “Fun” is an inadequate word for what went on after school there, before Mrs. Dickey arrived, like the U.S. Marines, to restore order.

Laredoans of a certain age need only to hear together the names of our Cub Scout den mates Richard Goodman and Fred Dickey to imagine exactly the sort of high jinks that are forever associated with those heroic humorists of local Laredo legend.

Time passed, and with Freddy getting in trouble on other campuses – to be more specific, at every other campus in town – I found replacement partners in crime, Johnny Snyder and then Hector Torres.

The fifth-grade fork in the road meant that Freddy and I followed paths with fewer and fewer crossings.

During high school, I saw Freddy occasionally. After all, in those days, Laredo had a population of only 55,000, and we lived on the same side of town. But in the decades that followed, not once.

It’s not an unusual story: distance and the hectic years of starting a career and families separate many childhood friends.

Then one January day in 2008, on a half-day visit I made to Laredo, our United Day classmate Les Norton invited the two of us to lunch at La Posada.

The camaraderie of our reunion over fajitas after almost 50 years was as easy as stumbling on a Nuevo Laredo sidewalk late on a Saturday night. The life we’d shared in elementary school had never been forgotten, and after a few brief updates, conversations from long ago were resumed in mid-sentence. The laughter was as contagious as it had been at school on Clark Boulevard.

When my father died, I got to know a different Fred, someone the Freddy of schoolboy antics wouldn’t have led me to predict: the mature funeral director, Fred Dickey Jr.

Everyone our age knows how emotionally exhausting and complicated and expensive deaths in the family are. I was having a hard time coordinating things from a distance of two thousand miles. Confused by all the options and uncertainties, my calls to Fred for help were always a combination of comfort and clarity. Even though this involved no business interest for his funeral home, Fred’s advice was the kindest and most useful of any I received.

At the 2018 memorial service for my dad in Laredo, Fred came and met every member of my family in the reception afterward. A daughter asked me, “Who was that nice man, Mr. Dickey?”

What would Miss Cobb, Mrs. Stanley, and every other teacher who thrashed and wrote off young Freddy have said?

I learned in our pláticas that Fred still carried around a painful bruise on his soul from the injustices of those years at United Day School. Few of our calls ended without Fred recalling how Mrs. Stanley had once told him and his parents that he was incorrigible.

Incorrigible.

Case closed.

At age ten, Freddy was told that he would never amount to anything.

During all his subsequent disastrous school years and all those different schools, Freddy never erased his personal scarlet letter.

So, the easiest path for the boy was to prove everyone right by actually being incorrigible.

He was very successful at this.

Only institutions founded in Laredo after his graduation from high school in 1969 at age 21 were denied the honor of expelling him, and as Fred half-exulted later, he was “the oldest graduating senior in the history of Laredo schools.”

I learned to hear the pain in that background music every time 70-year-old Fred repeated with false mirth how Freddy had been deemed incorrigible all those years ago.

And then, after spending twelve years living up to the ignominious label, Freddy turned the page. The life he led as an adult, even while he retained that enormous original sense of humor and fun, was a corrected, second draft of the story full of mistakes he’d scrawled as a schoolboy.

That’s why I invoked Wordsworth’s famous line, “The child is father to the man” with skepticism earlier.

The child that Freddy was did not father the man that Laredo and I came to know as Fred Dickey Jr.

Unless, that is, you’d known the boy with a generous heart as a friend and benefitted from that same kindness in the adult.

The problem student who couldn’t sit still to focus on memorizing Bible passages, writing out words for spelling practice, the sheets of arithmetic problems, maps to color, bowdlerized books to read, or tests – all the lobotomizing make-work that chained us to school desks – wasn’t incorrigible, but a student who didn’t learn in the teacher-pleasing way Danny Clouse did.

The incorrigible label was just another obstacle in his way, and it wasn’t until he got beyond the rigid, old, one-size-fits-all classroom rules that he was able to find a place to use his hidden talents.

All that time Freddy wasted in schoolrooms living up to his reputation as a bad boy dummy!

Few people appreciated what unspoken pride and quiet vindication the ex-screw-up Fred felt in 2016 when he was inducted into the Nixon High Hall of Fame as a Mustang Legend.

Public recognition was late in coming. After all, he had been a respected Laredo businessman for decades. But anyway, Fred understood years earlier that he had actually never been incorrigible.

On our calls, Fred’s frequent despedida, invoked with a laugh, was the Jimmy Buffett line, “If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane.”

Never insane, Fred Dickey must have been protected all these years by his patron, Saint Crazy.

Now that you’re gone, dear Freddy, dear Fred, whenever I think of the two of you, it’s always with great affection for both the child and the father.

“Shine on, you crazy diamond.”