As Autumn Leaves Begin to Fall (The Passing of Childhood Friends)

Nineteen so far as I know… that is deceased classmates who started kindergarten together with me, or who joined us later in first grade or second, etc. Children I sat beside and played with or at least observed on the playground and later in the halls, gym class, and on the streets. We were communards, willing or not, and even sixty years later we still recall and reflect on each other now and then, whether or not we were close. And then there were the neighborhood kids. Less likely to have been the same age, but enormously important in our younger, more circumscribed and less mobile years

Cumulatively to date I know of twenty-one such passings, and of these, five have resonated especially for me. Which is what I want to write about.

Their names (in rough but probably not exact order of passing) are Carson Reinoehl, Ed Schlotterback, Ben Hatton, Phil Wheeler, and Mike Zumbaugh.

Carson was my very best and probably only kindergarten friend, as early on the teacher sent a note home to my mother: “Stephen doesn’t play with the other children, he just works out puzzles.” I must have improved, because I distinctly remember he was my best friend at five years old, though indeed I don’t remember any others. By the third grade we had drifted, and I remember seeing him only two or three times after high school before he passed, roughly seven years ago. Still, his remembrance deeply touched me, and I attended his visitation. Given the little time we were friends and the near-sixty-year gap, I was very surprised to have responded so. It must mean something.

The next leaf to fall for me was Ed Schlotterback. We shared a lot in common: long Saturday hikes, love of nature and science, idiosyncratic personalities… and I remember having to stay indoors one recess with Ed because we were the very last to learn a times-table quick enough. Ed was one of a kind, and taught me how to cast molten lead into plaster of Paris molds thereby producing shiny lead dimes (entirely real-looking). Sadly his last years were tragic. This was my first experience with the passing of a very good contemporary adult friend, and of course it made a much deeper impression that I cannot articulate.

And then Ben Hatton.. We never spoke a word to each other in school, but became neighbors four years later. I had recently married Kathy, and Ben and Susie Rosenberg lived together in the next-door apartment beside the old Boy Scout Woods. And we shared beer! Michelob!! Lots of it!!!  On summer weekends, for just one summer. What a tragedy that we couldn’t all have met under such circumstances!. How many more friends we would all have to treasure in life and to commemorate in death!! That friendship was short as both households soon moved on, such are the lusty early years that blow gale winds of change, but it was a genuine friendship between people (Ben and I) who had mistakenly assumed throughout four high school years that they did not like each other.

Much more recently (this past November), Phil Wheeler passed. We were good friends from the get-go once the Catholic nuns turned their progeny over to the public school for their last four years, and became very close after high school. Both of us with National Merit Scholarship commendations, yet neither of us with degrees for several years beyond the norm, not to mention other personality quirks; we were indeed outliers in Garrett. When I was jailed in Auburn for ten weekends (DUI), I would walk to Phil’s downtown apartment upon release Sunday evening and we would play chess until dawn. The deal was he would feed me beer and drive me home if I would teach him to play better chess; one of the few things I knew more about than he. Ultimately we both completed degrees at Indiana University, Phil in physics and I in mathematics. But our friendship was not based on learning or intellect. It was something else, something so rare that I know no name for it. No doubt you too have shared the same kind of ineffable bond with someone.

Finally, Mike Zumbaugh passed, and I will be going to his visitation Monday. His passing is especially poignant because he was a neighborhood friend. In the hood. Relatively innocent, our neighborhood wasn’t a ghetto, we didn’t shoot or knife anyone, just a commonplace blue-collar Indiana working class railroad town with a significant influx from Kentucky.

Of course we did pile rocks to throw at the neighboring kids who were throwing rocks at us, and we bloodied each other’s noses, and played army, and climbed trees. And we listened to short wave radio, traded coins from our collections, shot at birds with sling-shots, and chased fireflies. And we shared Archie and Batman and Superman comic books, and looked at Playboy when one of us might have sneaked a copy from the news stand or from an older brother. And we carved initials into trees, and played basketball and dodge ball and volleyball and kickball and 99 kick the can, and watched the moon with a telescope, and saw meteors, and invented all kind of games and other activities  that have no names and that are utterly forgotten, except… Except in the thrill of remembering that old thrill that we cannot name but cannot ever, ever, never ever forget!!

So rest in peace Mike Zumbaugh and all the others… And You! If you have had or have been a friend such as these five, it will never be forgotten, it is still there in the Cosmic Soul, which Abides!!