1. Over at the Inland Lounge Saturday, after the luncheon at the Elks, Cas, Bucky, Eddie Joe, John Sevy, and I were trying to piece together the order of succession of Kellogg Mayors over the last fifty years. We never figured it out. I am going up to City Hall soon to look at the gallery of pictures of past mayors and get our questions answered. But, today, I wondered if possibly local businessman and gondola visionary Wayne Ross had ever served as mayor. I won't go into detail why I thought of this possibility, but in doing a fruitless search on the World Wide Web for Wayne Ross's obituary, I accidentally came upon news that stopped me cold, shook me up.
Steve Rife died on May 4. He was 64 years old and died of diabetes complications. You can read his obituary, here.
Back in Little League, junior high, and high school, Steve Rife, who graduated from Wallace High School in 1972, was among the very best athletes Kellogg faced, whether in football, basketball, or baseball. By the time we reached high school, because Kellogg and Wallace merged into a single team in American Legion baseball, Steve and I were teammates for three years, and I much preferred having him on my team than as an opponent.
I had one moment of success as an opponent of Steve Rife's and it happened fifty-two years ago. I was twelve. It was the Little League All-Star tournament and both Kellogg and Wallace won their opening games and faced off the next day. I had only hit one home run during the regular season and shocked everyone, including myself, by slamming a shot out of the park in our opener against the Valley All-stars. Then, against Wallace, facing the fastballer Steve Rife, I hit another home run. Little did I know at that moment that Steve Rife would be a constant presence in my athletic life over the next six years or so.
In fact, as time moved along, I foolishly used to picture myself as becoming Kellogg's Steve Rife, especially in basketball. He was always in my head and my imagination as a model of athletic excellence. That never happened. Not even close. Steve Rife grew into a strong, high jumping, very dependable, high scoring member of Wallace's basketball front line, one of the best players ever, not only at Wallace High, but in Wallace's conference. By about January of my junior year, I mostly warmed the bench and I would be boasting if I said my high school basketball years were mediocre.
So, I never became Kellogg's Steve Rife. But, Steve Rife became a friend I enjoyed a lot when we were teammates. I enjoyed how fun he was, how he arrived for ball games in his car (a Pinto, I think) with Rare Earth in Concert blaring out of his 8 track tape deck, rocking out to "I Just Want to Celebrate" or the extended jams of "Get Ready", getting himself ready to play ball.
Steve's life and my life went in very different directions. I last saw him in the summer of 1973 when we both played in Kellogg's slow pitch softball league. Then I got injured at the Zinc Plant, never played ball again, and focused on my college school work. Steve stayed close to home, worked in his family's furniture business, moved to Alaska and Arizona when the mines shut down in the Silver Valley, and, being in our different orbits, we never saw each other again, even when he returned to the Silver Valley and worked as a deputy sheriff.
Reading Steve Rife's obituary is sobering and grievous. I now know that years of living with diabetes undermined his physical health. A guy who was once as strong and graceful as any athlete I'd ever seen or known died a crippled man, his life cut short by the cruelties of disease and age.
2. I spent the morning continuing to hack weeds while it was still cool in the back yard. I also borrowed Everett's pickup and made two trips to the transfer station and got rid of eight trash cans of weeds, sod, and lilac branches. It was very satisfying to get this first couple of loads of yard waste out of our yard and motivated me to continue this sizeable clean up project.
3. I've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a couple of books exploring the Richard Nixon presidency. The first of those books arrived today: Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years by J. Anthony Lukas. For many in North Idaho, Lukas's name is familiar because he wrote a definitive history of our area, the state of Idaho, and the West itself entitled, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. In the same way that Lukas exhaustively researched and meticulously and brilliantly told the story of the 1905 assassination of Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg and the many ramifications of this event, including the labor wars in the Silver Valley, I can tell already that in a similar way, Lukas researched deeply into the documents of the Nixon years and conducted countless interviews in preparation to write his in-depth examination of Richard Nixon's insecurities, deep need for loyalty, feelings of powerlessness, fear of losing, long held grudges and resentments, and siege mentality, all of which contributed to why a plot was hatched for burglars to break into the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex. The opening chapters have gone into more depth than anything else I've read or seen on the Nixon presidency.
The other book I'm waiting for is Elizabeth Drew's Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon's Downfall.
These books came to my attention when I listened to the eight episode podcast, Slow Burn: A Podcast About Watergate, here.
No comments:
Post a Comment