Paul told lots of stories about his childhood and adolescence but he embroidered a lot, too, so I really have no idea how many of them are true, or to what extent they're true.
His earliest memory, he always said, was carrying clothes hangers when the family moved from a house on 2nd Street (maybe?) to 806 N. 5th Street in West Monroe, when Paul was perhaps three or four years old (1935-1936?) He and his siblings and many of his nieces and nephews lived in that house at one point or another. My grandfather, Willy, lived there until he passed away in 1984.
He always sounded aggrieved when talking about his brothers and sisters, still indignant, 40 years later, that one of his older sisters swept him off the back stoop with a broom. (From what I can tell, it's a wonder they didn't murder him in his crib.)
He had very fond memories of his paternal grandfather, John Wilson Jasper, who he recalled as a gentle soul. Paul recalled his grandfather taking him, as a very young boy, for a walk in the park, and in the hollow of tree, finding a little, boy-sized toy hatchet, which they both agreed must have been left there by a long-ago Indian boy, just for Paul. Likewise, he had a memory of riding his tricycle at his grandfather on the sidewalk out their house, pretending like he was going to run over his grandfather, and John would say "no, no, don't do that."
"Then he went inside and died of a heart attack," Paul added, still feeling guilty about it decades later.
Doris, the eldest of the five, when I told her this when I was living in Louisiana in the early 80s, said "Rubbish! That never happened." I think mostly she meant the tricycle incident (which makes sense; John died in 1939, when Paul was 7, so he probably was not still riding a tricycle at that point) but I think she doubted the hatchet story, too, although it always sounded authentic to me.
It was always clear, though, that Paul thought John was the only one who understood him, and that he was taken too soon.
When he was probably in 1st or 2nd grade, Paul was diagnosed as having amblyopia, or "lazy eye." The standard treatment at the time (late 1930s) was an eyepatch over the good eye to make the "lazy eye" work harder, strengthening the eye muscles etc. Paul had other ideas, of course. It made no sense to his six-year-old self to wear the patch on his good eye, so he wore it on his bad eye, and played pirate. With four older siblings, plus grandpartents, aunts, uncles and cousins (at various points), all living under one roof, it is no great surprise that no one noticed Paul's patch was on the wrong eye.
More about that in a subsequent posting.
Friday, October 16, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Background
He was born August 19, 1932, in West Monroe, Louisiana, youngest of the five children of William Godbey Jasper and Grace Ewell Baker Jasper. His older siblings included his brother Roy (1930-2001), Joan (1927-2002), Doris (1922-1986), and Joyce, his only surviving sibling, who will be 85 next month.
His parents grew up in East Texas; Willy was born in Ennis, which is just south of Dallas, but at some point I think the family must have moved to Marshall, or close by, since that's where Grace was from. Willy worked for a variety of newspapers in East Texas before landing at the News-Star and Morning World in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1929. Monroe was undergoing a bit of a boom at the time, being the center of what was then the world's largest natural gas field, but it didn't last.
Paul always told us that his parents never loved him, that he had a bad ear infection as an infant that resulted in a ruptured ear drum and all night crying for days on end. Doris, his sister, who was nearly 10 when Paul was born, told me this theory was all a bunch of piffle, that no father ever loved a baby more than Willy loved Paul.
Still, he was, apparently, a sickly child, and not remotely athletic, unlike his older brother, Roy, who was robust, enthusiastic, and a natural athlete. I never could tell whether he idolized his brother or was insanely jealous of him, probably a combination of both. I do know that he felt like Roy never stuck up for him when he was being bullied by other kids, which he took out on me when he felt like I wasn't sticking up for my (barely) younger brothers. And I know he resented Betty, Roy's wife, who had no time for Paul and who wasn't inclined to share Roy with his kid brother.
Paul told a story of playing croquet with Roy and the other kids one summer day. I don't know who did what exactly but in the crux was that Roy took off running and Paul, crawling through a hedge in hot pursuit, was whacked square in the forehead by a croquet ball Roy had sent tumbling back his way. Paul yelled bloody murder and started chasing Roy with the croquet mallet, only to be grabbed by Willy, dragged into the house, and spanked ("whipped," Paul insisted) thoroughly, with Grace holding him down.
The injustice of it. He was the one with a knot on his forehead the size of a grapefruit, yet he was the one being whipped, and his mother, far from defending him, was helping his ogre father by holding him down.
I think the story summed up his relationship with his family of origin. He perceived himself as unwanted, unloved, and he made up for it by ostentatiously being the black sheep, the beer swilling, cigarette sucking ne'er-do-well youngest son of a couple of strict Southern Methodists.
I'd like to say that in the end he worked through all of that but in fact he never did. He told me once that he drank (to excess, on a regular basis) so that he could "forget," although he never specified exactly what it was he was forgetting. Unfortunately, as is the case so often, it seemed to have the opposite effect; thanks to the alcohol, he was never able to work through it, and as a consequence he was never able to let go.
If I had a time machine...
His parents grew up in East Texas; Willy was born in Ennis, which is just south of Dallas, but at some point I think the family must have moved to Marshall, or close by, since that's where Grace was from. Willy worked for a variety of newspapers in East Texas before landing at the News-Star and Morning World in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1929. Monroe was undergoing a bit of a boom at the time, being the center of what was then the world's largest natural gas field, but it didn't last.
Paul always told us that his parents never loved him, that he had a bad ear infection as an infant that resulted in a ruptured ear drum and all night crying for days on end. Doris, his sister, who was nearly 10 when Paul was born, told me this theory was all a bunch of piffle, that no father ever loved a baby more than Willy loved Paul.
Still, he was, apparently, a sickly child, and not remotely athletic, unlike his older brother, Roy, who was robust, enthusiastic, and a natural athlete. I never could tell whether he idolized his brother or was insanely jealous of him, probably a combination of both. I do know that he felt like Roy never stuck up for him when he was being bullied by other kids, which he took out on me when he felt like I wasn't sticking up for my (barely) younger brothers. And I know he resented Betty, Roy's wife, who had no time for Paul and who wasn't inclined to share Roy with his kid brother.
Paul told a story of playing croquet with Roy and the other kids one summer day. I don't know who did what exactly but in the crux was that Roy took off running and Paul, crawling through a hedge in hot pursuit, was whacked square in the forehead by a croquet ball Roy had sent tumbling back his way. Paul yelled bloody murder and started chasing Roy with the croquet mallet, only to be grabbed by Willy, dragged into the house, and spanked ("whipped," Paul insisted) thoroughly, with Grace holding him down.
The injustice of it. He was the one with a knot on his forehead the size of a grapefruit, yet he was the one being whipped, and his mother, far from defending him, was helping his ogre father by holding him down.
I think the story summed up his relationship with his family of origin. He perceived himself as unwanted, unloved, and he made up for it by ostentatiously being the black sheep, the beer swilling, cigarette sucking ne'er-do-well youngest son of a couple of strict Southern Methodists.
I'd like to say that in the end he worked through all of that but in fact he never did. He told me once that he drank (to excess, on a regular basis) so that he could "forget," although he never specified exactly what it was he was forgetting. Unfortunately, as is the case so often, it seemed to have the opposite effect; thanks to the alcohol, he was never able to work through it, and as a consequence he was never able to let go.
If I had a time machine...
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Twenty Years Ago Today
I was at work when Janet called.
"Richard, something is up," she said. "Barb called to say that your dad collapsed at work and was taken to Baptist Hospital."
I told Janet I had a few things I needed to finish up, then I was heading home to find out what was going on.
Striding up the path to Emory's Fishburne parking deck, I kept thinking, "OK, this is probably nothing major. Maybe he has the flu and just got dehydrated."
My dad, Paul Jasper, was 57 years old and ever since he had turned 50 a few years before he acted like he was living on borrowed time. No great surprise, really: He had a family history of heart disease (his mother died of a heart attack at age 57), he was a four-pack a day smoker (and had been since age 13 or 14), and he was an active alcoholic.
I got home, gave Janet a hug, and sat down on the sofa in the living room of our rented house on Medlock Road in Decatur, and called Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, indicating that I was calling to check on the status of a patient. Turns out he hadn't been admitted, so they routed me to ER, and then again, and then again. Each time they did so, my heart sank a bit deeper. I knew what was coming.
"Richard," Mom said, when the call was finally routed to her. "Your daddy died today."
I started crying, and apologizing for crying, and Janet was crying and trying to reassure me while holding David or Emily, I don't remember which one now.
"We're on our way," I told Mom. "I'll try to get hold of Pete."
Steve, my middle brother, and his family lived in Ft. Walton Beach at the time so they were already in Pensacola, or on their way, by the time I talked to Mom. Pete, though, was in school in Massachusetts, where, as chance would have it, the telephone operators were on strike. I couldn't get information for Cambridge. I wound up calling a colleague at the library, Mary Alyce, to ask her if she could find a number for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Eventually, she called back with a number for the computer lab at the Kennedy School. I called, asked for Pete, and they called him to the phone.
"Oh my God," he said, when I told him what had happened.
That was October 13, 1989, twenty years ago today, and in a bit of irony I'm sure my dad would have enjoyed, it was Friday the 13th.
He had worked for the News-Journal, the daily paper in Pensacola, since December 1958, so nearly 31 years. That morning, as they did every weekday morning, Dad had dropped Mom where she worked at the C&P National Bank on Palafox Street, then headed to the News-Journal parking lot, about three blocks away. He called later in the morning to let her know that he had forgotten his wallet and he was going home to pick it up.
Around 11:30 or so, he went to the men's room, to freshen up before going out to meet Mom for lunch. He never made it. He collapsed in the men's room, where he was discoverd moments later by colleague, who called 911. Another colleague called Mom, who quickly walked over from the bank with a friend. By that time the paramedics were already working on him; she poked her head in the men's room said, "Paul, I'm here," but he didn't answer. Whether he heard we'll never know.
They took him by ambulance to Baptist, where the ER folks worked on him a while, but it was no use. He had suffered a ruptured aneurysm of the aorta and basically bled to death internally. For all I know, if he had ever been willing to go to the doctor they might have found the aneursym and fixed it and he might still be kicking along at age 77, assuming lung cancer or cirhhosis hadn't intervened by now. But he was deathly afraid of doctors, mostly because he assumed that one of them was going to tell him he'd worn out his lungs or his liver.
He never went if he could help it and so we'll never know.
* * *
Paul was a newspaperman and his father, Willy, was a newspaperman, and Willy's father, John, was a farmer and a lay preacher and a poet. For whatever reason, a good number of John's descendants seem to be pretty good with words. Willy's brother, John, was a lawyer; Paul's sister, Joyce, was a magazine publisher; his brother, Roy, and his other sisters, Doris and Joan, all at one point or another had customer-service oriented jobs that required a facility with words, and several of my first cousins have a writerly bent.
Of the 30 plus years Paul spent working for the News-Journal, 23 of them were spent as the de facto editorial page editor, a job for which he wrote (on average) five editorials per day and a couple of personal "columns" per week. Once upon a time I tried to calculate how many words he must have written, just in that guise; I'm inclined to think 1 million words is a conservative estiamte.
I figure it is time I gave him a few words back. I spent a couple of years as a newspaperman, too, following in his and my grandfather's footsteps, before I realized I really disliked "straigh" news, and that while I had a light touch with a feature I was never going to be another Bob Thomas or Lewis Grizzard. By the time Paul passed away, I was well-established as an academic librarian, a career I have enjoyed for nearly 25 years now. For a while I thought I'd put together a compendium (librarian love compendia, ya know) of his columns but I never got anywhere with that.
I guess I have been waiting to find my own words. Twenty years later I've learned enough about myself (I think, I hope, I pray) that I can make a little more sense of his life than I could when he was living it.
If this goes the way I want it to go, I will have a little more to say, every day. For today, I will conclude by saying:
He was an easy man to fall in love with, but a hard man to love.
I loved him, even so.
I did then.
I do now.
"Richard, something is up," she said. "Barb called to say that your dad collapsed at work and was taken to Baptist Hospital."
I told Janet I had a few things I needed to finish up, then I was heading home to find out what was going on.
Striding up the path to Emory's Fishburne parking deck, I kept thinking, "OK, this is probably nothing major. Maybe he has the flu and just got dehydrated."
My dad, Paul Jasper, was 57 years old and ever since he had turned 50 a few years before he acted like he was living on borrowed time. No great surprise, really: He had a family history of heart disease (his mother died of a heart attack at age 57), he was a four-pack a day smoker (and had been since age 13 or 14), and he was an active alcoholic.
I got home, gave Janet a hug, and sat down on the sofa in the living room of our rented house on Medlock Road in Decatur, and called Baptist Hospital in Pensacola, indicating that I was calling to check on the status of a patient. Turns out he hadn't been admitted, so they routed me to ER, and then again, and then again. Each time they did so, my heart sank a bit deeper. I knew what was coming.
"Richard," Mom said, when the call was finally routed to her. "Your daddy died today."
I started crying, and apologizing for crying, and Janet was crying and trying to reassure me while holding David or Emily, I don't remember which one now.
"We're on our way," I told Mom. "I'll try to get hold of Pete."
Steve, my middle brother, and his family lived in Ft. Walton Beach at the time so they were already in Pensacola, or on their way, by the time I talked to Mom. Pete, though, was in school in Massachusetts, where, as chance would have it, the telephone operators were on strike. I couldn't get information for Cambridge. I wound up calling a colleague at the library, Mary Alyce, to ask her if she could find a number for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Eventually, she called back with a number for the computer lab at the Kennedy School. I called, asked for Pete, and they called him to the phone.
"Oh my God," he said, when I told him what had happened.
That was October 13, 1989, twenty years ago today, and in a bit of irony I'm sure my dad would have enjoyed, it was Friday the 13th.
He had worked for the News-Journal, the daily paper in Pensacola, since December 1958, so nearly 31 years. That morning, as they did every weekday morning, Dad had dropped Mom where she worked at the C&P National Bank on Palafox Street, then headed to the News-Journal parking lot, about three blocks away. He called later in the morning to let her know that he had forgotten his wallet and he was going home to pick it up.
Around 11:30 or so, he went to the men's room, to freshen up before going out to meet Mom for lunch. He never made it. He collapsed in the men's room, where he was discoverd moments later by colleague, who called 911. Another colleague called Mom, who quickly walked over from the bank with a friend. By that time the paramedics were already working on him; she poked her head in the men's room said, "Paul, I'm here," but he didn't answer. Whether he heard we'll never know.
They took him by ambulance to Baptist, where the ER folks worked on him a while, but it was no use. He had suffered a ruptured aneurysm of the aorta and basically bled to death internally. For all I know, if he had ever been willing to go to the doctor they might have found the aneursym and fixed it and he might still be kicking along at age 77, assuming lung cancer or cirhhosis hadn't intervened by now. But he was deathly afraid of doctors, mostly because he assumed that one of them was going to tell him he'd worn out his lungs or his liver.
He never went if he could help it and so we'll never know.
* * *
Paul was a newspaperman and his father, Willy, was a newspaperman, and Willy's father, John, was a farmer and a lay preacher and a poet. For whatever reason, a good number of John's descendants seem to be pretty good with words. Willy's brother, John, was a lawyer; Paul's sister, Joyce, was a magazine publisher; his brother, Roy, and his other sisters, Doris and Joan, all at one point or another had customer-service oriented jobs that required a facility with words, and several of my first cousins have a writerly bent.
Of the 30 plus years Paul spent working for the News-Journal, 23 of them were spent as the de facto editorial page editor, a job for which he wrote (on average) five editorials per day and a couple of personal "columns" per week. Once upon a time I tried to calculate how many words he must have written, just in that guise; I'm inclined to think 1 million words is a conservative estiamte.
I figure it is time I gave him a few words back. I spent a couple of years as a newspaperman, too, following in his and my grandfather's footsteps, before I realized I really disliked "straigh" news, and that while I had a light touch with a feature I was never going to be another Bob Thomas or Lewis Grizzard. By the time Paul passed away, I was well-established as an academic librarian, a career I have enjoyed for nearly 25 years now. For a while I thought I'd put together a compendium (librarian love compendia, ya know) of his columns but I never got anywhere with that.
I guess I have been waiting to find my own words. Twenty years later I've learned enough about myself (I think, I hope, I pray) that I can make a little more sense of his life than I could when he was living it.
If this goes the way I want it to go, I will have a little more to say, every day. For today, I will conclude by saying:
He was an easy man to fall in love with, but a hard man to love.
I loved him, even so.
I did then.
I do now.
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