A Present for my Grandniece Olive

©2016 by John LaTorre

This is a picture of a Christmas decoration that has been in my family for almost sixty years. After this Christmas season, I’ll be giving it to my grandniece Olive Flemons, who is three years old, and I’ll be enclosing this letter with it.

Dear Olive,

I’m giving you this Advent candelabra, which has been in our family for a long time. As you can see, it’s not in the best shape, but maybe if I tell you a little bit about it, you’ll eventually come to see it as the beautiful object that it is.

It’s old. It was made before you were born, before your mother was born, even before your grandmother was born. Your great-grandmother – my mother – bought it when our family lived in Germany. She discovered it at an open-air fair called the “Weihnachtsmarkt” which is German for “Christmas Market.” The fair was held every December in downtown Frankfurt, and there would be lots of venders of Christmas ornaments and handcrafted items and food. You could buy big gingerbread hearts with your name written in icing, or gingerbread houses, or little cookies called “Pfeffernussen” made of spiced dough and covered with powdered sugar or frosting. Or, if you were hungrier, you could buy a grilled sausage and a roll with mustard. If you were thirsty, there would be coffee or tea or hot cider or hot apple wine (which was a specialty of that town). The whole area smelled of gingerbread and sausages and wood smoke.  It would probably have been raining, although I remember a light dusting of snow one year. These markets have been held in German cities for hundreds and hundreds of years, and go on to this very day.

How did I end up with the candelabra? It happened this way: I received a box from my mother about thirty years ago, which must have been around the time your mother was born. Inside the box was this candelabra, and a note from my mother. Here’s what the note said:

“Dear John

“Don’t know if you remember but we got this Xmas ornament the first Xmas we were in Germany – at the Xmas booths down next to the Main River. I want you to have this as one of your memories of Germany. It’s very special to me so I want you to have it – Maybe when you’re in your 60s it’ll be a good remembrance. Love, Mom.”

 We moved to Germany in 1957, so the purchase would have been in December of that year. The candelabra has been set up in either my mother’s house or my house every single Christmas since then. I’m in my sixties now, but soon will be in my seventies, so I think the time has come to pass it on.

You will notice, of course, that this ornament has not had an easy life. There are four angels on it, each playing a horn of some sort. But the paint has chipped off their heads, so they are all mostly bald now. And the candelabra has been broken and repaired many, many times, either by my father or me, using whatever glue we had handy. One of the angels has only one wing, the other wing having disappeared long ago. Another angel is missing its left forearm, which must have made it quite difficult for her to play her horn. But since angels are supposed to be supernatural creatures, maybe a missing arm or wing isn’t much of a hindrance to them. And it’s a reminder to me that many people with missing parts turn out to be angels, too, so you shouldn’t be too quick to judge them on their appearance.

This damage is typical of something that has seen so many moves (ten of them, at least) and so many miles of travel. In fact, I estimate that it has traveled about twenty-four thousand miles, crossing the Atlantic Ocean five times, and then down to Florida, and then to California. That’s the same number of miles that it takes to go completely around the world! And that doesn’t include the many times it’s moved across town, or from one town to another within California. Not many angels have traveled so far, or so often.

I suppose I could clean it up a bit. It still has some splotches of glue on it, and a little dust. But I don’t want to create any more damage than it already has, and even the dust tells a story. It could be German dust, or Virginian dust, or Floridian dust, or Californian dust. Who knows?

There are four arms on the candelabra, each with its own candleholder. The four candles are for the four Sundays of Advent. On the fourth Sunday before Christmas, the first candle would be lit. The next Sunday, another candle would be lit, and so on until the last Sunday before Christmas, when all four candles would be lit.  (Of course, some of the earlier candles would be burned down by then, so they’d be replaced, so that there would always be a proper number of lit candles.) We would always use red candles, although green candles would be appropriate, too. Or maybe both red and green, or white. You can use whatever you want, since it’s your candelabra now.

It’s hard for me to look at the candelabra without thinking of your great-grandmother. Like the angels, she had a few parts missing when she died, as your mother or grandmother can tell you. She was a strong woman, although she kept most of that strength hidden. It would come out mostly when defending her family. For example, I’m left-handed. Back when I was a schoolboy, there were still people who thought that people shouldn’t be left-handed. One of them was a teacher who insisted that I learn to write using my right hand. When my mom heard about that, she came down to the school and told the teacher, in the strongest words, that I could write with whatever hand I pleased. She said that God made me that way, and God surely knew what He was doing. That teacher never made me write or draw right-handed again. I’m sure your mother or grandmother can tell you many more stories about her and about what a fighter she was when she wanted to be.

She was a beautiful woman, as this picture shows. And you can see that she loved her family fiercely. She loved me and my brother and your grandmother, and she absolutely adored your mother.  She would have adored you, too. And that’s why I felt that it was right and proper for you to have this gift from her, and from me. She would have wanted it that way, knowing that a young lady like yourself would keep her memory alive and carry the tradition on into the next century.

So take care of it, dear. It may not look very pretty to you now, but it will become a little more beautiful each year. Trust me on this.  (If you don’t believe me, ask my sister or your mother; they’ll tell you the same thing.) And maybe someday, if you have children of your own, you can tell them stories about your family, and about your great-grandmother, and of all the people and places these little angels have seen.

 Love,

Your great-uncle John

An Open Letter to the Electoral College

©2016 by John LaTorre

Permission to reprint this in any form is hereby granted, provided that the author and source be given due credit.

To be specific, this is an open letter to those members of the Electoral College who are pledged to vote for the Republican candidate. Please hear me out, because I’m going to ask you to do something that few have ever done before, and I need to give you my reasons for it. Please read this with an open mind.

I’m an ordinary citizen, not a politician or journalist, but I have something on my mind that is certainly on your minds, as well, and it’s my hope that my thoughts may help to guide yours.

It’s no secret that this recent election is unprecedented in modern history. And your place in modern history is also unprecedented. As the Electoral College, you’ve always had power that, for the most part, you’ve never seen the need to exercise. But you need to exercise it now, because your actions could influence the future of the country far more than any Electoral College has in the span of American history.

The Founding Fathers, as you know, realized that most elections are straightforward and don’t require anything more than your conveying the votes of your constituents to the Senate, so that they can be counted. And that’s the way it’s been since your College began. But they also realized that there would be circumstances where an election would be so out of the ordinary that some sort of moderating influence would be necessary to ensure the stability of the country.

This is, I believe, such a circumstance. I believe this for three reasons.

First, it seems that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote by a considerable margin. If this had been any other election, we would have the usual discussion about whether or not the Electoral College should be disbanded in favor of a popular vote. But this has not been any other election. We now know that the voting process appears to have been tampered with in several of the swing states, with no attempt so far to reconcile the results of electronic voting and paper ballots, and that “Gerrymandering” has been taken to extremes in several other areas. All this may be legal, but that doesn’t make it fair or just. And the Electoral College has a unique ability to restore justice and fairness where it is lacking.

Second, the Republican candidate was elected to office on the basis of several sweeping promises, and we now hear that he is breaking those promises even before you cast your votes. This is not the man your constituents thought they were voting for.  This is a man who would say anything to get elected, without any guiding principle except for what directly benefits him or his family. He has already demonstrated a desire to blur the lines of public service and private emolument, to treat a free press as an adversary rather than a critical part of the American political process, and to hold contempt those who would suffer most from a resurgence of violence against those with less power … black people, gay people, handicapped people, women, Muslims, and any number of others. He is filling his cabinet post with billionaires with no experience in the fields they are expected to be conversant with, and whose personal interests run counter to the positions they are expected to fill. And he is already boasting of taking revenge – his word, not mine – on those members of your party who did not support him.

You know all this. You have seen it, as plain as day. And you know that putting the Presidency in the hands of a man like this cannot be beneficial to the political process to which you and your party have dedicated their lives and careers to.

Third, a fair election depends on an informed electorate. That has not been the case in this election, because the media have failed to provide them with fair, unbiased reporting. Instead, we have a candidate that was given a vast amount of free publicity (over a billion dollars’ worth, by some estimates) simply for saying outrageous things. The media have seldom fact-checked the statements of the candidates, resulting in an environment where the electorate was forced to rely on two separate and inimical streams of public information, purveyed by online sources that filtered out anything that ran counter to their own political agendas, both on the left and right sides of the spectrum. This was most egregious in the Republican candidate’s campaign, where he made claims that were proven to be unsubstantiated or simply contrary to known facts, while the media sat silently by without calling him out on it. How could the voting public be expected to make an intelligent decision under these circumstances?

To make matters worse, I read in the morning newspaper that foreign powers have flooded the social media with posts that were designed to hamper the Democratic candidate and favor the Republican candidate, in an attempt to influence the election. We should all be appalled at this attempt by a foreign government to sway our electoral process.

That’s why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College. To be sure, part of its purpose was to ensure that those living in states with smaller populations had a disproportionate influence on the outcome of elections. But that’s not the issue I’m addressing here. The other purpose was to act as a sort of safety apparatus, much like the fire hose behind a glass panel that you see in some public buildings, under a sign that says “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.” It’s put there with the expectation that nobody has to use it, like the powers of the Electoral College to disregard a constituent population’s vote. So far, we haven’t needed to use it. But we can, and we should recognize that there are times when we should, and that this may be one of those times.

Which brings us to the second purpose of the College: to allow people with more experience in the political process, with cooler heads than the general population, and the wisdom gathered from years of watching the political scene and how government really works, to use that wisdom and experience to shape the course that they think best for the country, even though that course may go against the wishes of the electorate. Our Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the type of cyber-attacks and electronic vote tampering that this last election has produced, but they knew how demagogues could sway opinions and carry votes, and how necessary it was to provide an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail.

It won’t be easy for you to defy your party’s wishes. For many of you, it would be political suicide, at least for a while. You were appointed as an Elector on the premise that you wouldn’t go against the popular vote in your area, and you would have to break that promise. The fact that you have the power to do this legally won’t be much help here. You will incur disfavor. Even worse, many of you may receive death threats, from that small contingent of the people who voted for your candidate and who trade in the coin of violence and coercion. (And, as you have seen in the past few weeks, you have seen how emboldened these people have become to spend that coin, to an extent that is unprecedented in modern American history.) I’m sure the Founding Fathers foresaw this, too, and trusted that an Electoral College would have the courage and moral fiber to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences. When they began this country, they pledged their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor to that cause, regardless of the consequences. And they were confident that future generations would produce people with a similar commitment to honor, and that they could put that responsibility into capable hands … into your hands.

I do not envy you. I wish you didn’t have to make this decision. To be honest, being a hero isn’t easy. Most true heroes didn’t want the job. James Meredith and Ruby Bridges didn’t want to be heroes. They just wanted to go to school. The men and women that rushed to help the victims of September 11, 2001 didn’t want that disaster to happen. They would much rather have lived their usual lives instead of battling fires and breathing air laced with asbestos. When John Kennedy was asked how he became a World War II hero, he famously answered, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” But when they were called, they answered, regardless of the consequences. That’s what made them heroes. You have that opportunity to be a hero now.

As you know, if you’ve studied American history, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial resulted in an acquittal by a single vote. What you may not know is that a number of Republican senators defied their party and voted for acquittal. As a result, none of these senators were elected to office again. Many of them had turned down bribes from the party, in the form of office appointments or diplomatic positions, which had been offered if they switched their votes. So they suffered considerable damage to their careers. But in time, they were recognized and honored as heroes. People came to respect their courage and integrity.  If you likewise defy your party and vote for the common good, I believe that people will in time respect you as well. And your grandchildren will be able to say that their grandparents saved the country from its closest brush yet to political chaos.

So your choice is clear. You can play it safe, do what is expected, retire to your homes and lives as though nothing had happened, and slip into history’s dustbin. Or you can vote your conscience, accept the consequences, and join the Founding Fathers as true patriots. It won’t be an easy decision. But our Founding Fathers counted on you to make the right one. And we are counting on you to make the right one, too.

Good Golly, We Miss You, Molly

©2016 by John LaTorre

Once upon a time, there was a writer named Molly Ivins. She was a good ol’ girl from Texas and never forgot that, although she was born in California and educated at Smith College and Columbia University. And she was that rarest of the rare: a hard-nosed Texas liberal along the lines of John Henry Faulk, Ann Richards, Bill Moyers, and Jim Hightower (all of who were her personal friends). She became a columnist for a number of publications, where she displayed a flair for showing us the humor, insanity, and significance of politics on the state and national level. She died in 2007.

It’s a real temptation to fill out this essay with nothing but quotes from her, because she was one of the most quotable people of the twentieth century. There are going to be a lot of them, anyway, because nobody could articulate what was on her mind than she could. I beg forgiveness from Random House and everybody else who owns the rights to her work now, but it can’t be helped. And I encourage you to read her books first hand; most of them are still in print, beginning with Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and continuing nearly up to her death.  She often said that, in her view, the primary function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I don’t know if that was original with her, but there is no better phrase to sum up her career.

The book I’ll be quoting from here is Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, published in 1993. Written a quarter of a century ago, it has an astonishing relevance to the current political campaign. In that race, a slick liberal policy-wonk lawyer named Clinton is running for president in a race against a billionaire populist with no government experience and a Republican who, when not reading from a TelePrompter, come across as an incoherent salad of scraps of words and ideas. The main difference is that the Clinton is now female, and the other two candidates have been combined into one.

The billionaire populist at that time was H. Ross Perot. “Ross Perot is fundamentally a superb salesman. So superb that it amounts to a form of genius,” Molly wrote. “Over the years, he has become far more sophisticated in his analysis of political issues, but he retains the glib salesman’s tendency to reduce complex realities to catchy slogans… He is still given to the sort of sweeping statements he made twenty years ago: ‘Pollution? That’s an easy one. No question about it … Give me the choice of having all those industries dumping pollutants into the rivers or the choice of having no factories, and I’ll have the factories. I can clean up the rivers in five years.’ This is not a man who has grasped the concept of dead oceans.” Any more than Trump grasps the concept of climate change, it seems.

In the same article, Molly pointed out the futility of electing rich people with no government background to office, without them even running for a city or county office first. “Why do they always want to buy the governorship or senatorship? Or, in the case of Perot, who’s richer than God, the presidency? It’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days, when rich guys just bought racehorses and yachts.

“Because when these rich guys get into office, we find they’re disastrous as political leaders. They’re so accustomed to working in hierarchical, top-down organizations—where they can fire anyone who doesn’t jump high enough—they go berserk with frustration when nobody jumps at all. You can get elected governor, but you can’t fire the Legislature, or even the Egg Marketing Advisory Board. Our last Big Rich Governor was Bill Clements, ’87 to ’91, who, when he tried to learn Spanish, inspired the observation, ‘Good, now he’ll be bi-ignorant.’”

 But Perot’s biggest problem was his shaky grasp of reality. “Ross Perot is a liar,” Molly wrote. “It’s really quite striking and leaves me with a certain respect for professional politicians, who lie with such artistry, such deniability, such masterful phraseology that they can always deny their denials later on.

“Perot lies the way Henry Kissinger used to lie but without Kissinger’s air of grave, weighty authority. Perot just flat-out lies. What’s more, when he lies, he accuses everyone else of lying. He never said this; he never said that; he never said the other. They’re making it all up. They’re all liars.” And twenty-four years later, we’ve got Lyin’ Ted, and Lyin’ Hillary. Déjà vu.

Elsewhere, Molly describes Perot’s penchant for seeing all adversities as conspiracies, in a way that seems to presage Trump’s allegations that the upcoming election will be rigged against him. “That squirrelly little part of his brain that will never allow him to admit he’s wrong about anything comes up with these fantastic rationales for his own flaky behavior. A Perot presidency would be like the time of the papist plots in England. Conspirators sighted everywhere, evidence no object.” Elsewhere, she brings up a weird tale about how Republican dirty-tricksters were going to torpedo the wedding of Perot’s daughter Carolyn. “In true conspiracy-nut fashion, Perot has decided that anyone who doesn’t believe his conspiracy theory is part of the conspiracy. Does the FBI fail to find a scintilla of evidence to back up Perot’s claims? Why, then, the FBI is clearly a tool of the dirty Republicans. Do the police say that Perot’s source on this ridiculous alleged plot is a well-known fantasist? Why, then, the police must be in on it too!”

And, of course, the media were favorite targets. Perot was notoriously sensitive about how he felt the media were against him, about which Molly wrote, “…he would blame it on the media being unfair, for not putting the right interpretation on what he said or meant to say, and he would then attempt to instruct or lecture the press on how we were to interpret him. It was painful to watch. When you run for public office, you don’t get to decide what other people think of you.” Today, it’s even more painful to watch the press corps hustled into chicken-wire enclosures at rallies, where they are pointed out as enemies and targeted for humiliation. As in other areas, Trump is going even further than Perot, or any of his other fellow candidates of the previous century, had ever dared to go before.

While Perot was better at grabbing headlines, he turned out not to be serious challenger to the incumbent President. The parallels here are less distinct, but there is a common thread that Bush’s re-election campaign suffered from a lack of vision, offering little guidance beyond the general sentiment that the best way to govern is to let business do its thing and wait for the inevitable prosperity to trickle down to the people who need it. In this sense, Bush reflected the prevailing Texas philosophy that the primary purpose of government is to foster a hospitable environment for “bidness,” the citizenry be damned. Likewise, Trump thinks that the best way for the economy to improve is to make government get out of the way and let business do business.

I find another parallel. Molly’s descriptions of George H. W. Bush’s appearances on television remind me a lot of Trump’s appearance at the debates and at his rallies. “George Bush without a TelePrompter can scarcely produce an intelligible sentence. I’ve been listening to him since 1966 and must confess to a secret fondness for his verbal dyslexia. Hearing him has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials: Will this man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive? As he flops from one syntactical Waterloo to the next, ever in the verbless mode, in search of the long-lost predicate, or even a subject, you find yourself struggling with him, rooting for him. What is the man trying to say? What could he possibly mean? Hold it, I think I see it!”  As someone who has found it impossible to clearly diagram any impromptu sentence of Trump’s that is over fifteen words long, I find the resemblance striking. (And it might be worth noting that the hand gestures Bush used in his speeches were choreographed by one Roger Ailes, whom Donald Trump recently recruited for the same purpose.)

Molly also wrote a lot about the disparity in wealth. He pointed out that while the eighties and early nineties saw one of the greatest increases in productivity in modern history, almost all the wealth created by that productivity went to the top one percent. That’s even more true today. And she also saw how our communications companies were agglomerating: “At the end of World War II, 80 percent of American newspapers were independently owned. Today [1992], almost without exception they are owned by one of fifteen chains.” And now it’s fewer than that, and it’s also true of television and radio as well … in fact, it’s often the same chains.

And I could go on for pages and pages about some of the other subjects that Molly raised in essays in this book: health care, the rise of women’s political power, the artful use of redistricting to deprive people of political power, and the effects of unemployment. (After the paper she worked for went belly-up, she compared the experience to having her horse shot out from under her.) That such a book, written almost a quarter of a century ago, is still relevant to our current situation is a marvel. Or maybe not. She was only seeing what any intelligent, clear-headed commentator could see on the horizon. The big issues haven’t gone away, despite our fervent wish that they would.

Our world is not devoid of political commentators, of both liberal and conservative stripes, but seldom do we hear one with such a fine ear for the humorous. We have Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver, and their mentor Jon Stewart, but these people come off more strident than Molly ever did. Even her enemies liked her, and she liked most them as people if not as politicians. “George W. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer,” I heard her say at a lecture just before she died, “but there’s not a mean bone in his body.” She had similar kind words for most of her subjects, even as she pilloried them in the press when (in her opinion) they went all stupid on her. She couldn’t have done otherwise, and I doubt that they’d have let her do otherwise. She loved practical jokes, even when they were played on her (she recounts the time that Perot called her to complain about his treatment. He called collect, and she took the call without thinking that maybe Perot could have paid for it himself).

People either loved or hated her writing, but mostly they respected it, because it was well researched. She had her facts straight, and they knew it. When asked for her opinion on what government was supposed to do, she would quote the preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: “I believe government should be used in order to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. God, as the architects say, is in the details.

“I believe that all men and women are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that governments are instituted among men and women, driving their just powers from the consent of the governed, to secure these rights. And that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

All well and good, but then she adds: “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults. If Texas were a sane place, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”  And in the last essay of the book, she wrote: “The thing is this: You got to have fun while you're fightin' for freedom, 'cause you don't always win… And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

But go thee now, and get some Molly for yourself. She’s in bookstores, she’s in libraries, she’s on the Internet. And she’s more relevant than ever. God, I miss her.

Thank You, William B. Gross, Wherever You Are

©2016 by John LaTorre

I just finished watching “Horowitz in Moscow,” a DVD I picked up at a Friends of the Library sale some months ago. It’s a recording of Vladimir Horowitz’s concert in Moscow in 1986. It was his first visit to the Soviet Union since he defected from there in 1925, at the age of twenty-three. In the beginning of the film, he is speaking to his niece, who is seventy years old. When he last saw her, she was nine.

But the core of the documentary is not the trip, but the concert he gave to a sold-out crowd. He won over the crowd with a recital of works from Scarlatti, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Liszt, and Moszkowski. The performance was spellbinding.

And it reminded me of when I saw Horowitz in concert myself, at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. It must have been around 1969, and it was all because my friend William B. Gross persuaded me to go. He told me that he was planning to camp out in front of the ticket office, so that he could be the first in line for tickets when they went on sale the next morning. He wanted me to go with him, and I did. We stayed on the sidewalk all night, taking turns at running for coffee at a nearby diner that was open at all hours. We bought the tickets and went home, returning some months later for the concert. It was the first concert of classical music that I had ever attended, and it changed my life.

My family was not into classical music. The only exposure I had to it was a set of twelve long-playing albums issued by the Reader’s Digest people. It was called A Festival of Light Classical Music and consisted of a dozen records comprising most of the shorter mainstays if the classical music repertoire. I listened to them all, because I had a crush on a girl who said she liked classical music, and I figured that this was one way to get on her radar. I was wrong about that, but listening to those records gave me an acquaintance with the genre.

Bill Gross was an avid collector of classical music recordings and publications. His apartment was filled with so many of them that you couldn’t navigate from room to room unless you stuck to the paths he’d left between the stacks of books and records. It wasn’t all classical music, though. He had recordings of everything Tom Lehrer ever did, even the most obscure albums that were never sold in this country. But it was his collection of piano recordings that he pressed on me most. He himself was a talented pianist, but he seldom touched the instrument once he realized that he would never give a performance as good as the people he idolized: Artur Schnabel, Van Cliburn, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Vladimir Horowitz, Artur Rubenstein, and a host of others whose name I can’t recall now.

He loaned me those records, and I made tapes of them on my Sony TC-200 tape deck. None of those tapes have survived the intervening years, but they gave me my first real familiarity with classical piano music. From there, my taste branched out to baroque music, mainly due to Bill’s affection for the parodies of Peter Shickele, whose “P.D.Q. Bach” records were gaining popularity among the college crowd. To really understand the parodies, you had to be acquainted with the originals, which Bill was happy to provide me. My exposure widened to Beethoven, Mozart, Franck, and Wagner—the latter due to another friend of mine named Charles Karpuk, who once had me over to his place to hear the entire Ring Cycle in one marathon sitting.

I lost track of Bill eventually. I’d given him a car to sell, an Oldsmobile F-85 given to me by my father. I signed the title over to him, but I don’t know if he never sold it, because I never got a dime from him. When I moved away from the Baltimore area in 1978, I pretty much gave up any hope of seeing Bill or the money again.

But I’m not angry. Bill gave me more than the car would ever be worth. He gave me an exposure to classical music that I never would have had otherwise. When I saw Horowitz in concert, I became so enraptured with Horowitz’s magical performance that I found myself leaning far over the rail of the balcony. And I got a taste of that again as I saw Horowitz performing in Moscow before an audience that was as transported as I was by his genius.

I wish I knew where you were now, Bill, so that I can thank you properly. You had so many things to share with me besides classical music. You were a skilled auto mechanic, and you gave me a taste of what that was all about by helping me work on my cars, and letting me work on yours. When I bought my copy of John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, I remember you chortling over Muir’s description of some of the definitely non-standard repair procedures Muir was describing. An expert audiophile, you also counseled me on what stereo components to buy, and how much I should spend on them, and how to get the best use of them.

And I remember the hours we spent in the basement of the freshman dormitory at the Johns Hopkins University, where the studios of WJHU were located. At the time, WJHU was just a “carrier current” radio station whose broadcast range didn’t extend past the dormitory complex. It was for hobbyists, and hobbyists we were. I was doing mostly engineering, minding the sound levels and cuing up records on request, and you were the one keeping the equipment humming so that we could stay on the air. And Karpuk was there, too, reading H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe in a sepulchral voice in the wee hours of the morning.

I’ve had some luck using the Internet to track down old friends, but none at all with Bill. I found out that his sister had died, and that his brother sold the family home many years ago. But Bill seems to have left no traces on the World Wide Web. Maybe he finally got a degree in some sort of engineering science, which was his ostensible reason for being at Johns Hopkins. Or maybe he decided to make automobile repair his full-time job. Or maybe the problems he had with a back injury put an end to those dreams, and he found a way to parlay his extensive knowledge of classical music into a profitable career. He could have done any of those things. Or maybe, restless spirit that he was, he found other things, or was forced into other things, that steered his destiny into a path that neither of us could foresee.

But for what you’ve done for me, I thank you, Bill. I owe you one.