Lone Star Jayhawk

Someone once wrote a novel about Kansas that began with the line, “He broke his brother’s arm just to hear the sound of the bone snap.”  The point was that Kansas is so vast, so open, so quiet, that the plainness, the sameness, drives people mad.  But when my friend Doug Price talked about Kansas, he made it seem like the most magical place on Earth.  I went with him once, on a long drive from Texas.  When I mentioned Kansas looked pretty much liked Oklahoma to me, Doug was mightily offended, so he started pointing out the green landscape, the fertile fields, the massive beautiful trees far larger than anything I’d seen in my home state of Texas, and the majestic rivers.  When I looked at Kansas through Doug’s eyes, it was, in fact, pretty special.

A small-town boy, Doug’s father was the local undertaker.  Since the town was too small to have its own ambulance and the funeral home’s Hearse was the only vehicle suitable to carry people to the hospital a few towns over, the family vehicle pulled double duty.  From the time he was old enough to drive, Doug spent a fair amount of time driving people to the cemetery or to the hospital since the funeral home was, after all, a family business. 

I always wondered if that childhood had an impact on Doug’s appearance.  Although he was taller than me, he looked shorter, always standing with his head bowed, the way funeral home employees do when talking respectfully to the bereaved.  The effect was amplified because he usually clasped his hand together in front of him, like he was either listening to you closely or praying—you couldn’t tell which. 

A born storyteller, Doug could make small town Kansas life seem simultaneously boring and as funny as a sitcom, often at the same time.  He loved to talk about how the different Christian sects didn’t get along, and had something snarky to say about every one of them (including the Methodists, of which he was a practicing member).  This interdenominational warfare was on full display during the town’s annual parade, which was called the Bible-Esta.  Each church would create a float illustrating a story from the Christian Bible—Doug’s favorite was Jonah and the Whale, which was made from an old Cadillac.  The man playing Jonah would lay with his head in the whale’s mouth at the front of the float.  He had rigged the old Caddie with mirror and levers so he was the one actually driving—backwards.

Small town life wasn’t enough to contain Doug, though, so he want on to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, home of the Jayhawks.  To him, this was Heaven on Earth.  His house was stuffed with KU Jayhawk memorabilia everywhere—clocks, blankets, Jayhawk statuettes.  His email address was LoneStarJayhawk.  Despite the fact that he was 1) an accomplished student  (he earned both a bachelor's degree and Doctor of Jurisprudence from KU) and 2) probably the least athletic person I’ve ever known, the center of the KU campus, no, the center of the Universe, was Allen Fieldhouse the school’s basketball arena.  Several sportswriters have called it “the best place to play college basketball in America” (a fact Doug would never let you forget).  He had more than one photo of this unusual, built-from-brick basketball arena that he’d show you at the drop of a hat.  He could tell you every national championship KU has ever won (especially in basketball), every notable athlete who ever went there, and all kinds of trivia you didn’t know you needed to know.  My favorite:  Dr. James Naismith, inventor of the sport of basketball, coached there at one point.

Doug was peripatetic, seeming destined to live his life wandering through Kansas.  His favorite book was William Least Heat Moon’s Prairy Erth (this is not misspelled), because Moon travelled to and wrote about every county in Kansas.  Doug’s journeys led him to law enforcement and into the heart of darkness.  He eventually landed a job as a county prosecutor, which led him to help solve and later prosecute a case involving a serial killer.  I remember him speaking, horror still fresh after many years, about skulls and bone fragments—and then he would stop, unable to say more.  He made sure the killer was prosecuted and locked up.  Then he walked away, never practicing law again.

Out of work because he could no longer bear to do the job he trained for, Doug was drawn to the Big City.  In Kansas, this means Wichita, the largest city in the state, a little bit bigger than Corpus Christi.  After Doug’s dad died, his mother moved to Wichita and made a new life there, buying a house and beginning a career as a school teacher (Doug was proud his mother had taught NFL Hall of Famer Barry Sanders, mainly because Barry, too, is from Kansas).  Trying to re-invent himself, Doug went back to school, trying to get a master’s degree in Political Science.  Doug did things backward; most people get a masters and then go after a doctorate; he already had his doctoral degree when he started his masters.  By now, Doug was in his 30s, and, while at Wichita State, he met a woman named Theresa, who later would become his wife.  When asked how the two met, he would proudly proclaim, “I met my wife the old-fashioned way.  I went to a bar” (the name of the bar was Kirby’s, by the way).

When Doug showed me around “his” Wichita, I got an idiosyncratic tour.  He took me by the Wichita State University campus—but only to show me the football stadium, because the university had dropped football in 1986, years before I made my first trip to Kansas. He took me to the very first Pizza Hut in the US, because Pizza Hut, too, is a Kansas original.  He took me by the school his mother taught at (but only to show me the statue of Barry Sanders).  He took me to a burger joint he liked (full of memorabilia of Xavier McDaniel, a former Wichita State basketballer who achieved NBA greatness).  He took me to Kirby’s, because the was where he and Theresa met.  It lived up to its nickname, which is a “noisy little bar” that proudly proclaims itself a “hole in the wall.”

And he took me to golf courses—Wichita has 13 golf courses; Corpus, with roughly the same number of people, has three.  Doug really loved golf, and he really loved golf courses.  He could wax poetic about a particular hole on a particular course—not just in Wichita, but about any golf course that regularly hosts a televised tournament.  But he was lyrical about the golf courses in Wichita, about how the ground water enabled the courses to stay properly green, how the large, native trees provided stability and created the proper degree of difficulty, and even about how the winter freezes killed off pests and kept the greens beautiful in the summer.  What can I say?  The man loved golf courses.

Doug’s time in Kansas ended about the time my friendship with him began, a bit more than 30 years ago.  The combination of his graduate work at Wichita State and his law degree from KU landed him with a job teaching Political Science at McMurry University in Abilene, Texas; I joined the faculty there a year later.  And I can’t tell you why we became lifelong friends—he was a fiscally conservative Republican, while my grandfather warned me I would go to hell if I ever voted for any party other than the Democrats.  He was reserved—a lavish display of emotion from him was a handshake, and I am a grab you in a bearhug kind of guy.  He liked things quiet, he was the Great Indoorsman (except when he played golf), and he tolerated children.  I like loud music and being physically active and had 3 sons. 

But he was a gifted conversationalist, a thoughtful, principled person, generous with his time—when my first son, Lars, was born ill and I had to spend 6 weeks with him in Dallas area hospitals, Doug regularly drove back and forth between Abilene and Dallas to check on me and on Lars.  We also shared a love of books and good barbecue and beer.  We also shared an intense love of our hometowns and our respective home states—he of Humboldt and Wichita in Kansas, me of El Paso in Texas.  Our friendship survived change of jobs and changes of towns; he left McMurry, as I later did to move to the Texas Gulf Coast.  We regularly kept in touch and saw each other when we could.

Theresa called me last night and said, “I have bad news.”  I knew immediately what it was; Doug had gone outside to smoke his pipe and to do his crossword.  When he didn’t come back in, she went to check on him, and he was gone.  After the initial shock of grief had passed, I found myself running through more than 30 years of very fond memories of a deep friendship—and of a place called Kansas.  When I look back on the trip I took there with Doug, I couldn’t tell you of a single place that really sticks out in my mind, but I vividly recall Doug’s reaction to places.  With him as a guide, the mundane became a place of wonders.  I was very glad to hear Theresa tell me he’ll be buried in his native soil.