Remembering a friend who always put others first
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- October 26, 2024
- 1454
Comedy, Mark Twain is reputed to have said, is tragedy plus time.
The inference, of course, is that after a while, even the worst things can be filtered through the hourglass of humor and folks will smile.
One of my favorite examples of this phenomenon is from “Animal House,” the 1978 movie that sprung from the fertile minds of those who created “National Lampoon,” the funniest magazine of its era.
In this scene the guys of the Delta fraternity have just received their mid-semester grades and believe they’re about to be expelled.
It’s a glum gathering, full of resignation and a defeatist attitude, the kind of come-to-Jesus moment they all knew was inevitable if they continued their scatological, anti-authority, scandalous ways.
College, to the boys of Delta House, was an excuse for breaking every rule in the student handbook and then incinerating the thing.
“Every fall,” Dean ‘Double-Secret Probation’ Wormer says, “the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode.”
His vendetta against the Deltas has finally resulted in vindication.
“War’s over, fellas,” D-Day says. “Wormer dropped the big one.”
This leads to one of the movie’s most-quoted lines, delivered by “Bluto” Blutarski, a role John Belushi was truly born to play.
“Over?” he challenges his friends, still shrouded in pall of misery and loss. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”
“Germans?” a bemused Otter asks.
“Forget it,” a nonchalant Boone replies. “He’s rolling.”
“Animal House” remains one of my favorite fall movies, the ones that capture a place and time with evocative precision, sort of the way “Doctor Zhivago” plunges the viewer deep into winter and “Jaws” is the quintessential summer film with the shark menacing the friendly beaches on Amity Island, plus all that fear.
But there’s something lurking in the darkness of the Faber College campus as well, the loss of innocence you can almost feel when JFK adorns a Homecoming parade float, one that symbolizes a better tomorrow, complete with racial harmony and brotherhood.
Though never explicitly stated, the Kennedy assassination casts a shadow over the antics of the zoo fraternity, a feeling Belushi hints at: “Seven years of college down the drain … might as well join the Peace Corps!” a line that goes by almost without notice.
But it was OK to refer to the bombing of Pearl Harbor to comic effect, which might not have been possible 20 years earlier, memories of the Japanese attack perhaps still being too fresh, something the filmmakers probably considered in 1978.
Comedy, as someone wise once said, equals tragedy plus time.
But there’s nothing funny about what happened recently. A close friend of mine — and I don’t have that many — died quite suddenly.
It came as a shock to a lot of people, folks I’ve known for decades, and it served as a reminder no one is guaranteed a tomorrow.
The reason I began this essay with memories of “Animal House” is he and I drove to the next town over to watch it in a theater, there being no such things as VCRs or Blockbuster back then.
He was a Belushi fan, an adept mimic, when the mood was right.
We did a lot of things together: fastpitch softball, league bowling, working for the city parks department, mowing grass and painting stuff, picking up trash using a stick with a nail on the end of it.
We played a lot of cards, hit the bars, listened to music, and went to concerts including seeing Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at Blossom Music Center, an outdoor amphitheater, a summer treat.
Oh, and the baseball games we took in. It wasn’t at all unusual for me to get a call from my friend an hour or so before the first pitch and hear him say, “Tribe’s in town … pick you up in 10 minutes.”
He was that kind of guy, always thinking of the other person before himself. He took my sister to see James Taylor, a former girlfriend to hear Judy Collins and my fiancée to experience John “Cougar” Mellencamp, since I’d already seen him twice before.
He tended bar at our favorite corner tavern, worked tirelessly for fraternal groups, helped me coach a Pony League team, and made sure that when there was a holiday party, everyone was invited.
I hired him to cover high school football games in the early 1980s, and the last time we got together (a week before he died), he and I spoke about the future of small-town journalism. A few days after he passed, his editor told me he’d posted a story that very day. Something made me smile — he was still in the game.
You may not know Larry Stine’s name, but you probably know his work. From newspapers to cable access TV and local radio, he was a dependable presence, a friendly voice and a talented professional.
With his passing there is a void, but in time, perhaps, we’ll smile again when we remember something he said, like the time when he channeled his inner John Belushi and yelled, “Toga! Toga! Toga!”
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where memories of close friends are often shared.