What's in a Name?

By Kent “Max” Stolt

If not fate itself, then it was timing and simple geography that brought us together in high school. More specifically, Wauwatosa West High School. The Trojans of ‘Tosa West. Class of ’79. From that class of over four-hundred, we came to form our own circle of friends, partying and laughing our way vigorously into young adulthood, with a little help from Ted Nugent, Lynyrd Skynyrd and plenty of Old Style beer. Thankfully we survived those comically heady days, and in so doing established for ourselves some of the best memories and lasting bonds of our lives.

And what a memorable cast of characters. There was Skoj and Colonel Don, Tief and Willi, Hash and Baby Jeff, Jake and Fingers. There was Rob, Craig and Jim. And Joel and Avery—for whatever reason not everyone got nicknames. On the girls’ side there was Chris, Meg and Joan, Rachel and Kristin (nicknamed Schmugli, though I can’t remember how she got that one).

As for those nicknames, that was no bullshit secret club thing. None of us ever set out to create or assign nicknames for ourselves. Hell, I don’t even remember the stories behind a lot of those monikers anymore. They just happened. And somehow over the years they stuck. Sort of like our friendships.

I got my nickname the first day of sophomore year, and I have a German teacher to thank for it. His name was Gediminas Marchertas (That didn’t sound too German to us.) and as long as we were in his class he wanted us to call each other only by our corresponding German names. Logical enough. Only problem was, there is no German name for Kent. So, what was I supposed to do?

I found out soon enough. Gediminas walked over to his desk, pulled a sheet of paper from his briefcase, and presented me with a mimeographed list of first names—in alphabetical order—and told me I had to pick one. (Now that sounded very German.)

All eyes were on me now, or so it seemed, as I scanned the column of names. Ernst…Hans…Markus…Max. Hmm. That one sounded kind of…I don’t know, fun. Might be worth a laugh at least.

“Max,” I said, throwing caution to the wind.

Gediminas stared me down like a grim magistrate for a few seconds. Finally, he nodded. “Very well, then. Max.”

He took back his list. I let out a slow breath. And we all went back to doing whatever it was we used to do in those classes.

Well…little did I know.

From that moment on, my friends, many of whom were in German class that day, decided to go exclusively with my chosen name. No matter when or where. They greeted me as Max. They introduced me as Max. They asked for Max when they called my parents’ house. Within a matter of days, my new identity was firmly and irrevocably established.

Not that I had a problem with it. On the contrary, from the beginning I thought it was cool having my friends call me Max. Why? For starters, it’s a distinctive name: short and simple, strong and direct. It grabs one’s attention, but does so without being overbearing or pretentious. I’m guessing that’s why a lot of dogs are named Max.

There’s a reason why people who get nicknames tend to get them early in life – there’s a hint of playful innocence to them. Unless, of course, your nickname is “Psycho” or “Mad Dog.” Then all bets are off. But more to the point with me, Max was the perfect sobriquet because it fit in so well with the humor and camaraderie we all felt; part of the high school code of not taking life too seriously. The real-world shit would come later.

The nickname wasn’t some silly alter-ego thing, either. I didn’t act or think of myself any differently now that I had a new calling. I never went into “Max” mode. It’s what everybody called me, and soon enough it seemed perfectly natural, almost logical. So much so that after a while I didn’t even notice it anymore.

Then off to college we went. Here was higher education in every sense, where opportunities flourished and we could start getting more serious about life – well, a little more maybe. Friends became roommates and constraints were tested a little more. Through it all, those friends and those nicknames remained reliable companions. Even more so in the years after college, it was good to know a few precious things could, more or less, stay the same. That’s the real story here.

Our high school days are long gone now, but it’s still fun whenever we get together and get around to retelling a few of our stories. And we still have our nicknames. Couldn’t shake them if we tried. I daresay any of us today would damn near choke if we had to call one another by our ‘real’ names. Bill? Scott? Kent? No way. For us, at least, we’ll always be Willi, Skoj and Tief. And Max.

We wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

A Meaningful Part - The Life Story of Clarence Stolt - Foreword (revised)

 

“Let it be said,

When I am dead,

He was a meaningful part of the whole.”

                                        A quote (source unknown) found in Clarence’s journal – 1966

 

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

My father was fifty-nine-years-old when he died from hypernephroma, or renal cell carcinoma, widely regarded as the most common type of kidney cancer. I remember how that age seemed so ‘old’ to me back in 1976 when he quietly passed away. I was just a teenager then, still emerging from protected childhood but hardly a fully appreciative adult either. Now I’ve seen plenty of my own years go by and I have crossed over the fifty-year mark (and then some) myself, and somewhere in all that my attitude towards fifty-nine went from old to mature to prime of life. Now it hardly seems fair that his life was cut short the way it was. Of course, this is one of the more slippery tricks time plays on us all. And just as easily as time slips by, so too does the stories and details of a person’s life. They fade and fade until finally they disappear altogether.

Perhaps the biggest regret I have about my father’s life, and death, is that I never had the chance to sit down and talk with him man to man about his experiences: the anecdotes, the lessons learned, the hopes, fears and disappointments he must have carried to the very end as he faced up to his own mortality.  What more might I have learned about him from such a conversation? Maybe more selfishly, what might I have learned about my own life? It is in those fleeting, daydream sort of moments that I find myself wanting to be re-introduced to the man who once loomed so large over a young boy’s world.

I remember him fondly, if vaguely, and can rely on memory enough to say with confidence that he was a good man and upstanding father. No dark mysteries there. But still, what of the many facts and circumstances that once made up so much of that life? Naturally, if not sadly, many of those bits and pieces are now gone forever; lost to history, as they say. (Not that he didn’t leave any written record behind. Surviving journals and family narratives were an invaluable source for much of what follows.)

It was for these reasons I decided to dig a little deeper into the past – his and mine – to record and preserve what I could. This before any more details of the man fade away. I owe him that.

I’ll start with one distinct memory I do have: I can still hear him in the basement of our home at night, clattering away on his trusty old Remington typewriter, the keys firing off in spurts so rapidly it sounded like a tiny motor going through its paces down there. I didn’t know then what he was writing or who he was writing to, but when he was on a roll it was almost comforting to listen to it. And so it is with that enduring sound in mind that I now start tapping on my computer keyboard what I have come to know to be the life story of my father, Clarence Stolt.

 

 

 

 

Kent Francis Stolt

April, 2012

 

 

Where Do You Go to Get Away?

In the mind of a writer places can tell a lot about people. In the mind of someone needing fresh direction or a little escape from it all, the place one chooses to go can say a lot as well. The place I go when I need to get away is a town in Wisconsin named Black River Falls. I go there when I can, which is to say not that often, maybe two times a year if I’m lucky.  Yet the older I get, the more meaningful it is every time I do get in my car and “head on up to Black River.” When I go to visit family living in town, I always come back feeling a little more sure of myself and very sure of my heritage and good fortune. Might that make it a sort of sacred place for me?

We’ll get back to that.

       For the record, Black River Falls is located in the west central part of Wisconsin. It serves as the county seat of Jackson County and tallied an official population of 3,622 according to the 2010 census. While there are two other rivers named Black flowing elsewhere in the United States, there isn’t another town called Black River Falls anywhere else in the country, or the world, for that matter. So I guess that qualifies it as a unique place right there, right?

Originally named “La Riviere Noire” or “The Black River” by French explorers in 1659, the river’s dark waters gave name to a trading outpost that was eventually incorporated into a village in 1866. By 1883 Black River Falls had grown to become a town of sawmills sending fresh-cut timber downstream for processing and the construction needs of a rapidly growing nation. (But with prosperity came peril, and in October of 1911, following days of uncommonly torrential rains, that same river rose up and went on a flooding rampage that nearly wiped out the town. Black Friday they called it.)

On a lighter note, according to the official town website the list of notable people born in Black River Falls include major league baseball players Ernie Rudolph and Phil Haugstad Rudolph pitched in seven games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945 and Haugstad pitched sparingly for the Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds from 1947 to 1952. There were legitimate heroes, too, like United States Marine and Congressional Medal of Honor winner Mitchell Red Cloud Jr., who died in action in Korea in 1950.

       Not that any of that brief history lesson has a damn thing to do with my story, except for the fact that my mother, Carol Stolt (Nee Thompson), was born on a small farm on the outskirts of Black River Falls in June of 1922. As for me, I was born and raised in Milwaukee some years later, so I never once called Black River Falls home. Yet for as long as I can remember, the times spent up there with aunts, uncles and cousins, the many days and nights spent swimming, fishing, playing cards, anything that lent itself to sharing a good laugh. Some of the best times and best memories I will ever have.

       So really this is more about family than it is about the town itself, though in my mind the two always seemed to fit so well together. The heritage of my mother’s family, and the majority of the townsfolk, is Norwegian - hardy people who are steady-working, slow to anger and quick to laugh at themselves.

I like that.                                                                                          

       When I’m in Black River Falls I flash back now and then to some of the times we, as an extended family, have shared over the years. Too many to count.  There were weddings, vacations, sleepovers and holidays. I think of my dad’s old home movies showing Christmas Eves long ago when we all gathered in the cramped but cozy quarters of my grandmother’s house on Fillmore Street. For a few years in the mid-sixties us cousins put on our own little Nativity play for the grown-ups, complete with homemade costumes, painfully bright lights for the home movies, and a bale of straw fresh from the Johnson’s farm for the manger. Nobody would ever think of doing that these days. Probably just as well.

       But time moves on, and nowadays any trip to Black River Falls requires my stopping out at the grounds of Little Norway Lutheran Church where my mother was laid to rest in 2011. Little Norway lies at a quiet crossroads in the midst of farmland and a stretch of woods a few miles west of town. The whitewashed building with its grand steeple was built in 1873, and in the church yard are cracked and weathered tombstones etched in Norwegian to prove it. I enjoy going out there by myself and walking in the yard, then down the patchwork-paved country road next to it. I think it’s the stillness and the quiet out there that impresses me. In the words of Henry David Thoreau, out there “my thoughts are my company.” It’s the perfect spot for me to take stock of things, do a little self-inventory of past and present. I’d like to think Thoreau would have found this an agreeable place too.

This town means a lot of things to me. It becomes a source of pride and wonderful memories whenever I drive across the bridge over the Black River and see Main Street. I trust it will be like that again the next time I return.

The dictionary definition of the word “sacred” includes the phrases “highly valued and important” and “entitled to reverence and respect.” Well, when it comes to the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, I guess that covers it just fine for me. 

So if you get a chance, take a minute from your busy day to think about wherever it is you go when you really need to get away and unwind, to rethink things or recharge your batteries. It could be a backyard, a park, a town or city where you grew up. It could be a church or even a favorite watering hole, for that matter. It could be from the past or in the present. Whatever does it for you is good enough; no explanations necessary. Just appreciate the feeling you get when you think about it and don't ever let that go.

                                                                   ---

 

Last Call

In my lifetime I’ve known two people who took their own life. Two good and honorable men who, at either their darkest or most liberating of moments, decided they had had enough of this world and chose to leave it all behind. Now, I never cared to do any statistical research on the subject, but I daresay this puts me in a regrettably exclusive club. Suicide is one of the last taboos in our enlightened world and happens more than we realize, just not to someone we know. Let alone two people.

One was a childhood friend who lived across the street when I was growing up. It wasn’t until years later, long after I lost touch with him, that I heard he was found dead in his basement, leaving behind a young, though apparently estranged wife. That’s really all I know there.

The other was one of the funniest and most innately intelligent men I’ve ever known. He and I came to be good buddies when I was a writing student living in Chicago. That came to an end in the early morning hours of April 4, 1989, a Tuesday, when he was found lying in the alley outside his apartment with the gun still in his hand. Some said later he had tried to make it look like a burglary attempt gone bad. All I know is that I had stopped over to see him only two nights earlier and we went out to get something to eat; nothing at all seemed out of the ordinary. He was thirty-six-years-old.

Why bring this up now?

Sooner or later – if we’re honest with ourselves – we all go through times, long or fleeting, when we feel lost in our purpose. While I’ve never been in crisis to the point of contemplating suicide for even a moment, there have been times when I felt discouraged and uncertain enough about my professional future, and I’ll leave it at that.

There’s an old adage that says you first must lose yourself before you can find your true self, the real you. Thinking back to these two lost friends, especially my Chicago buddy, I’m reminded of the power of this proverb. The good news people will tell you that everyone finds their way again. The bad news folks will say…ain’t necessarily so.

 

Back in 1984, after graduating from college, I didn’t have a damn clue what to do next so I moved down to Chicago, thinking possibly about Graduate School and definitely about the chance to see what it would be like living in such a famed city. Needing work quickly I took a job as a busboy at a health and fitness club that happened to serve its membership with a fully-stocked bar and restaurant. Soon enough I got the chance to do some bartending, and that’s when Jim Vavrinchik came into the picture. Head bartender at the aforementioned Lakeshore Athletic Club, he became my de facto boss.

 I can’t say we became friends right away. Like I said, he was my boss. He was also a first-rate bartender who could be a gracious gentleman or a no-nonsense presence, depending on the customers and situation at hand. One night I was closing up the bar and the phone rang. It was Jim. My first thought was that he was calling to remind me to do something or other, when in fact he was inviting me to join him after work for a beer at a neighborhood watering hole called Quenchers. That turned out to be a fateful night for me. In time I met some of his friends and started to feel more at home in Chicago. But I was just as grateful to spend late nights sitting side by side with him at Quenchers or some other such tavern.

Looking back on it now, there was always a sense about him that he was living more for today than tomorrow. He was overweight. He chain-smoked. And he could outdrink anybody all night long if and when he wanted to. (I know for a fact that when you went out drinking with Jim Vavrinchik you never ended the night early.) He never talked about his past, and I never asked – probably one of the things he liked best about me. We never talked about current events or politics or women. No, our conversation lent itself more to baseball, old Brando movies and whatever other bullshit popped into our heads at two in the morning. And I loved it.

He even taught me the words to the theme song of “Have Gun, Will Travel,” a TV Western from the early Sixties that was a favorite memory of his youth. At the end of a particularly “relaxing” night, I’d sit in my car outside his apartment, waiting for Jim to get out, but I knew what was coming. He’d start singing quietly and before long I’d be joining in a terrible two-part harmony:

“Paladin, Paladin where do you roam?

Paladin, Paladin far, far from home.

 

‘Have Gun, Will Travel’ reads the card of a man…

A knight without armor in a savage land.

 

His fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind…

A soldier of fortune is the man called Paladin.”

 

 

(Maybe it doesn’t sound funny now, but…well, you had to be there.)

 

Jim never married - his preference and lifestyle wouldn’t allow it. But it wasn’t until after his death that I learned he had a young daughter living with her mother in New Orleans. Maybe therein was a reason for his ultimate decision, but…who the hell knows? I heard, too, that he had been enrolled in a nursing training program at the time but quietly dropped out without telling a soul. One of the sadder aspects of the whole thing was that Jim did have so many friends, any one of whom would have done anything to help him out.

But, as they say, that’s all in the past now – twenty-seven years ago as I write this. When enough time goes by, so does much of the sadness. But not the mystery.

Still, it’s a fanciful thought that I could sit down at a nearly empty bar late at night and have another beer or two with Jim now. It would be fun to reminisce and do some catching up, that’s for sure. I’d want to have a serious conversation with him about our younger selves and the hopes and expectations we secretly carried with us. But I know we’d just end up bullshitting like we used to do –  probably minus the singing this time.

When I think of Jim these days I am reminded that deep inside we all have a bit of a restless soul that longs for something more. And while I've always been leery of writing a tribute to him and having it turn into some maudlin, clichéd sermon about overcoming life's tough turns - no way he would have wanted that - it is impossible for me to tell this little tale without acknowledging that I, too, have had my own private fears and doubts to fight. And that’s okay. When it comes to that we’re all in good company.

 

 

 

 

 

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.”

-          Henry David Thoreau

 

 

                                                                                                  

 

Chicago, 1986

 
 

“Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves.”

-          Henry David Thoreau

 

 

 

 

And the More I Write...

Due to the overwhelming response to my last post about favorite writing quotes (Okay, there was hardly any response at all, but such is the blogging life, and this, dear reader, is where a little self-indulgent imagination comes in handy.), I thought I'd put down a few more quotes, for my sake if no one else's. Words and wisdom from renowned writers can go a long way in teaching, inspiring and even at times comforting the likes of us lesser but well-intended scribes. So, with that in mind, here are some more I found of value:

10)  "The end of the story is always found in the beginning."    - William Sloane

 9)  "And I was sardonically amused at those who referred to writing as if it were an act of              supreme inspiration. Writing is fiendishly hard work."               - James Michener

8)  "In my own experience, nothing is harder for the developing writer than overcoming his anxiety that he is fooling himself and cheating or embarrassing his family and friends. To most people, even those who don't read much, there is something special and vaguely magical about writing, and it is not easy for them to believe that someone they know - someone quite ordinary in many respects - can really do it."
                                                                                                       - John Gardner

7) "Words have a great, great power to move us. After everything is said and done, it's the words we're listening to on television and in movies the whole time - the cadence of words, the truth of words. Words have magical power."
                                                                                                      - David Mamet

6) "I see but one rule: to be clear."                                                - Stendhal

5)  "Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot."                                                            - Stephen King

4) "Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), 'Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?' chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death."
                                                                                                      - Steven Pressfield

3) "People can see straight through storytelling that is false, staged or cynical. It has to come from the heart, not just the head."          
                                                                                                      - Richard Branson

2) "If a story is in you, it has to come out."                                  - William Faulkner

1) "Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."                                                                                            - Tim O'Brien

  

I Write, Therefore... I Quote

What makes a quote really good? More than good, what makes it memorable, powerful, even magical?

Simply answered, the curse and the beauty of words lie in the eye of the beholder.

How many books have you opened and the first thing you see before you get to page one is a short quote or two. There’s even a special word for them in literary circles. For what it’s worth, they’re called epigraphs. Some are intriguing and set the table for the main course to come. Others, like an unknown poem or ancient text, can be so vague and mystifying as to be next to meaningless. Am I supposed to be impressed? Am I really supposed to know what that means?

On the other hand, when someone says something that strikes deep and strikes a nerve, there’s nothing better.

I have always enjoyed a clever quote, a few choice words once spoken or written that, for whatever reason, reveal a spark of uncommon wit and wisdom that taps into my own truth. More than once I have used what I considered a good quote to punch up a short piece of my own writing. Like this:

“Good writing consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.” -- James Michener

The right quote operates on two levels. At first reading, it makes its point, plain and simple. At least it better. But then there’s just a moment where your mind flits back to what it just read and says, ‘Hmm. I like that. That works.’ It’s clever, but it’s true.’ And following the idea of author Stephen King that writing is refined thinking, well, why not borrow someone else’s thinking and add it to the mix? Why not plug in a thought or two from some of the masters of the craft to build up your own writing when you need it.

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I collect quotes. Touching on all sorts of topics. I write them down in a notebook dedicated to just that purpose, and I would suggest everyone do the same. Whenever I come across a quote that makes me pause and speaks to me, I write it down. Gathered together in one place like that, they’re a wonderful touchstone of inspiration and guidance whenever good things try to run and hide — and sooner or later they always do.

I do my best work with words (as opposed to, say, drywall or computer programs), so many of my favorite quotes reflect, as you can see, on the craft of writing. With that in mind, and with a respectful nod to Rene Descartes’ famous meditation, “I think, therefore I am,” I offer a few more of my top iterations by writers on writing to help guide and prompt the pursuit of my craft. I write, therefore…

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“Writing is easy. It’s the words that are hard.” — Mark Twain

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”- Benjamin Franklin

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” — Ernest Hemingway

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” — Mark Twain

“The first draft of anything is shit.” — Ernest Hemingway

“God gives you the best plots.” — Norman Mailer

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.” — Truman Capote

“If a story is in you, it has to come out” — William Faulkner

Twisting Fiction into Fact

I was going through boxes of old magazines and scrapbooks in the basement of my parent’s house, sorting and sifting through parts of their past, when I first came across a peculiar little article. More specifically, it was a short, untitled sidebar piece clipped out of a magazine and taped to a sheet of heavy paper. From the masthead I saw that it was from the August 16, 1964, issue of Newsweek magazine.
 

 

A list of curious coincidences on the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy was making the office duplicating machines hum in New York last week. Under the title ‘Strange as It Sounds,’ the synchronism read:

 

-          Both Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy were concerned with the issue of civil rights.

-          Lincoln was elected in 1860, Kennedy in 1960.

-          Both Presidents were assassinated on a Friday and both in the presence of their wives.

-          Both Presidents were shot from behind and in the head.

-          Their successors, both named Johnson, were Southern Democrats and both were in the Senate.

-          Andrew Johnson was born in 1808 and Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908.

-          John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald were Southerners favoring unpopular ideas.

-          Booth and Oswald were both assassinated before it was possible for either of them to be brought to trial.

-          Both Presidents’ wives lost children through death while living in the White House.

-          John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in a theater box and afterward ran to a warehouse.

-          Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and ran to a theater.

-          The last names of both Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.

-          The names of Andrew Johnson and Lyndon Johnson each contain thirteen letters.

-          The names of both John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald each contain fifteen letters.

-          Lincoln’s secretary, whose name was Kennedy, advised him not to go to the theater.

-          Kennedy’s secretary, whose name was Lincoln, advised him not to go to Dallas.

-           

 

 

Coming less than a year after the national trauma of Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, one can imagine the goosebumps and raised eyebrows when readers took all that in back in 1964. (Like my father, who obviously thought enough of this corollary list to clip it out and set it aside.)

Well I too was intrigued. So I decided to do a little research on the subject myself. A couple of taps and clicks on the computer and I found out that this same comparison of the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy has been circulating for years. But alas, a little fact-checking by historians and pseudo-scholars alike uncovered a few problems.

For starters, the ‘author’ behind these comparisons has never been established. Usually not a good sign.

Secondly, while President Kennedy did indeed have a personal secretary named Evelyn Lincoln, there is no record of President Lincoln ever having a secretary or staff member named Kennedy. Whoever thought that one up was good. Real good.

Too bad it never happened.

Which begs the question – what is the veracity and the meaning of the rest of the list?

Anyone with the vaguest notion of American history knows the common fate of these two celebrated figures. Since the other oddities on that list do hold up under historical scrutiny, the overall effect is enough to make one think twice about dismissing outright those funny little things called chance and destiny. That’s a good thing to ponder.

But there’s another note to be found here, a cautionary one. The line between fact and entertaining fiction can be a fine one, easily and discreetly crossed by anyone these days. If there’s one thing history and media and politics has taught us over the years, it’s that a little stretching of the truth goes a long way in getting and directing people’s attention. For better and for worse

Urban myth and folklore has always been part of our entertainment culture. Nowadays that story culture is being stretched like never before with blogs and websites of every ilk. There is fake news and “data dredging,” whereby vast amounts of data are mixed and matched until they seem to present fact and identity where none exists at all.

So consider this a friendly reminder, dear reader, that everything you see in black and white isn’t always as simple and straightforward as, well, black and white. Take it from Newsweek in 1964.

Or better yet, take it from Lincoln himself, who purportedly once said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time.”

That one I'd like to believe. I really would.