Column: Finding a friend

I don’t consider myself a big Facebook guy. But I do check in daily and occasionally discover an interesting tidbit from a “friend,” often an old newspaper chum.

Newspaper people tend to stay in contact mostly, I imagine, because the small- and medium-size papers we happily worked at in the 1970s to the late 1990s were methodically decimated by entities as innocent as Craig’s List. It took a while for the old-time business model to collapse and then it seemed to collapse overnight. We dinosaurs think back wistfully and sporadically keep in touch about the old days. Some of us are dying or losing our minds.

I assume that I have been “found” by just about anyone who has wanted to find me on Facebook. But recently. Kathie H. chimed in with an exploratory inquiry to reconnect from 60 years ago. Kathy is the oldest child of Chuck and Mary Ella, former dear friends of my late parents.

Chuck, Kathie reported, had just turned 99 and had been wondering about the whereabouts and condition of my brother and me. Kathie said Chuck had all his marbles, was still driving and living independently. Pretty impressive but I feel compelled to note that my mother nearly made it to 103, though the last two were in a nursing home that she hated night and day.

Chuck and my father, Russ, were fishing buddies and I know only a thimbleful about their adventures on the huge man-made lakes near the Missouri/Arkansas border (Table Rock and Bull Shoals). My near-total ignorance about their times together, unleashed from humdrum family responsibilities, allows me to imagine wild, half-drunken episodes with little fish caught.

Russ was the custodian of their Evinrude outboard engine, and as a grade-schooler it seemed to be the most exotic contraption I’d ever seen. On the way to the lakes, Chuck was reported to gun his Ford V-8 as they approached a small steep hill on Ballas Road to get the car briefly airborne, surely a lie that I will go to my deathbed believing as true.

Chuck, Mary Ella and my parents would occasionally go out to dinner, although back in the 1950s that was not as commonplace as today. They played bridge, which in those days was an easy rationale for week-night cocktails .

The most prominent memory elicited by Kathie’s query was of Thanksgiving dinners. They were always held at our house, with Chuck and Mary Ella (and the kids Kathie and Susie) arriving early to help with the food prep.

It was the standard Midwestern Turkey Day menu of gobbler, mashed, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce and, most important to us kids, green beans with those canned onion rings that showed up only once a year. Homemade pumpkin pie, of course, with handmade whipped cream with a touch of vanilla.

Chuck and Russ wore bow ties and we kids were on our best behavior, a concept that apparently vanished from American society around 1959. Photographs of the dinner table are indistinguishable from the famous Norman Rockwell painting.

I provided Kathie with a brief outline of my life since we last saw each other (probably at a Thanksgiving) in the late 1950s. It’s always an interesting exercise to condense your life into a few paragraphs. You obviously leave a lot of stuff out that no one cares or needs to know. The remaining stuff can seem underwhelming when you consider the decades it took to accumulate and achieve.

But then you factor in the great wild card: No one was told what kind of life to lead; you pushed ahead many times into the unknown, ricocheted here and there and, with some lucky breaks, came out O.K. I’ll take it.

Kathie was a teacher for 43 years, had four kids and buried two husbands. Susie, perhaps the cutest girl I ever laid eyes on, died a couple of years back of leukemia. She didn’t say so, but I think that Kathie’s life could have used a little more joy.

My parents moved to California when I was away at college at Northwestern. So for Thanksgiving, rather than flying to the West Coast, I would motor down to St. Louis and spend the holiday with Chuck and Mary Ella, Kathie and Susie and the youngest kid, Joey. For four years, the first thing Chuck would say upon seeing me come through the front door was, “Joey, get Jim a beer!”

I’m not a huge Facebook guy, but what is better than a surprise batch of 60-year-old memories? I can taste the green beans and onion rings right now.