Author’s Note

REFLECTIONS  OF  A  LUCKY  MAN

          If I’m not the luckiest guy on earth, please consider me at least a runner-up.  For most of my life I’ve worked in what I consider two of the most enjoyable and exciting jobs on earth--in the old days as a newspaper reporter and then, for more than a quarter century, as a Capitol Hill staffer.

            In this book I’d like to share a few of the funny, touching and occasionally historic things these jobs have allowed me to do, or at least to see.  These little stories are true.  Most repose in my own memory, sometimes reinforced by musty old papers from tattered cardboard boxes my wife Eddie has tried for years to persuade me to throw away.  Other stories on these pages come from trusted friends who were involved in whatever drama or mischief was afoot.  Quotations have been re-created to reflect the substance and tone of the conversations.

            Most people in this book are my friends, and their names and descriptions are real.  But in a few cases, to prevent friends from being embarrassed or compromised, I have given them alternate identities. 

            My lifelong streak of good luck, however, started long before I began either of my careers.  It started, in fact, with my parents.  Genes don’t come any tougher or more durable than the ones I inherited.  

            My father, Lee Lynam, was as resilient as a front wheel spring on his 1930 Model A Ford.  He never failed to bounce back--back from the challenges of life as a kid on a dirt-poor Texas farm, as a doughboy gassed and left for dead on a battlefield in France, as a car dealer bankrupted by the Depression, as an oil field roughneck overtaken by age, and as an aircraft mechanic for the Navy in World War II.  Yet through all these personal ordeals, never once did he waver in his unshakable pride in the United States of America.  He was, above all, an unashamed patriot.  Neighbors knew better, for example, than to joke about his flagpole.

            In the tiny front yard of the home in Bishop, Texas, where he and my Mother spent their final years,  Daddy erected a flagpole imposing enough to serve an Army fort.  And in a way, I’m responsible.

            A few years after coming to work in Washington, I sent him a flag that had been flown over the Capitol of the United States on his birthday.  My boss, Congressman Jim Wright, was kind enough to write an accompanying letter warmly praising his service to our country.  In the last few years of Daddy’s life, this letter and this flag were his proudest possessions.

            On holidays, he would go out in the yard just before dawn and, standing alone in the dewy grass, await the first rays of sunrise.  Then, with a pride as deep as any ever stirred by a full-dress parade at West Point, he would ceremoniously raise the flag, hobble back a few steps and snap a crisp salute.  On one of his last birthdays, he limped on his game leg to the breakfast table.  In his hand he clutched the flag.

            “Where are you going with the flag?” asked my Mother.

            “Going to put it up,” he said.

            “On your birthday?”

            “Yes.”

            “That’s silly, Lee.  People don’t put up the flag on their birthday.”

            Daddy took a sip of coffee, but said nothing.

            “You’re supposed to put up the flag on national holidays, like Memorial Day and the Fourth of July,” Mother pointed out.

            He grunted.

            “What would you say,” Mother asked, “if I put up the flag on my birthday?”

            Daddy thought for a minute.  “It’s not your flag,” he said, shuffling out toward the flagpole.

            Years later, as Mother related this story to me, she smiled understandingly.  To her, coping with a headstrong Lee Lynam was a personal obligation as compelling as the duty she felt to look after family members and friends when they became too sick or incapacitated to care for themselves.

            Day after day for nearly four years, this quiet Texas housewife provided loving and selfless full-time care for her mother, who suffered a stroke at age 84 and was never again able to speak, feed herself or leave her bed.  Moving her into the front bedroom of our home, Mother cared for this withered, gentle soul for the rest of her life.  In addition to her regular household duties, Mother cooked special food for her mother, fed her spoonful by spoonful, kept her sick bed spotless and even administered occasional hypodermic shots to ease her pain.  In later years, she gave similarly tireless care to other family members and friends.  Never on earth did there live a kinder, more selfless person than our Mother.  Her devotion to others and reverence for life extended even to ants.

            In the 1950’s, my brother Jimmy was an F-86 crew chief at a U.S. Air Force Base in Germany.  Once he wrote home using an envelope which, unaccountably, happened to contain a tiny sugar ant.  As Mother sat at the kitchen table, reading this treasured letter from one of her beloved sons,  the ant, still perky after its transatlantic flight, crawled out of the envelope.  

            “What did you do with it?” I asked.

            “It came from Jimmy, so I gave some sugar to the poor little thing and put it out in the back yard,” Mother said.

            Our Dad died in 1969 and Mother in 1982, but they would be as proud as I am today of Jimmy and our sister Gwen.  Both are truly remarkable people.  Jimmy and his wife Marie now live in Fort Worth, not far from their daughter Penny and son Butch, or Jimmy Wayne.  Marie, a delightful and energetic retired school teacher, now devotes full-time to Grandchildren 101.  Jimmy, having completed a distinguished Air Force Reserve career as a Chief Master Sergeant, the highest possible enlisted rank, now is a Deputy Sheriff.  But when it comes to sheer personal achievement, Jimmy and I both stand in awe of our younger, red-headed sister.

            Like many young couples, Gwen and her husband Richard had to work hard to provide for their two small children, Joy and Ricky, in the early years of their marriage.  Short on money and busy wiping noses and changing diapers, Gwen got a late start toward her dream of becoming a professional educator.  Not until her second child was four years old could she devote the time necessary to attain her bachelor’s degree.  With her duties as wife and mother still getting top priority, she somehow managed to juggle a number of outside jobs through the years along with her unrelenting pursuit first of her master’s degree and then of her doctorate.  Demonstrating skill and understanding in each task she undertook, she advanced quickly through the ranks of academia.  Only fifteen years after the day she won her bachelor’s degree from Texas A&I in 1966, Dr. Gwendolyn Tilley, Ph.D.,  became Vice President of Instruction at San Jacinto Junior College, an institution with 10,000 students in Houston suburb of Pasadena.

            And if middle-aged husbands are supposed to buy snazzy sports cars in fond hope of recapturing their youth, Gwen’s husband Richard Tilley didn’t fit the mold.  As he neared the end of an admirable career in petrochemical engineering, he sweet-talked Gwen into letting him buy not a sexy red Porsche coupe but an eighteen-wheel diesel truck.  Finally having realized his long-suppressed dream of thundering along the highway at the wheel of a massive tractor and semi, he even got Gwen to take one trip in this monstrous machine.  For years, from their home in Pasadena, Richard contracted for hauling jobs all across the nation.  As their truck roared along the interstates, it was perhaps the only Peterbilt rig in America driven by a petrochemical expert who at least once carried with him an attractive Ph.D. to share coffee and help with the maps.

            Grateful for the sturdy genes God gave me, I was understandably diligent in my search for a spouse who had been similarly blessed.  While working as a projectionist at a movie theater in Kingsville, I met a very pretty, vivacious girl named Eddie Forrest.  She worked in the box-office, and I shamelessly used to lure her up to the projection room now and then for a little smooching.

            In fact, as the daughter of an old-time locomotive engineer as tough and level-headed as my own father, Eddie looked like an ideal candidate for wifehood, except for one thing.  I wasn’t sure she always exercised sound judgment.  My suspicions were confirmed when she agreed to marry me in the full knowledge that the $14 in my pocket was all the money I had in the world.  In retrospect, however, her judgment may have been better than I thought.  To date our marriage has lasted 48 years.

            Our first child was a delightful little girl named Marsha Ann, who inherited both her mother’s attractiveness and her superb culinary skills.  Today she is the mother of three children--Michael, Jennifer and Tiffany--and operates a small catering business in the idyllic little Shenandoah valley town of Strasburg, Virginia.  Next came our son Charles, whose turbulent years as a teenager made life interesting for Eddie, for me and once even for the sheriff of Arkadelphia, Arkansas.  (See Chapters 8 and 9.)  These days Charles lives with his wife Sandy and two children--Marshall and Maryann--in Leakey, Texas.  Our youngest daughter, Sharon Kaye, is a warm and soft-spoken person who loves every little animal that God put on earth.  Before moving to her present home in Bradenton, Florida, she lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and operated a unique business called Dirty Dog Bathers, Inc.  You’d never guess what service the company rendered.  

            In addition to family members, no human has ever been luckier than I in the matter of friends.  From my newspaper days I cherish the memory of working with guys like Gene Gordon and Carl Freund, whom you will meet in Chapter 1, and Madeline Williams, a female reporter who often beat us men in what was supposed to be our private domain.

             Her late husband, Mack Williams, was the fastest rewrite man and the best friend a fellow ever had.  Others, too, have gone wherever ink-stained newspaper wretches go.  I think about such greats as George Dolan, Bill Haworth, Jim Vachule, John Mort, Joe Titus, Jack Gordon and Sam Hunter.  I like to think that these days they may be talking shop with an earlier bunch of reporters named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.   

            On Jim Wright’s staff, too, served some of the finest people on earth--people in Washington like Kathy Mitchell, who kept Jim Wright organized, and Anne Page, who did her best to keep me organized also, with occasional instances of success.  Then too there was John Mack, Jim Greer and his late wife Peggy, plus the Fort Worth crew--Jimmie Lee Bodiford, Larry Shannon, Norma Richson and Orabeth McMullen.  Three others--Craig Raupe, Joe Shosid and Carlos Moore--you will meet inside the book. 

            In the following chapters also you will get a glimpse of three of the very best friends I ever had--George Troutman, Dayle Henington and Seth Kantor.  Dayle and his pretty wife Juli use San Antonio as home base these days as they flit around the country visiting friends.  George and his vivacious and tireless wife Dottie live near Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on a beautiful estate nearly large enough to qualify for statehood.  My friendship with Seth, a superb journalist, began back in our days on the old Fort Worth Press and grew even stronger as we worked together in Washington.  Seth died unexpectedly in 1993.  His wife Ann remains one of our closest friends.

            In 1989, after nearly three decades as a Capitol Hill staffer, I was lucky enough to be retained as a Congressional consultant for two prestigious hometown organizations.  One was Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.  Through the years as DFW improved its facilities and grew in traffic volume to become the second busiest airport in the world, I have been privileged to work with a succession of great DFW executive and staff people--Oris Dunham, Vernell Sturns, Jeff Fegan, Kevin Cox and Joe Dealey and Clarees Vesey, to name only a few.

            For eight years I have also represented Fort Worth’s own Tandy Corporation which, along with its other enterprises, commands attention on Capitol Hill by virtue of sometimes appearing to have a Radio Shack store on every corner in America.  As a pioneer in the field Tandy probably has done more than any company in America to popularize the personal computer.  Fortunately John Roach and Ron Parrish, my bosses at Tandy, never bothered to ask how much I knew about computers.  So I may have neglected to mention that my data processing sophistication was limited to my old-time Underwood manual typewriter.  Having used computers for eight years, of course, I can see they are clearly more efficient.  On the other hand, my Underwood never ate seven hours of work if I happened to punch the wrong keys at 2 o’clock in the morning.

            On such occasions I have always telephoned my oldest grandson, Michael Williams, a computer wizard.  So often did I roust him out of bed seeking help that he finally gave up his apartment and moved into our basement.  Now all he has to do is come upstairs.  To him I owe thanks for retrieving several large sections of this book from the electronic gizzard of my computer.

            For research help, my thanks also go to Glenda B. Stevens, archivist for the Jim Wright papers at Texas Christian University.  She cheerfully dug through countless folders to locate documents I hazily remembered but needed to see again.  Similar thanks are due to Charlcia Bullard, reference librarian for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for allowing me to refresh my memory from old clippings in her files.

            For other bits of background and information I am indebted to such friends as Graham Purcell, Donnald K. Anderson, Don Kennard, Kathy Mitchell, Anne Page, Joe Shosid, Bill Newbold, Phil Duncan, Carl Freund, Wayne Franke, Eugene L. (Gene) Krizek, Norman Sherman, Jack Russ and Major General Roger P. Scheer, USAF (Ret.).

            In closing, there is one other good friend I would like to mention.  His name is Jim Wright.  Look carefully in this book and you may find some further reference to him.

Washington, D.C.                                                             --Marshall Lynam

June, 1997