A kind of friend from long ago

While doing a Google for an artist friend from college, I suddenly thought about another friend, a newspaper reporter I worked with in 1971-72. Considered intelligent, he was really just scratching around the perimeter of whatever he happened to be writing about at the moment. His mind was filled with conclusions; he saw no reason to listen. In 1972 he went to Houston for a few weeks with Scientologist friends, but he never publicly said if anything took. He dropped out of school his junior year and went to work for the city’s daily newspaper. He was a good enough writer at 17. Insight … Not so much. Of course, all this is past tense. I last saw him in 1980; he had applied for a reporting job at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where I had worked since August 1976. I put in a word for him, but management hired somebody else. Somebody with more of a Fort Worth connection, I believe. Back in 1972, he stayed with my Sheridan gunner and me at a house outside of town, next to the woods and a moccasin-friendly lake. His mother had shown him the door, or he just left home. He had a girl friend, high school, and a 1964 Chevrolet Impala. He might have been as intelligent as he thought. If so, it was the misplaced kind of intelligence, the sort of throw-away kind God often graces people with and they turn out kind of weird. People who get that kind of intelligence most often don’t believe in God. Strange. He wrote a book about the Waco Standoff. I think he works for the Dallas Observer.