Uncle Don

I was talking with my niece on the telephone the other day and she told me she had read my latest post and enjoyed reading something about her uncle Don.  She told me that she really didn’t know much of anything about him as the family tended to say only he was a great guy and that he had died young.  As I thought about what she was saying, I could understand why she had heard so little about Don. 

Don died of cancer at age 22.  My wife’s family is not one that sits around and does a lot of reminiscing.  Losing a child has to be unimaginably hard and I doubt I would want to stir up all the feelings, emotions and pain that accompany such a loss.

So I told my niece I would try to recount some of my memories of her uncle and hopefully provide a glimpse of his personality and character for her and the other nieces and nephews who never had the chance to know him.

I first became aware of Don when I was in eighth grade playing quarterback for the Annunciation Bulldogs and he was playing defensive end for Saint Agnes.  Every time I was setting up to pass, this big, very fast, blond kid was in my face.  All day long I asked my linemen to try to get in this guy’s way and all day long they couldn’t do it.  We ended up tying that game but even though I didn’t know his name I would remember him.

The next time I ran into him was that summer when we both were running full tilt through a cemetery at about 1:00am.  How we got there takes a little back-story.

One of the summer activities some of the youth of Green Bay participated in was to pitch a tent in someone’s backyard and sleep out.  The sleeping out part quickly lost its thrill but the part where we waited for the lights to go out and then snuck out for a night of wandering the town never got dull.

On this particular night, a couple of friends and I waited for the house to go dark and then headed out to the Valley Outdoor Theatre to take in a movie.  We sat out by the back fence, turned up a few of the speakers in open parking spots and sat back to watch a movie or two.  We noticed another group of three or four kids sitting about 30 yards away apparently enjoying a similar night out.

Once in a while, the Green Bay Police got bored and would come swooping along the back fence and flush us out like a flock of quail.  That night they surprised us with their spot lights and we took off running at a speed you can achieve only with a cop on your tail.

We ran across Military Avenue and into Fort Howard Cemetery.  As we entered the cemetery we headed in different directions and I found myself trailing behind a big kid.  The two of us distanced ourselves from the pack and when we thought the cops had given up we stopped and caught our breath.  We started to walk back to find our friends and realized we recognized each other from the football game we had played a few months before.  We hit it off right away and by the time Don headed back to his neighborhood, I felt I had made a new friend.

The following year I went off to the Catholic high school and Don went to the public school.  We hung out together some during that year and discovered a mutual love for soul music.  He had come to soul through his older brothers and I had spent many an hour searching the cutout bins of H.G. Prange and Shopko to find Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Irma Thomas and Sam and Dave records.  We bonded over this music as most of our friends were listening to music that was being played on the radio and we were listening to music coming out of Muscle Shoals, Alabama and Detroit.  I would go to his house and listen to music up in his room until his father would come home and quietly, but authoritatively tell us to turn it down.

The next year my Catholic education finally came to an end and I started my sophomore year at Green Bay West.  Don was a popular kid without being the type that turns your stomach.  In other words, he was popular with the kids first and the faculty and coaches second.  He was intelligent, good looking, charming and possessed a good sense of humor.  He also had a bit of the devil in him that made it fun to hang with him.  The first time I drove a car was when he pulled up next to me on a Green Bay street and asked me if I wanted to drive.  We were both 15 at the time and I jumped at the chance.  Don had decided to take one of the family cars we called the “swamp wagon” (his older brother had reputedly driven it into a swamp and it had retained a bit of the smell) for a ride and had come looking for me for company.

Don loved to climb things.  I watched him climb railroad bridges, flagpoles, building exteriors and numerous trees.  One time I walked outside into the front yard of Fidler’s, a famous Green Bay beer bar, looking for Don.  After a period of time, I spotted him about 70 yards away sitting like the Buddha in the very top branches of a tall tree.  I could see the grin on his face as he, apparently, was enjoying the view.

That brings us to his smile.  He had the best shit-eating grin I have ever seen.  It would light up his face.  To his friends it radiated amusement and seemed to ask “what crazy thing is going to happen next.” It was a nice mix of bemusement and expectation.  Authority figures sometimes saw it differently.  I know of at least two incidents when he was detained because of his smile.  I witnessed it happen at a goofy gathering of teenagers that thoroughly spooked the Green Bay police.  Don was just standing there taking in the scene when a cop asked him what he was grinning at.  He was then ushered into the paddy wagon and given a free ride downtown.

The smile in early development

Don had, what I like to call, a great sense of silliness.  I think that is one of the things he appreciated in me as a friend.  Our junior year we had a German class together.  Our teacher was a mild mannered nebbish who never was able to get across to his students the value of learning another language and the ancillary benefits that go with learning about another culture.  Maybe, given his students, that was an impossible task, but nonetheless we were in the class to fill a college entrance requirement and were bored beyond tears.

Don had whiled away a couple of class periods dividing the class into two competing countries.  The back third of the class was the country of Verkiam and the rest of the class were residents of Weinerville.  He drew detailed, funny maps of Verkiam and Weinerville.  At lunch one day he informed the residents of Verkiam that we were going to invade Weinerville later that day and that we were to prepare by making as many paper airplanes as we possibly could before class.

In class upon Don’s signal, the residents of Verkiam all leapt to their feet and began an aerial bombardment of Weinerville.  Our teacher stumbled out into the hallway to swallow a nitro glycerin pill and the onslaught continued until we had fired all of our paper airplanes.  For those of us who knew any German history, the irony of the invasion was sweet.  The leader of this invasion was the guy we elected our student class president.

In our sophomore year Don made the varsity football team.  He was the only sophomore on the team and by the end of the season he was getting playing time.  This was a team that went undefeated and sent four starters to Nebraska where they played key roles in winning a national championship in the early seventies.

Don was a big, fast, running back who combined power and speed.  He quickly became the top back in the conference and was recruited by most of the football powers in the country.  He once showed me a box he kept in the bottom of his locker at school that was filled with letters from universities asking him if he would like to join their football team.  He ultimately chose to play for Murray Warmath and the University of Minnesota.

Don was a great athlete, but he also was an intelligent young man who was not immune to the upheaval and turmoil of those times.  He was very much aware of the civil rights movement and the anti war movement that was growing into a youth movement.  He told me that on his visit to Notre Dame the football coach who was showing him around campus pointed to a hill and told Don he wouldn’t have to worry about “hippies” as there was only a handful that gathered at the top of the hill.  Don’s reaction was that he wished he could escape the football coach and go talk to the people on the hill.

As a freshman at Minnesota, when peace had become a universal desire of the nation’s young people, he was disturbed by the violence of big time football and the behavior of some of his teammates.  He told me of going to parties with other football players where loaded guns were being passed around and about certain teammates he considered dangerous, and not just on the football field.   Both he and his roommate, a quarterback from Colorado, began to sour on the experience.  After his freshman year he left Minnesota.

The next semester he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay and it wasn’t long thereafter he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.  I remember the night he told me of the diagnosis.  It just didn’t seem possible.  Here was a guy that radiated health and strength.  When you are 21 years old, you feel pretty indestructible.  You can understand someone dying in an accident but good health is taken for granted at that age.  It was very hard for me, and I think most of his friends, to grasp what he was experiencing.  Over the next few years, I would wonder if that twitch or ache I was feeling, was something more serious than I might have thought before Don got sick.  Other friends told me they experienced the same thing.

Don had some surgery, radiation and chemotherapy and his cancer went into remission.  It was during this time that he bought a Volkswagen bug and he, I and a friend decided to go to Mexico.  Gary and I looked at the trip as the beginning of an adventure.  We packed up our meager possessions and planned to move to San Francisco at the end of our trip.  Don’s perspective was naturally different.  He was fully aware that this could be his only opportunity to hit the road and he was determined to get everything he could out of the trip.  Our different perspectives sometimes lead to minor conflicts but by and large we all got along well on the trip.

I have often thought that something dark was following us on that trip.  Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.   But something always seemed to be out there as we almost slid off a mountain in Arkansas, lost our steering in the mountains of Big Bend National Park, and finally when we were smashed into by a bus on a Mexican highway out side of the city of Irapuato. 

Don hiking in Big Bend National Park

We roamed around Mexico until our money was nearly gone and then headed up the coast of California.  Gary and I started to look for an apartment and after about a week Don left to go back to Wisconsin to see his doctor and have further tests.  A couple of weeks after he had returned to Green Bay we received a letter from Don telling us that the cancer had spread throughout his body and he was going to have to endure another round of treatment.  I knew then that the chances of my friend dying were much greater than his survival.  I still remember reading his letter and trying to come to grips with the reality.  He died several months later.

As I think of your uncle, I think of an infectious personality, a keen intelligence and so much potential lost.  He really had a combination of qualities that makes me wonder how he would have put his talents to work in this world.  It was a stark lesson that life is not often fair and we need to cherish it while we can. It’s too bad you never got to meet him.  You would have liked him a lot.