Bob Hawthorne

I would like to share a few memories of my dear friend Bob Hawthorne. As I mentioned in my remembrance of Gerry Komrowski, Bob Hawthorne and I met as soon as I entered high school because we had both signed up for the freshman soccer team. We were both quite small - neither of us weighed a hundred pounds, far too small to play football, and not tall and rangy which would be more suited for cross country running. We spent most of our time goofing off on the bench, where we soon realized that we both had a great fondness for Three Stooges routines. More than half of the people reading this will have no idea what I'm talking about, because they are female, and because for females, the Three Stooges are incomprehensible at best, and disgusting at worst. There is no better way to demonstrate the unbridgeable chasm that separates male from female than to observe the reaction to the rituals of the Three Stooges routines: the grunting, loony gibberish, the eye-poking, the slapping, the boinking and conking, and above all, the carefully encoded vocal sound effects that accompany each particular variation of assault and battery. The universal response from females is "This is really stupid". The nearly universal response from males is laughter.

Bob Hawthorne and I met when each of us had perfected a repertoire of Stooges schtick that made it possible for us to communicate entirely in that medium, and at a point in our lives when there were no females around us to express their disgust at our antics. It was a perfect chemical reaction that proceeded instantly.

Bob and I proceeded to join the freshman wrestling squad as soon as soccer had ended, so things just kept rolling merrily along. It was the year that the Beatles dominated the top 40 , and Bob and I rode the bus to the wrestling matches and listened to a transistor radio playing all of our favorite early Beatles songs. The bus rides were the best part of being "on the team". We were in the lightest weight class, so our matches would be over first and we could get back to being silly boys again.

Later in high school I began to take things far too seriously, and Bob and I drifted apart, especially when he started going steady with his girlfriend Sandy. They were the cutest couple I have ever seen. I was certain they would be married someday. Bob was head over heels in love. But somewhere along the line they broke up, and Bob was deeply hurt. I think that's when he started drinking, although it's not at all clear that he wouldn't have been drinking otherwise. Still, whenever I saw Bob, there would be some harmless mischief under way within a very short time.

Once, Bob and I managed to find ourselves at the Plainville Firemen's Field Days. Firemen's field days were a sort of carnival that small towns would put on in the summertime in rural New York - a perfect time for beer drinking. There would be some rides and some games, and in this case they had a pole barn with games going on under a roof. There was one game that had a large table, with people hunched over the table tossing pennies onto plates or somesuch.

Bob said "Watch this", and proceeded to climb up one of the poles, into the trusses supporting the roof. Quiet as a cat, he climbed right out over the table, and he dropped onto the table with a whoop and a holler, scattering the table and everything on it, and setting the players back on their heels. Bob and I jumped out and skedaddled before they knew what had happened, and before they could throw us in the slammer.

Another time, Bob was driving around Baldwinsville, and he called me over into his car. I barely recognized who he was until I was in the car next to him, because he was wearing a wig, and because he actually wasn't a bad looking girl when he had a wig on. Bob explained that he was in disguise because he didn't want the B'ville cops to recognize him, as if they couldn't recognize the car, which was a National Champion modified-stock drag racer that he had brought back from North Carolina, and in which he was prowling around B'ville looking for someone to drag race with over on "sixty road", which was B'ville's equivalent of "Dead Man's Curve". I had enough of my own problems with the B'ville cops,and I didn't stay long in the car, just long enough to know that Bob was still the funniest, biggest kid I would ever know.

I wasn't able to attend our 10-year reunion, but I heard rumors afterward that Bob had been kicked out for being drunk and disorderly at the reunion. God bless you Bob, I loved you even more when I heard it.

After our thirty-year reunion in '97, I stayed on in B'ville for a few days, and my best friend from grade school, Larry Cummings, invited me to lunch with Bob Triggs over in Skaneatles. We had a very nice lunch in a hotel by the lake. Larry brought out some memoribilia from our St. Mary's school days. It was a beautiful summer day, and I had taken the back roads to Skaneatles, over the Kingdom Road and Perry Road, passing by the little farm where I was born, as I always try to do when I am home.

On the way back from lunch, I stopped to take a photo of a beautiful red barn with big puffy clouds in the blue sky behind it. As I continued back, past Conners Road, my eye caught a little country cemetery which I had not noticed before. For some reason, I stopped and walked over to the cemetery, and the first gravestone I came across, at the edge of the cemetery, was Bob's grave. He had passed away from cancer some years before.

I returned to California, and for a long time I wanted to write some kind of story about the things that had happened on that trip to my 30-year reunion, but I was never able to write much of anything, except to manage a little verse to remember this last visit with my childhood friend, Bob Hawthorne:

As I returned from far away
to see the land where I was born

I drove the hills of Kingdom Road
to find the woods where I had played

What was it made me turn
to see the gravestones in the sunny meadow?

What was it made me stop and walk

to lean against the maple tree

and look down on the polished stone to find my friend asleep -
his name to mark the place where friendship lives

Now rest my friend, in summer's arms
And sleep with songs of mourning dove

Your gentle laughter rustles with
the leaves of evening wind