This time it’s two men following that guy with the scythe over the ridgeline of the world: Marcel Marceau and William T. Haw. I only knew the latter personally and MM (b.1923) didn’t know WTH but I see nothing strange about them going arm-in-arm on the ultimate adventure. I became aware of MM in Chicago during my undergrad years, last of the Fifties. Bill Haw came along in 1970 just as Bob Scriver divorced me. Bill had been hired to be the new Browning High School counselor and I was returning to teaching because I didn’t have enough money to do anything else. Couldn’t think what else to do anyway. Bill started me on the Third Wave Psych people: Maslow, Rogers, Perls, Erikson -- bunch of renegades who didn’t want to lie on a couch talking about infant sex nor to torment rats.
Bill was the first counselor who actually COUNSELLED. He’d been trained as a “mature” (I put quotes because there’s a valid point of view that would maintain Bill never matured) student in Detroit where one of his proudest moments was lying on his belly on the floor alongside a little black girl, both of them coloring and explaining as they drew, so that he could figure out what was going on in her troubled little head. It worked.
Once in Detroit he was arrested for something or other (his driving I think), and got everyone in the holding cage to sing gospel songs so enthusiastically that the judge wanted to know what was going on and the guards were humming along.
In Browning the school was expanding painfully quickly, so his office was the former boys’ bathroom at the end of the hall. All his conversations echoed from the tile, which wasn’t removed along with the urinals, but he pointed out that it was a “corner office” with a terrific view of the Rocky Mountains. In 1970 we had a lot of riot and revolution in the school and one day the entire student body gathered in the library/auditorium to demand the overthrow of the status quo. Both management (er, administration) and faculty hid from the shouting, pounding kids. Bill went out there on the stage and talked them down, got them agree to conditions and even return to class. He was wacky and energetic and he understood them.
Elsewhere I’ve written about the Free School and the Kindergarten Seminar. But did I tell you that early in life he ran a Baptist church camp and was a rodeo contestant and a photographer? In those days he was married to Kay and his daughter was Wendy who was in high school. I was living in East Glacier, which was frowned on by the administration in those days but has since become the norm. We had a ferocious deep-snow winter and while we could still get through, Bill drove his van loaded with teachers. Three of us hefty damsels (calling ourselves the Three Graces) sat on the back seat over the axle and made sure we had traction. Once we ended up with too many cars on the Browning end and I was supposed to drive the van back to East Glacier. Wendy, Bill’s daughter, went along and sat over the axle, but we still didn’t have enough traction, so we stopped and shoveled the back of the van full of snow. Anything to avoid putting on chains!
At Christmas all the East Glacier teachers went “home” -- not so many in those days called the rez home -- and I stayed there to guard the pets, the plants and the plumbing at a half-dozen houses. The Haw’s dog was a beagle who had been neutered a little early and stayed a puppy. When I let Sloopy out, he dove into the fluffy snow, sank to the bottom, burrowed along until his usual irrepressibility exploded him up above the three feet of snow, then sank and burrowed some more. It was so much fun that he refused to go back in until he was exhausted and nearly had to be carried.
The next winter the snow was even deeper and pounded hard by wind. The road to East Glacier was closed to everything but snowmobiles. We lived in our classrooms and thanked the powers-that-be that no students had been snowed in with us! Every evening we played penny poker but in the morning, Bill Haw and I were the only ones who got up and went to breakfast at the Red Crow Kitchen. The regulars decided that we were sleeping together, a conclusion I didn’t know until Boyd and Lila Evans told me recently. Actually the story was quite different because Bill had fallen in love, but not with me. Not many knew. (I was sleeping along in a sleeping bag over a warm place in the floor where pipes must have run underneath.) One night we all stayed in Eula Sherburne's house which had been empty since her death years earlier. Her shopping list was still on the kitchen counter.
Kay, Bill’s first wife, was a cousin to Terry, Bill’s best friend. Kay had faithfully struggled with Bill’s St. Bernard breeding plans, teaching the inexperienced male dogs what to do, which would have been a lot easier if they’d been smaller, and probably being the main feeder and shoveler-outer. She was a great backup wife, smart and competent, always able to follow-thru on Bill’s big plans. She learned sign language with Wendy, their daughter, who was deaf. But Bill -- whose physiology was tuned so high that he was on phenobarbital most of his life, who had to have a shunt installed to keep his head from exploding -- was often absent or explosive, and it began to wear.
Then he had one of those male-menopause personal revolutions and began to talk about Lynn. It was obvious he was madly in love. She had taught in East Glacier when he was the principal there. The Free School was just one step on the way out of being a nice conventional guy with a regular salary. He and Lynn went to Alaska and had a whole new exciting life up there. This time they raised bloodhounds and had two daughters.
When I saw them again they were “retired” and running a pet store in Kalispell. Their daughters were in grade school. I went home with them for supper and they took along a pet chipmunk. Bill told about installing a fancy new burglar alarm: if there were noises in the night, it called the Haws and turned on a speakerphone so they could hear what was happening and even talk to intruders. At 4AM, which is when the sun comes up during a Montana summer, the phone rang. Groggy, Bill answered, slowly realized someone was talking in the pet store, and demanded, “Who’s there?” The answer wasn’t quite intelligible, but the conversation continued several minutes before he realized he was talking to the parrot!
As we sat talking at the table, the chipmunk ran around checking for edibles. Then it spotted my clasped hands and wiggled into the warm cave they made, curled up and went to sleep. Naturally I had to stay until the chipmunk woke up. I don’t think I ever saw Bill again after that. They sold the pet store to someone from California, which is what you do in Montana, and built a house.
The next I knew was not long ago when I stopped in East Glacier at the Brown House to visit the McMasters. Terry told me Bill was in a nursing home. He was there seven years: everything was wrong with him. His brain drain plugged up. His chemistry was a disaster. His attitude stunk. And his mind was mixed up. Today, 76 years old, he gave up. Marcel Marceau and Death. This way please.
Bill had an older sister, Molly, whom I never met and wasn’t very aware of. Knowing he was sinking, she had idly plugged his name into Google and found herself reading my blog. She told Lynn and Kristin, who read it and figured out where I was. Kind of by accident, I was back in the loop.
One of MM’s classic acts was Bip going from birth to death, out along that continuum, that journey, that slow transformation, that burning up. Bill’s trip was more exciting than most. (There was the winter they took all the Free School kids south on a barely running school bus. Kay had to keep sending more money.) He spent all the energy and ideas he had -- no hoarding and no denying anyone what they really needed. (In the end Kay probably needed her freedom. Wendy died young of cancer, but there was nothing he could do about that.) There were laughs and songs and crazy tales. The Blackfeet might say it was a kind of “Napi” life, since Napi is both a trickster and a creator. We’ll gather some time in the future to share one more time.
Did I say Bill’s grandson’s name is Camden? He’s not two years old yet, just starting out.
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