We said goodbye to my uncle Neil earlier this month. He was my dad’s younger brother and if you ask me to go to my “Happy Place,” I would be at my grandmother’s kitchen table in Greenville Ohio, past my bed time, listening to my mom, my dad, his brothers Jack and Neil and grandpa yuck it up as they played poker, while my grandmother, pretending not to laugh, would call them all “morons.” I didn’t understand the game, didn’t get the jokes and didn’t care. I was surrounded by happy humans who were happy to have me around. I was happy to be a moron right along with them.
Uncle Neil had struggled for the past year with a cruel combination of Lymphoma, Parkinson’s and other conditions that chipped away at his memory. But not his sense of humor for mere disease and age could never touch that. This was the man who could make your face muscles ache from smiling after a brief chat, the Uncle who took my brother and me to see Monty Python’s The Holy Grail and made the entire row of theater seats shake with his uproarious laughter. Sure, everyone in the theater was laughing, but I worried that Uncle Neil’s head would pop off. His joy was unbridled, it was infectious. He held his sides and practically rolled in the aisles, he enjoyed it so much. “Just fabulous,” he’d say about everything that delighted him and I’m sure that was how he felt when he married Donna Highfill, a feisty parson’s daughter whose wicked sense of humor could go toe to toe with his own.
Clearly he was a treat to us and everyone he met, so it’s not a surprise he had a long career of managing and motivating people in the Virginia Division of Volunteerism and later in the Richmond corporate banking world. Other than that I knew little; something about winning an award, maybe a trip abroad when he was young? While researching for his obituary I decided to search the Dayton Daily News archives. It was there that I found not only my fabulous uncle in a series of fabulous feature articles but also a glimpse of what home town newspapers used to be.
The Goofball in the above article is uncle Neil himself, winner of the 1962 Paperboy of the Year Award. Gee whiz, but this prize comes with a trip to Spain! By golly, Neil is in his Freshman year of Spanish, so surely he’ll do just fine! Gosh, that kid is off to great things and life is swell!
(That vibration I feel in the chair next to me, I’m sure, is the ghost of my uncle shaking with laughter as I write this)
But the Dayton Daily News didn’t stop there. No siree.
Look at that action shot! The anticipation for this trip was as palpable as the news day was slow and yet there was more!
Uncle Neil meets with the Mayor of Greenville to go over diplomatic gift giving
He met with the mayor! He discussed strategic uniform diplomacy! This was no mere pleasure cruise which we all learn about because the Dayton Daily News wrote even MORE:
Neil “bubbles…”
Omg, “Neil bubbles…” did this reporter have any clue about the years of torment he would endure from his brothers for that head line? Whatever, it was a “fabulous” trip where Neil went to a bull fight, saw tanks battle with Communist rioters in the street of Lisbon, met the future King of Spain and most importantly Zsa Zsa Gabor. My mind boggles at how all of this could have happened to a 14 year-old (and clearly the editorial staff at the DDN was gobsmacked as well) but it was 1962 and life truly was fabulous. I still have that apron, by the way, in the box of old dress up cloths for the kids.
Okay, but wait, seriously. There’s more.
Announcing his bid for presidency in 1996
Here he is two years later, announcing his future campaign for President in 1996. Or was he? Did he just make a joke and the DDN editor overheard it and shouted “stop the presses!!” Again my mind boggles; how did this even make the news? With all this kid glove coverage, you’d expect my uncle was the editor’s son or possibly a reporter have a crush on him. This newspaper could not get enough of my uncle, but then, a lot of people felt that way.
It’s a shame that my 21st century mind is baffled by all this media good will and encouragement. Here on the same page as my Uncle’s “presidential bid” is a story about the area’s first woman bus driver (“the kids say she’s okay!”) and an octagenerian melon farmer who traps varmits. These stories are hardly worth the ink used to print them and yet the sweet subtext is brimming with community pride. It seems weird by our standards today where we expect divisive comments; there is no angry push back from PETA activists trying to free the trapped muskrats, there are no trolls insisting that this so-called bus driver stay home and be a “trad wife,” no one in the on-line peanut gallery is calling my uncle a “libtard” (or worse) for thinking of a presidential bid. Imagine this for a second; there once was a time that community news was just presented at face value and, one imagines, Miami Valley residents read these articles and thought “oh, that’s nice,” or “I know her,” or “that reminds me, I need to buy a melon,” and, most likely, “that Neil…what will he get up to next?”
I’m sure this kind of wholesome news coverage has it’s share of detractors, (they are writing outraged comments to this article this very minute so we’ll know soon enough!), but it also reminds me that my uncle grew up in a media environment where adults made it clear that ordinary members of the community mattered, everyone from the mayor to the bus drivers to the paper boys. Is it any coincidence that later in life my uncle’s career focused on fighting the War on Poverty, on getting proper funding for community volunteer organizations and on working with coal miner’s wives and widows to get their hand made quilts in fashion magazines and into stores in Beverly Hills and 5th Avenue. He believed that ordinary people mattered, that their efforts deserved a day in the sun. I can’t help but think he got that idea from his local newspaper.
If he were here today, I think Neil would thank the DDN for the effusive coverage and apologize for disappointing them in 1996. “Maybe in 2024,” he’d quip and the editors would leap into action, I imagine. Then he’d positively “bubble,” that all of this and his life in it’s entirety was all “just fabulous.” And then he’d laugh and, I promise, you’d laugh right along with him.
