QEPD Johnny Snyder: the good was in the shared golden years of our childhood,  so I’ll remember instead all the happy times we had as boys in Laredo

What-ifs inevitably come to mind when a young person dies. 

The words “cut down in the prime of life” leave you wondering what might have been. 

Why is fate cruel? “Why did Otis Redding get on that plane?”

On Memorial Day we remembered the deaths of young Laredo soldiers in Vietnam. The classmates whose names are engraved on the monument in Jarvis Plaza will be forever young, never husbands, fathers, or mentors. As Yeats asked remembering a friend killed in World War I, “What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”

On other days, we are surprised by sudden griefs as something makes us remember our childhood friends who died too soon.

“What a waste!” we think and say.

But these early deaths have not been the only reapers of our young friends.

We have also watched lives lived out in what could be called a living mortality.

Some people we know have survived, sometimes for years, as breathing, ambulatory people, but empty inside, without the spark of life that made them who they once were.

For all of us who came of age in the 1960s, we have our personal lists of friends who died but stayed alive. While we all know that drugs killed Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Gram Parsons in their twenties, we also know that drugs effectively killed Syd Barrett and Roky Erikson long before their obituaries appeared.

It is too painful to add the names of Laredo contemporaries who lived for decades after drug addiction extinguished the flame we’d loved since childhood. We had missed them for a long time already when they died.

This week Sylvester Stewart, the artist we knew as Sly Stone, died at age 82. His obituaries ruefully remind us that he had not been a practicing musician for over 40 years, thanks to his life-long cocaine addiction.

All that talent wasted.

All that music never made.

“If only…”

Today we mourn the premature death of a Laredo friend, Johnny Synder, 1948-2025.

Johnny’s life is well-known among Laredoans of a certain age. I needn’t rehearse the sad details of his story, of his first death decades ago and now this second, and final, one.

The Latin motto about funeral orations, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, “of the dead, [say] nothing if not good,” is hard to follow in the case of my dear boyhood friend Johnny Snyder. Where was the good I could invoke after all the unhappy years?

The good was in the shared golden years of our childhood, so I’ll remember instead all the happy times we had as boys in Laredo.

The Snyders lived around the corner from the Clouses on a block of 2-bedroom tract houses built for the GI Home Loan market. The neighborhood was hyperbolically called The Heights, since its elevation was perhaps 30 feet above the International Bridge over the river.  Johnny’s father, John Sr., like my father, and many other men of their generation, came to Laredo as a soldier at the Army Air Field and stayed. There were three Snyder children: Robbie, Johnny, and Debbie.

My earliest memory of Johnny was seeing him and rest of the Mier St. Gang, Robbie, Grady Vela, Beto Piña, and Chester Long playing baseball in the street. I’d join the gang a couple of years later, when its members formed the nucleus of Fidel Hale’s Yankees team in Little League.

Our first day in morning kindergarten at United Day School was a premonition. Johnny and I got in trouble. During an art activity that morning, we were given squares of colored plasticine modeling clay to sculpt into shapes. I was on the floor working next to Johnny with my green clay. He looked over at me and said, “Hey, just think how big we could make something if we put our clay together!” 

I hadn’t thought about size and scale, but big sounded good, and we made a tower out of our mixed clay. Unfortunately, Johnny’s clay was red, and the mixed batch tower was an ugly brownish color.

The teacher was under the mistaken impression that she didn’t need to tell us not to mix the clay colors and scolded us with strong words.

It was a paradigm for many further adventures with Johnny: fun ideas of questionable wisdom.

In our Little League years with the Yankees, Johnny, who was a natural athlete, was a perennial All Star. 

In the legendary season of 1960, when we were league champions, he was the best pitcher and best hitter in the American League. 

Later that summer, Johnny, who never wore a hat, except during games, had to spend a night at Mercy Hospital for heatstroke. He’d worked on a 105-degree afternoon watering lawns on a housing development his father’s real estate office was marketing and collapsed.

With his buzz cut hair always in the sun, it bleached to a platinum blond. His nickname was Espejo because his white head shined as bright as a mirror reflecting the sun.

Soon thereafter, in his years at Lamar Jr. High, two blocks from our houses, he was a BMOC, with straight-A’s, President of the Student Council. Many girls were romantically inclined –or more!— in his direction. All eyes were on him.

He played Che Guevara to my Fidel Castro in a school Mock United Nations stunt at Ursuline Academy in the summer before the Cuban Missile Crisis. A photographer sent a photo to the Associated Press, and it appeared in newspapers around the state. All I remember is how hot it was in those fatigues and how itchy the paste-on beard was.

In high school, Johnny and I moved on from baseball and pickup basketball games at the outdoor court down the street at Blessed Sacrament Church, with developing parallel interests in books and literature. He had the advantage of a more conventionally literate family than mine, where reading was limited to the Saturday Evening Post, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and the Bible in King James’ English.

We started out laughing along with Mark Twain, oblivious to the dark adult themes of Huck Finn, and moved on to Bryon. Johnny was always a master of the put-down, as many of our high-school classmates had to endure, and Byron’s acid mockery seemed to us the ultimate in cool.

Listening to music on hot summer nights at Chiqui’s detached bedroom at his grandmother’s house across from Chic-E-Lin’s, we thought Mick Jagger’s swaggering machismo, “Her eyes are kept just to herself, I can still look at someone else,” in “Under My Thumb” sounded very grown-up, even though it was actually Brian Jones’ marimba hook that took us in.

By 1964, it was Bob Dylan who was giving us most of the lines.

Now they asked me to read a poem
At the sorority sisters home
Ah got knocked down and my head was swimmin’
I wound up with the Dean of Women
Yippee! I’m a poet, I know it
Hope I don’t blow it.

We weren’t poets, but we were something, and we knew it. Bring on the Dean of Wimmin’! Even though neither one of us had ever tasted one, in those days, the world was our oyster.

Our other literary model was John Lennon’s little book, In His Own Write, where we marinated ourselves in the vinegar of second-rate Finnegan’s Wake stirred with oil from “Jabberwocky.” Tasteless and mostly uneducated 15-year olds, we found Lennon’s nonsense brilliant: “Puffing and globbering they drugged themselves rampling or dancing with wild abdomen, stubbing in wild postumes amongst themselves.”

The world sighs with relief that we didn’t save any of the imitations we scrawled on notebook pages instead of working at more useful things like trigonometry or Tennyson.

Looking back, I can see that Johnny, and hence me, his acolyte, knew nothing of Big Books. No Brothers Karamazov for us. Our essential laziness combined with our preference for the clever short piece, meant that we were susceptible to one-liners, acerbic quotes, and bitter aphorisms. No wonder we read Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary aloud to each other’s delight on the way to and from school during those high school years. It took me a couple of miserable years in college to learn how to get through books like Don Quixote and to write 20-page papers.

Once we had driver’s licenses, we’d go down to Jarvis Plaza and park across from Statler’s News where we’d buy 35-cent Modern Library and Signet paperback reprints of classic literature, which we started but didn’t read. We, however, did read Sgt. Rock comic books with close attention. In those days reading comics seriously  was an advanced ‘camp’ taste. The comics’ jaunty slang, like “hit the rack,” we memorized and added to our conversation, which, in any case, was mostly a sequitur needing ironic ‘scare quotes’. 

At the biggest fork in the road of my life, it was Johnny who had the most to do with my going to college far from Laredo.

Unlike my family, in which going to Baylor to complete my Southern Baptist education was the only option ever imagined, at the Snyder’s house I heard talk about Yale and Princeton, Stanford and Cal. Robbie Snyder had been at Johns Hopkins, and the East Coast sophistication in his conversation on visits home seduced me like the farmer’s daughter in a joke.

We decided when Johnny was a junior and I a year behind that we would also go to a distant college, preferably on a campus with a football team in the Ivy League. When it came to the enormous differences between a University of Pennsylvania and Cornell or Dartmouth and Harvard, it was blindfolded dart throwing. We knew the school colors –and not much more.

As it turned out, Johnny’s habit of intellectual improvisation and clever shortcuts had not prepared him for advanced math, and his SAT scores came back with a low number for the math half. Yale didn’t take him, and he squeaked into a place at UT in Austin.

Johnny was a lucky survivor in Austin on August 1, 1966. He’d just finished a placement test in Batts Hall, one of the buildings on the edge of the plaza below the Main Tower where Charles Whitman was shooting students as they walked between classes. Johnny stayed inside and was safe, but looking out the window of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese office, he could see the wounded bleeding out in the sun. 

When I saw him several days later in Laredo, he was still shaken, aware that, except for the few minutes he delayed inside Batts, he would have been outside in the cross hairs of Whitman’s rifle. We spent an evening listening to Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” album, playing “Season of the Witch,” with Jimmy Page’s beguiling guitar riff, over and over.

The road I took the next year ended in New England. It took me where Johnny and I had previously dreamed about riding around in his grandfather’s Buick, chain-smoking a pack of Pall Malls.

While I was away, Johnny and I stayed in touch. We laughed in long calls fed by stacks of quarters on dorm pay phones, and I’d get photos from the selfie booths at the bus stations in Laredo and Austin, like this classic from Johnny and Chiqui.

Five years later, I was in Austin, married and going to grad school. I’d see Johnny occasionally but the roads we’d taken only apparently crossed again. The reality was that we had both changed.

We somehow had tickets to a Kinks concert at Austin’s Municipal Auditorium in 1976, a dull concert of dreary replays of songs we used to love but no longer enjoyed any more than the bored musicians did. Our friendship and the music had worn out, and I didn’t see Johnny or hear from him again for 30 years.

Now, after 55 years of being adults, enough time having passed for us to be officially old, we look back on our youth with poignant emotions. There are blazing flash bulbs of memory, when we won a game or thrilled to a first kiss, when we won a prize at school or got a driver’s license, graduating from high school and the party afterwards at Jackie Frank’s house in Del Mar. Unforgettable instants.

There were wonderful extended times, too, periods measured in years rather than seconds, when life was good. We cherish the memory of our parents’ decades of love, the never-ending fun of schooldays, the joy of playing without timers as children, and the friendships that have lasted forever.

And there was also the Laredo of the 1950s and 60s. As with our memories of being 6 or 16 years old, everything shines now in a golden light that erases all disappointment and unhappiness.

Alas, to visit Laredo today is to get lost in the now built-over cactus and mesquite fields north of Saunders. 

In today’s Laredo, it’s Día de Fieles Difuntos every day on the empty downtown streets with its dirty sidewalks and boarded up shops, and at the fenced off Plaza Theater where we saw “A Hard Day’s Night.” On either side of Hidalgo or Convent, we walk past the tombstones of a dirty, unvisited urban graveyard. We weep, with no place to leave a flower in honor of a dead town where there once was so much life, so much of our generation’s life.

In the same way, we mourn the death last week of Johnny Snyder. Anger rises in our hearts and tears to our eyes as we look back on the decades of disappointments Johnny left us. We wonder “what if Johnny…?” Was it fate or his choices that cut off short a life we all expected to be glorious?

But, as with the ruins of the Laredo we look beyond to remember the city in its glory days, now that Johnny is gone, we bury the ashes of all the pain of his life and ours. We think of him now only as the boy we loved in the bright shining sunshine.

He returns to what he was, a golden boy for whom every road beckoned to happiness and success. As we finish mourning our own mistakes and better roads not taken, we can finish our grief for everything Johnny never accomplished.

Let us think of him now as a star actor in the make-believe comedy we all look back on in nostalgia, the fiction we’ve created over the past 60 years, that classic re-run we call “Laredo.”

Remember to enjoy today’s performance as we look back smiling: no matter how many cries of “Bravo!” we hear in the theater of our minds, the show will only return for encores for as long as we have memory left to conjure up 14-year-old Johnny Snyder and the Laredo of old.

We’ve missed you both for a long time, beloved friend and homeland.

Welcome back to the world we carry around in our heads, you’re looking great.