The Pecan Park Eagle

At one point, we stopped ‘neath a soft street light and just hugged. An old couple (probably about my age now) passed us as we stood there. “Keep it up, young people,” the lady said. “You are now our hope for the future.”

Fifty years ago today, on another Friday, some fifty Novembers back in time, I was a 25-year-old second-year graduate school Psychiatric Social Work student at Tulane University in New Orleans. I lived adjacent to the Tulane campus on Willow Street, across the street from the old Tulane Stadium that used to host the early Sugar Bowl contests. I also shared a university-owned and managed garage apartment with another graduate student. We split the $36.00 per month rent and got by as best we could without getting too much in each others way. It wasn’t easy.

For one thing, the apartment was a small, one-bedroom, one-bath place with two single beds and poor space for books or study for even one person.

For another, it had a drafty floor that served as a portal for carbon monoxide every time the managerial house tenants moved their car in or out of the garage. We had to leave the windows up all the time to protect ourselves from the potential for asphyxiation.

Then there was “Bully”, the management’s pet bulldog. Bully patrolled the fenced back yard that separated the house and driveway fence gate from the garage and entry door to our apartment stairs.

Bully was a great property watch dog who only seemed interested in sinking his formidable teeth into all people who were not his master – and that included my roommate Doug and me. To get into the apartment without getting attacked, we learned to approach the fence gate with our door keys ready and two sticks of about a foot in length. After a little gate rattle to get his attention, in case Bully was sleeping when you arrived, you pulled out one of the sticks and held it high for his eye-widening inspection.

“Hey, Bully? Do you want this stick?”

Bully inevitably reacted with excitement. No longer barking, he would quickly re-position his body in the direction he knew you would soon throw the stick – to the deep, far-side of the back yard. And he would look back at you with all the anticipatory focus of a Hall-of-Fame bound NFL wide-out.

It worked every time. If you had good speed, and you threw the stick far enough, you could make it inside the apartment stairwell door before Bully got back. He just never figured it out. And, of course, the second stick was there to get you off the grounds again. We called those sticks our “Wile E. Coyote Acme Bulldog Escape Kit”.

At any rate, the stick strategy got me off the grounds again about 11:00 AM, CST, on Friday, November 22, 1963. It started as a typical day, one that we all most probably would have forgotten by now, had it not been for what was about to come. It was a light Friday for me. A couple of small study groups scheduled for my morning had been cancelled. All I had to is grab a quick lunch somewhere and then do a 1-5 PM at my internship base, the Out-Patient Alcoholism Clinic on Chartres Street in the French Quarter.

I was in a good mood on the morning of November 22, 1963. I even found a good parking space down on Esplanade, the northern boundary street of the quarter. I didn’t even mind the several block walk south on Chartres to the Alcoholism Clinic. It would give me a chance to work off the cheeseburger I grabbed for lunch at the little mom and pop store on Claiborne as I was driving in. I had a 1.5 hour long group session to conduct and then three individual patients to see before we went into what I hoped would be a chance to rest from academia and catch up on my baseball reading.

My thoughts walking down Chartres were scattered and frivolous. “Why am I going down here to fight alcoholism in the French Quarter?” I thought. “Sometimes that feels about as hopeful as a fireman carrying a glass of water to battle the great Chicago Fire.”

The first intrusions of reality appeared as I walked past Harry’s Bar on Chartres about 12:50 PM. Inside, I could see through the window as I passed that Harry already had the television set on. He didn’t always do that at this time of day. The words on the screen read as “A Special Report from CBS.”

“Wonder what that’s about?” I thought, as I picked up my pace, but only because I was starting to run late.

When I got to the clinic, I got the news that changed the world for all of us. Everyone, patients and staff, were huddled around our small portable radio at the reception desk. For the next hour or so, we all hung in space, waiting for the answer to everyone’s first question: Was President Kennedy alive or dead?

We got the word in waves of declining hope from Walter Cronkite – with these two final separate statements sealing our shock for the grief that was to come in buckets:

1) “We just have a report from our correspondent Dan Rather in Dallas, that he has confirmed President Kennedy is dead.“

2) “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: (reading AP flash) “President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time.” (glancing up at clock) 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.“

After that came the weekend of shock and anger, grief and tumble.

One patient showed up late for group that Friday and had to be told that JFK had been assassinated.

“Does this mean that our group session is going to be cancelled?” she asked. “I had a lot of things I needed to talk about.”

I couldn’t wait to get out of there and go home. I wanted to go back to Texas and see my girl friend and be with my family.

Another surprise awaited. And it came in layers too.

When I got to the gate, I suddenly decided that I was tired of living in fear of Bully. Bully wasn’t a monster. Whoever killed JFK was a monster.

Besides, if Bully sometimes looked like a wide receiver to me, it must be because he sees me as his quarterback. – And I never heard of a wide receiver who would turn on his QB for getting him the ball.

I threw the stick for Bully and then stepped inside the gate and waited from a squatting position. When Bully reached the stick, he picked it up, then turned and dropped it, expecting his usual chase of me to the garage apartment door. But then – when he saw me in the yard, inside the gate and calling to him, he picked up the stick again and brought it to me. After three or four more tosses, I hugged Bully and he kissed me – and we walked together to the door. We were friends forevermore after that moment.

Then I went inside and stared up at my next surprise. There was Sandy, my girl friend from UH. She had flown over from Houston to surprise me – only to learn about the death of JFK from the pilot while they were still en route.

We just hugged and cried together for the longest time. We both had been “Kennedy Kid” supporters during his 1960 campaign – and we had attended his meeting in Houston with protestant ministers over the concern of same that a vote for Kennedy was a vote for the Pope.

That night we went back to a subdued French Quarter, where Sandy and I had once shared a table and drink with jazz trumpet icon Al Hirt at his club and even once together had about a ten minute private conversation with Tennessee Williams at the Napoleon House bar on Chartres. As a musician and marvelous student of history and literature, Sandy could talk to anybody and leave them with something they had been missing, even if they were already big and famous.

Friday night, 11/22/63, was the most somber, sober night in my experience with the French Quarter. Oh yeah, there were plenty of falling down drunks that bleak wet evening, but those were the same folks who were going to do it, anyway. They didn’t need the death of a beloved American president to get there.

After dinner, we walked around the Quarter hand in hand for what seemed like forever. We needed the quiet and the closeness. And we got it even more when a light rain started up, producing enough water to make the streets glisten and reflective of various colored lights from the glow of open Quarter bars and businesses. Bluesy horns danced through the night air, hitting notes and melodies that came close to matching the depth of this day’s spiritual abyss.

At one point, we stopped ‘neath a soft street light and just hugged. An old couple (probably about my age now) passed us as we stood there. “Keep it up, young people,” the lady said. “You are now our hope for the future.”

Forgive me. I can’t go to that fatal day – and that time through the funeral – without feeling sad again.

After Sandy flew back to Houston, I drove home to Texas through the night to be there in time for the funeral on television. I picked up a radio station in Baton Rouge that played one song, over and over again, for as long as I could get it through Beaumont. It was Bob Dylan’s masterpiece and my soundtrack for what happened to America, fifty years ago today – in about three hours from this writing:

How many roads most a man walk down
Before you call him a man ?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand ?
Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea ?
Yes, how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free ?
Yes, how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky ?
Yes, how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry ?
Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

~ Bob Dylan