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.