The Pecan Park Eagle

Rob Sangster: Gentleman. Scholar. Lawyer. Traveler. Adventurer. Activist. Writer. Admirer of Women. Good Friend. And Damn Good Citizen of the World.

It is October 1955, the autumn of my senior year at St. Thomas High School in Houston with the Class of 1956. I am sitting in Religion to the left of my left-handed buddy, Rob Sangster, and I can’t help noting that he is writing something down with apparent fervor. Thinking that Rob may have picked up on something from Father Allnoch’s lecture that I missed, I am compelled to look over at his paper and check what he has jotted down in such clearly distinctive cursive script:

“Chairman of the Bored” is Rob’s quiet and quick message. It makes me smile. I have to give nodding approval to Rob for seizing the thought into consciousness ahead of me and placing it in written form for a fairly immediate audience response, even if is just me, but that’s OK. Even if Rob and I do not cruise for girls or play ball together, we seem to have a friendship that isn’t necessarily measured by mutual tail-gunning experience in flights over Nazi Germany, but by the empathy chords and hunger yearnings for the “deeper meaning” of issues that are starting to crash into our adolescent encounters with life.

Rob is my seat mate on a CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) bus trip to Galveston just prior to our junior year. Rob helps me work through the disappointment I am feeling over the loss of my first girl friend. Rob helps me see the deeper meaning of my sorrow. “Bill,” Robs advises, “maybe this sort of thing wouldn’t happen to you if you simply stopped robbing the cradle for new girl friends. As a guy whose about start his junior year, you are way too old to be dating freshmen girls the next time.”

I take Rob’s advice, but continue to run into broken hearts for quite a while. Rob and I then graduate in 1956 and we lose complete track of each other until 2011, when, because of the Internet, we catch up with each other again through an electronic digital reunion.

Wow! What this man has done with the 56 years that have now passed since the STHS Class of 1956 graduated is phenomenal. In short, he seems to have fulfilled every adventure he ever dreamed of having as a kid – and others that only come into view for those who seek the open doors of new opportunity and then discover what rests beyond the walls and over the mountains and across the oceans without somewhere along the way selling out to the usual stopping points of conformity and complacency. Most people halt in the safety-first comfort zone before they ever get to see much of life at all. Not Rob Sangster. His life has been an odyssey.

I can’t pretend to relate all the details of Rob Sangster’s adventure. That’s his job and right to do so anyway. All I can do is tell you what I’ve learned for the sake of making my point. The guy is alive and healthy, and looking very much like that photo above today, because of both his genes and his life style commitment to making his life all that life can be. And, like me, he’s 72 years old, but swimming in a lifestyle that floats like the Fountain of Youth.

In 1956, when I was registering at UH and getting ready to work my way through college, Rob Sangster was off to Stanford in Palo Alto. After Stanford, Rob then graduated from law school at UCLA, I think. He practiced law for a while, but that wasn’t enough to stave off his need to avoid the “chairman of the bored” experience in our adult world’s real-time portion of life.

Rob married somewhere in there, but I know nothing of his marriage experience, nor does it matter to the point of this column. Today I know that he has a girl friend and that he now lives in Nova Scotia.

Sangster left the law field to see the world, moving his way literally over the tallest mountains and deepest oceans, traveling or living in over 100 countries at one time or another, writing a newspaper column and becoming a professional travel/adventure writer. Check out this website page for further information on this phase of his life:

http://www.transitionsabroad.com/information/media/rob_sangster_bio.shtml

Today Rob Sangster is working on his first novel. We understand that it will be a story in which the survival of the world hangs in the balance. And yep. I get it. – Doesn’t sound like “chairman of the bored” to me.

Rob Sangster is one of those rare people who understood early that his life experience would hinge on his ability to weigh the risks-rewards of adventure and proceed from there with a willingness to take responsibility for the consequences of his actions – and inactions. While some of his old buddies were still struggling with questions like “how old should my girl friend be?”, Rob already had taken a handle on the reality that none of us are entitled to anything we aren’t willing to work for.

Rob’s grasp of the lesson that life is not about entitlements, but about our willingness to take responsibility for what we do, and fail to do came through loud and clear in a private note he e-mailed me yesterday in response to my column, “The Ghost Rules of Eagle Field.” You will get it too – just as soon as you see it. Here’s what Rob Sangster wrote to me about his own first childhood baseball experience:

“On my first big-time at bat the first three pitches were called balls. Then I watched  three in a roll called strikes. I vowed never to let that happen again – in life as well.” – Rob Sangster.

Thanks for the great explanation of entitlements as balls taken while waiting on a pass to first base and personal responsibility as the act of not taking three strikes, but risking some cuts at the ball in the game of life. If I’ve got a kid on his way up, or a grown up kid who is still looking for the lesson, I want him or her to read the wisdom of Rob Sangster at least daily until he or she gets it too.

Nothing in life that’s worthwhile comes free. And it isn’t bad luck that gets us, or the absence of opportunity in America that holds us back. It’s our willingness to settle into a comfort zone with whatever is safe and familiar – and our refusal to take a swing with all it takes at something we feel passionately about. Fulfillment does not come knocking on the door like an entitlement check. Never happens.

Thank you, Rob Sangster, too, for reminding us of the words we also heard early and often from the late and wonderful Bobby Bragan:“You can’t hit the ball with the bat on your shoulder, you got to stand in there and swing!”

Bobby Bragan and Rob Sangster are both icons of passion-fulfilled in their own unique ways. Neither expected reward to come their way as a free pass to first base. Both reached for everything possible from the parts of life they each felt passionately about. And both are exemplars of how to live life to the fullest.

Thanks for rolling out that batting metaphor, Rob. As you can see here, it made my day.