Remembering a Good Man

            Adelaide and I became part of the Dadeville community even before we became fulltime residents. We had built our house on Lake Martin in anticipation of retiring to it, and since we were at the lake most weekends, we ate on Saturday mornings at Bob’s Fine Food, which was sort of like Cheers without the booze. It was where you met people and made friends and caught up with the local goings on. And we began attending church at First United Methodist Church in Dadeville.

            It seemed to me as a newcomer that there were three institutions in particular that gave Dadeville its distinctive personality: Moore’s Hardware, Floyd’s Feed & Seed, and the Piggly Wiggly.

            OF COURSE IT WASN’T the businesses themselves that established their uniqueness; it was their owners, Steve Moore, Fay Floyd, and Laeman Butcher. In every one of those places, you were treated like a neighbor as well as a customer.

            The Piggly Wiggly, or The Pig as we called it, seemed to cater most meetings and events in Dadeville, and I met Laeman when I was the guest speaker at a Kiwanis Club meeting. When I was introduced to him, he was ensuring that the luncheon went smoothly. My first impression was of a smiling, jovial person.

            I began to know him better when we shopped at The Pig and joined First United Methodist Church. To my first impressions, I added another: boundless energy. And later, selflessness.

            Seven or eight years older than I, he seemed to be always on the go, usually on a project to make Dadeville a better place—I can’t think of many civic projects he wasn’t involved in—or to help someone who needed help, whether taking someone groceries or cutting their grass or laying hands on a motorized wheelchair for someone who needed one.

            WE WORKED SIDE by side in the Methodist Men, whose mission is to help people in the local community, on such projects as building wheel chair ramps, repairing really rundown houses and clearing overgrown yards. No matter how hot or dirty the job was, he was always there. For all of the charitable acts that Laeman performed publicly, there were probably as many private acts of charity that he did not call attention to.

            Laeman was a Marine (I don’t think you’re ever a former Marine), and he was passionate about the welfare of all veterans. He helped arrange flights for veterans to see the World War II monument in Washington,D.C., and trips to the Infantry Museum at Fort Benning.

            He was equally passionate about politics, and although his leanings often didn’t jibe with mine, it never stopped us from working together for a worthy cause.

            IN RECENT YEARS he had turned running of The Pig over to his children, although he could still be seen about the store. The change did give him time to find yet another passion: Gardening. He went at it in a big way, and loved to share not only reports on how his garden was doing but the product of the garden as well.

            An icon toppled earlier this year when The Pig closed.

            But a community giant disappeared on Tuesday when Laeman died of a heart attack at 81. I admired and respected him, and I was fortunate to know him for as long as I did.

Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines. He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com

Mortality Comes Calling

We all are reminded of our own mortality from time to time — an illness or accident that could have been fatal, the death of a friend. When we are young, though the stark reminders that our time on this planet is limited, are quickly erased by the optimism of youth.

The passing of the years, though, brings the reminders more frequently.

A couple of events in recent weeks have touched me directly.

FIRST WAS THE DEATH of a friend and former colleague. He was half a dozen years younger than I, and when we first worked together he was in his early 30s. Our paths separated, and then we worked together again at another newspaper. Our careers, and our energy, were still on an upward trajectory, when he left for another opportunity.

We talked on the telephone every few months and saw each other only occasionally in the years that followed. But the friendship was one of those that that was not eroded by time and distance, and we always picked up with where we had left off. We did not dwell on aches and pains, and the barrier of distance leaves us picturing the other person as he was in days we were together.

In the past couple of months, we’d talked more often. He’d smoked for far too many years, and this winter had been particularly hard on him, sending him to the hospital multiple times with pneumonia. He was weakened, but each time we talked, he was confident that he was going to get better — and I believed he would get better, too. I would come visit, I promised, when he was feeling a little stronger. 

PNEUMONIA STRUCK again, though, and I did not realize until the last few weeks that he would not come home from the hospital.

I was taking comfort in the knowledge that he embraced life fully when word came that another friend, a contemporary, who had cheerfully fought cancer to a standstill for many years now was seeing the contest edge in the other direction. He is a realist, and, having toted up the cost of expensive drugs that at most could add only a few months to his life, he has decided to take as much enjoyment as he can in the time that remains.

All of this leaves me saddened, of course, and more conscious that the horizon looms ever closer.

But if youth is optimistic, age is stoic, and the Latin expression Dum vivimus vivamus  — is a "While we live, let us live" — becomes more relevant.

The poet A. E. Housman, I think, was both the optimist and the stoic when he wrote that  “… since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.”

There are no cherry trees here, perhaps, but pears and dogwoods will do nicely.