Play On!

Betty Wilson, wife of Sloan (“The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit”) Wilson, just sent us a book Sloan wrote that we hadn’t read, “What Shall We Wear to This Party?” and it reminded me right off the bat what a wonderful writer Sloan was. I remember Sloan at breakfast one morning in the Eliot House dining room at Harvard. He was reading to me from the folded papers he had in his jacket pocket. His words made me realize once and for all that a real “writer” is born, not made. The same is true for singers, may I add? I, who had probably been reading John Dryden or Algernon Charles Swinburne the previous night, found Sloan much to my liking with his great skill at handling modern American lingo eloquently, with never a trace of banality.

Sloan spent World War II in the Coast Guard and was right at home on any kind of watercraft, having had a boat himself most of his life. As I remember, he arrived at Harvard as the skipper of his own 87-foot schooner, which he parked in the Charles River basin. Parties on Sloan’s boat after football games will stay in my memory forever. Sloan was gone from us all too soon, and I realize this evermore when I phone Betty, who now lives on the Virginia shore, not far from her daughter and grandchildren.

After I got to know Sloan freshman year, and learned that he had gone to Phillips Exeter Academy, I wished ardently that I had had such a preparation for a college such as Harvard. My background was Winter Park High School, buoyed by highly intelligent parents from whom I learned much at the dinner table. When b.w. and I arrived in Winter Park in 1980, Sloan and Betty were living here! Sloan and I switched gears easily and continued the friendship we had enjoyed in college many years before. We four had countless good times together and attracted a variety of sparkling friends. Before Sloan left Winter Park to go north to stay, he turned to me one day in our doorway and said, “You are the best friend I ever had.” My feelings for him were similar. I’ve never found one like him since.

Nothing is forever

At just about the same time that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the last remnants of the Moorish occupation were driven out of Spain. The Moors were Moslems, of course. Today Moslems are quite different to handle in this Atomic Age than in 1492. Our forebears set up a country with strict regard for freedom of religion but made no provision to deal with faiths that treated others without goodwill. In the face of present quasi-warlike moves against the U.S., our so-un-American president has responded with bloodless appeasement that gives much more than it gets. Obama is no Hitler, but there are tricks of the trade that all demagogues since the German demon have borrowed. “The big lie” is a handy weapon in Obama’s political arsenal, and he can prevaricate with the best Ananiases. In my 91st year, my love for my wife, my home and my country is stronger than ever. After four years in the Navy in WWII, I returned home sharing the ubiquitous joy that “peace is wonderful ” — and it’s going to last forever this time! Nothing is forever, especially at 90, I remind myself.