Goofball:

"He MUST have been an intelligent thinker, that's why you couldn't hang out together....you're much too obnoxiously pedantic to carry on a rational conversation with! Did you always call him a 'bigot' every time you disagreed??..or were you too oblivious to it??"

Jerry IS intelligent. Highly intelligent. But intelligence is like a tool. It depends on what one does with it.

And we hung out together a lot. Although he didn't sing, he enjoyed folk songs, especially old ballads. He liked the way I did them and he dug up a lot of good songs for me. He attended "hoots" (informal song fests, usually in someone's living room) regularly.

I wasn't "obnoxious" at all. When he went off on a political dissertation, I just listened to see where he was going with it.

He was born in Louisiana, and he had a Southerner's attitude toward Black people, and let's face it, he was a bit of a bigot. He "tolerated" Blacks, but that was about it. We never discussed it because I knew better than to argue with a hide-bound Southerner with that kind of attitude. And no, I was not "oblivious" to anything.

And we DID hang out together, quite a bit. When I finished teaching my evening guitar classes at the U. of W. YM/YWCA, I headed for the Blue Moon Tavern for a quick brew before going home, and that was about the time Jerry came in. We'd have a couple of brewskis together, then he'd usually drive me home. He had a Jaguar sedan.

And often when I dropped into The Moon, Roberta came with him.

Jerry worked at the Space Center at Boeing (sort of "hush hush" stuff) and Roberta was a school teacher.

We were quite good friends, enough so that they asked me to be the Godfather of their first child. I don't think they would have done that if I had been "obnoxiously pedantic" and called him a "bigot."

Are you unable to read, Goofball, or do you simply not understand plain English? Or do you have a sick compulsion to make up stories that you know are not true about people and spread them around?

Don Firth