The High Sky of Winter's Shadows

By W. Jack Savage

The High Sky of Winters Shadows by W. Jack Savage is a collection of thoughts, reminiscences, eyewitness accounts and random opinions gleaned from journals, various notebook entries, graduate school projects, letters and at least two previous attempts at putting together a compilation such as this. They represent first person accounts spanning more than six decades through the eyes of one baby boomer. Told in essays of four-hundred words or less, Savage holds his bias as one whose eyes remained open through it all. However, this is also an exercise in soul searching as by his own account Jacks extraordinary memory offers a reminder that peering into the past can be a two-edged sword. While it may at times be painful, it may also provide valuable lessons that may re-color our first impressions. In the end however, it is the memories of a lifetime: of struggling through school, trouble at home, service in Vietnam and a career in radio of over thirty years; of little snapshots of life and crossroads remembered; of marriage, parenthood, acting, disappointment and the determination to share his stories in the hope that someone may find a sliver of light in the midst of their struggles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483665849

W. Jack Savage

W. Jack Savage is a retired broadcaster and artist who now writes and creates his art full time. He is the author of six books: three novels, two short story collections and The High Sky of Winter’s Shadows, an autobiographical account told in essays amassed over fifty years. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, Mankato and received his Master’s Degree from California State University, Los Angeles where he taught film studies for six years. Twenty-eight of Jack’s short stories have been published in literary magazines around the world such as the Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Nazar LOOK, The View From Here and Postcards, Poems and Prose. Jack is also a talented artist whose work has appeared in more than twenty periodicals and whose acting credits include over fifty stage productions and two pretty bad films. Jack and his wife Kathy live in Monrovia, California.

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The High Sky of

Winter’s Shadows

W. Jack Savage

Copyright © 2013 by W. Jack Savage.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 07/16/2013

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Contents

Dedication

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Epilogue

Dedication

Walter and Barbara Savage gave me life and loved me all of their lives. The love and support of my wife Kathy has made it possible for me to tell you about it.

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Foreword

I thought about who I might ask to write a forward to this collection of musings, ruminations and reflections from my lifetime but the truth is, no one can tell you the why or the wherefore better than me. After all, I’m not famous in any way and so the question becomes, ‘why would I care about this guy’s life?’ It’s a fair question to which I can only say that as a card carrying baby boomer, retired broadcaster, artist and writer, my powers of retention are considerable if not amazing, and while the life I’ve led could not be called significant in the ways we’ve been taught to appreciate them, I think you’ll find you have more in common with me than many of the notables I’ve read. You could fairly call me an underachiever but only in the sense that what I have accomplished took place in a non-traditional sequence. In spite of what my biography said, in truth, I never graduated from anything prior to receiving an Associate Degree from Northland Community College. I was a GED guy going in. Decades would pass before returning to school where I received my Bachelor’s from Mankato State and a Master’s in Communication Studies from California State University, Los Angeles. So I think you’ll agree that I have the proper educational window-dressing to offer an account of the world around me but after that, I’ll admit it gets pretty thin. If you consider that I began my radio career in Thief River Falls, Minnesota and ended it in Los Angeles, it sounds more impressive than it really is. I enlisted in the Army at seventeen and spent two and a half years in Vietnam with the 1st Cav. as an infantryman and helicopter door gunner. I was wounded and then nicked again a year later and discharged well short of my twenty-first birthday, so I needed a fake ID like everybody else. After a year or so I became a hippie to get in on the Free Love movement and believe me, I wasn’t alone. Several years later and with my marriage looking like it was down for the count, I inadvertently completed a broadcast course at Brown Institute and began a career in radio. It’s really amazing what a steady job will do to a floundering marriage and my wife and daughter and I welcomed our son about a year later. Those were happy times and though the marriage ended during the next stop on the radio cavalcade, if you’re anywhere near my age you’ve learned to appreciate the happy times no matter what the circumstances. I had another son not long after that for whom I did my best while he was growing up, but have little contact with today. What followed was a lot of ‘in and out of the garbage can’ as Fritz Pearls might say and nearly married a second time. However, I did learn to quit running back to St. Paul between every failure and severing that umbilical cord proved to be a somewhat giant step forward. There were several very good years in Cheyenne, Wyoming followed by a brief stint in Sheridan where I met my wife. After that, twenty six years in southern California (from which few ever return), three novels, two short story collections and what you’re reading now. My children haven’t read my books and my wife hasn’t read the last two, so I have little to no hope of any of them reading what follows in these pages and saying: Hey, this is pretty good. Let’s publish it. I love them but, well, you know. I should probably mention that since my life has been non-sequential, I have stayed away from that in assembling this work. Third grade may likely follow LZ English in Vietnam or frame shopping in Pasadena. It’s all beginning to feel the same to me anyway and avoids prolonged periods we can both do without. After all, I not only wrote it, I read before you did and believe me, it’s a better read this way. I will ask you to give it a page or two because most of what follows are short little pieces about nearly everything and after a few you’ll know whether it’s the kind of thing you can get into or not.

Of the title I will tell you this: a high sky is a baseball term meaning a blue sky with no clouds where you’d think first seeing and then catching a fly ball would be made easier because of it. However, a few clouds provide depth perception and help you better judge the tracking of the ball. Winter shadows result from the sun being lower in the sky than in summer. The truth is, there are no ordinary fly balls or ordinary backgrounds to catch them against and often, nothing you’ve done hundreds of times in the past prepares you for the next one. If you’ve ever dropped a fly ball you know that.

Acknowledgements

Continued thanks to my advisor and editor Diana Wiltshire whose valued input I could not do without and John Dos Passos, who’s The Best Times: An Informal Memoir inspired my ambition to letters long ago.

*     *     *

Not everything needs to be questioned. But I see sequential, three-act storylines happening all the time that I could write as fiction and accurately predict the outcome. For those in my generation, after John Kennedy was assassinated, came the quick arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald. Two days later Oswald was murdered on national television by this night club owner, Jack Ruby. Once the shock of the whole thing went away, everybody smelled a rat. It was just too much. Frankly, it was the kind of thing you’d feed to the people of America in those days, knowing a majority would accept it at face value. After all, in a fiction sense, television ruled and we were used to life in three acts, often packed into thirty minutes. It came bang, bang, bang, and life isn’t always like that: the President is killed and his killer captured and two days later the alleged killer is murdered. Please, and yet… it was so big and so real we didn’t quite know what to make of it. It was on TV. It had to be real, right? Nobody was voicing any concerns they may have had, not right away at least. After the Warren Commission Report said Oswald did it and acted alone, my mother said, My God… they blamed it all on him. It was the first time the stirrings within me came alive. My own mother didn’t buy it. But the authorities sold it and sold it and they’re selling it still. Fortunes have been made by the doubters and defenders alike, and regardless of what we thought once, we’ll never know the truth—not all of it. It’s like the three guys who broke out of Alcatraz. For years we were told that all that was found was an address book or something and therefore they must have drowned. Now we learn, they found the raft and footprints leading from it, and a car had been hijacked by three men two hours later. They escaped and we were never told because they didn’t want to look bad. They just closed Alcatraz and let the lie continue, which makes you wonder, how much of what we’ve been told is true? My answer would be, only that which could be managed, in a public relations sense. Otherwise, tell them anything and sort it out later. There are those who will tell you that Kenneth Christianson was D.B Cooper. There’s clearly a pattern here: crime can’t be seen to pay. No one can get away with it and any theory to the contrary is in conflict with American interests. Someone decided that and that’s what we’ve been given ever since.

*

This, at least in part, is about a guy I knew who became popular with women after he got married. As a result, he began to look at his marriage as an impediment to this new-found popularity, and split from his wife. After that he couldn’t get a arrested. None of the women who found him so cute while he was married, wanted anything to do with him… more on him later. Each year in St. Paul they hold something called ‘Grand Ole Days’. They shut off Grand Avenue for about three miles and hold events and it’s a fun time. My friend had a dog which had puppies, and he thought it would be a good idea to bring the puppies and find them homes. He cut a box in half, put a towel and the puppies in it and made a sign that said, ‘Free Puppies’. Hours passed and many people stopped by to see the puppies but none of them took one. By this time my friends and I had had a few beers and weren’t paying much attention, so when his daughter came along and asked if she could take charge of the puppy concession, he said, fine. Twenty minutes later all the puppies were gone. His daughter had turned over the sign that said ‘free puppies’ and written, ‘Puppies: $5.00’ and had made herself a quick twenty-five bucks. It finally occurred to me why my friend couldn’t get laid after leaving his wife. People like things better if they have a perceived value. Free puppies are fine but puppies for $5.00 are a wonderful bargain. As a married man, my friend had a perceived value and the women in his office found that little bump provided him with just a little more sex appeal than he had without it. Actually, he was lucky. His wife took him back, and whether he learned the same lesson or not, as far as I know, they stayed together. Perceived value—it seems a small thing but I’ve seen it time and time again. Price anything right and it flies off the shelves. Offer to give it away and watch them yawn.

*

When it comes to kindergarten, I have mostly good memories: the classroom, the kids, the treats we were sometimes given. I remember Clifford. He seemed always to be in trouble for something—but of course I never knew a kid named Clifford. Our teacher was Mrs. Peterson and she was very nice. However the memories seem selective, somehow, because even though I can remember quite a bit of kindergarten I can’t remember walking to and from school. Kindergarten was only a couple of blocks away really, but I should remember something about that process. Actually, there was one day, which was in the fall, when I was new to the process. There must have been a line with police boys for the block nearest school. I had drawn a picture of a palm tree. It slipped out of my hand and blew into the street, close to the curb. I went in the street to get it and the police boys didn’t like that. But that was the only time I can remember leaving school. I mean, I went through a whole Minnesota fall, winter and spring, walking back and forth to school for the first time and in my memory, it’s just not there. My mother must have wrapped me up like a mummy on some of the colder days and I’m sure I resisted that. In the spring there must have come that one day when I didn’t need a jacket at all; this was a very cool thing when you lived in the northern states. And for the very first time, I must have experienced the last day of the school year, knowing summer vacation began the following day. But I don’t remember it. I went in the morning and Kindergarten was split into morning or afternoon. So the other older kids, the bulk of the student body, who came in the morning, didn’t go home until later in the afternoon. I was growing up. I was going to school but I can’t remember the going and the coming home.

*

I played in alleys as a kid. Alleys were the best—they were like little streets for kids. You could wear costumes in alleys. Nobody would bother you if you wanted to put a towel around your shoulders and call it a cape, or make a ramp and do daredevil jumps with your bike. I lived in an apartment building so I liked to look at fenced-in backyards. If I had one, I thought, I could have a dog. They didn’t allow dogs in the apartment building. There were also the trash cans. Behind the liquor store they threw away cigar boxes. People threw away the neatest stuff, and sometimes in backyards, there were little houses instead of garages. It was never dangerous really, but it was territorial. You didn’t go down certain alleys because other kids were playing there. The neatest thing I ever saw in an alley was a grave. There was a rock wall