Just a Little Jog — 14

By rights, on Super Sunday any Sports Illustrated alum writing on Substack should post about The Game. Well, l'lI stick with this little series, which goes next to memories of . . . the Grateful Dead?

[Note written February 9, 2025: In the five years since the words below were written, I have stayed in touch with the photographer Herb Greene up in Maynard, Massachusetts, where he still lives with his wife. In fact, I talked with Herbie last week about a retrospective book he is hoping to publish. And through Herbie, I have re-found Ken Marsolais. We’ve had lunch in recent months in Katonah, and taken in a film at the Bedford Playhouse. I haven’t seen Cindy Beer-Fouhy in person but have been hearted to learn, via flyers and articles in local papers, that she’s still at it. In fact, she now teaching writing and poetry to adults through a college program hereabouts. All good. As for the narrative: It continues on from our older daughter’s bifurcated preschool experience, beginning now:]

The twins did not follow their sister in attending Cindy Beer-Fouhy’s preschool even part-time because that enterprise got caught up in a drama that felled the entire Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in 2005. There was financial mismanagement to a fare-thee-well, perhaps even malfeasance, with the result that our town lost what Luci and I and perhaps hundreds of others considered one of its shiniest jewels. I felt particularly badly for Cindy and Ken when the NWCA collapsed.

Cindy, for her part, would certainly stay busy in the area. I notice that this continues to be so, and that she has, even unto 2020, been one to always pop up. She’s involved in a poetry initiative somewhere around here, I noticed at one point. She sponsors the occasional event at the Writers Center over in Sleepy Hollow. I’ve seen in news-sheets much like the one that pointed me to Babe Ruth at Sing Sing.

As for Ken, he was a similarly artsy guy and I anticipated that he, too, would have a next act hereabouts, but I’ve lost track of him.

I was always fascinated and impressed by how he guided the NWCA; as my own career in New York was progressing at the time and I was taking of a few added responsibilities, I took notes on folks like him, about how to manage and spur people while staying a good-enough guy. Ken was something, though . . . something that I never could or would aspire to be. He was one of those charismatic leaders, to the task born. He was NWCA’s unassuming guru. Hovering, always smiling, saying only what was needed, he was a puppet-master who, clearly, cared for his colleagues and the performance, both.

He didn’t seem the treasurer type, and whatever financial mistakes or misdeeds felled the place probably surprised Ken as much as they did us when we read about them. He was the programmer type—the imaginer, the showman, the Barnum . . . as I say: a pied piper. He was the pace setter, instigator, the inspirator, sometimes the head-in-the-clouds-though-not-necessarily hopeless dreamer. He was soft-spoken and outwardly calm, but he generated electricity.

Every day after school, the arts center would fill with children. Every afternoon, a freshly arranged concinnity of sound would build as flute, clarinet, guitar and percussion blended together, each strain wafting, muffled, through the closed doors of rehearsal rooms to harmonize in the halls in an emphatically atonal but not unpleasing mélange, a symphonic salmagundi. Stepping lightly through those unquiet halls were a hundred ballerinas of all ages and sizes, scooting to class. Their little friends who had been released from school a bit earlier were already limbering up on the barres. (If limbering up is what a ballerina does on a barre. Looked like it, to me.) In other rooms, paintings were being painted or deconstructed. At afternoon’s end, books came out of backpacks and homework was started or finished on the floor as kids waited for their pickups by parental-units. I amused myself one evening by concocting names for all this, the first to mind being, Marsolais’s Kid Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Opus One.

As I say, I’m sure that Ken, our maestro, did look at budgets, but I never got the sense that budgets got his juices flowing. So, when it turned out that money was culprit in sinking the ship at the NWCA, I was especially sad for Ken. Well, I said to myself, even on the money front, he did try.

I knew this firsthand.

And this leads us to a Grateful Dead tangent. Of course it does.

∞

I’d met but didn’t really know Ken and he didn’t know me, but he phoned one day when I was at the office in midtown. I guess Cindy had our child’s Dad’s work number, and had passed it along.

Ken said there was this guy named Herb Greene who was going to help the Center for the Arts with a photo exhibition. Furthermore, this photographer Herb had, Ken said, mentioned my name: Herb had heard that I lived in the area, and had wondered aloud if Ken knew me. Ken had learned from Herb how he (Herb) and I were associated (although we had not yet met or even spoken with one another). Apparently, an idea had then popped into Ken’s always abuzz brain. He had put two and two together with Cindy Beer-Fouhy—“His daughter goes to the preschool . . .”—and had rung me up. He was calling with his idea. (I’ve tried to iron out that sequence for you. That’s the best I can do for now. What needs to be known: Ken called me after talking with the photographer Herb Greene.)

The backstory here involves, naturally enough, Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia. They died in succession in, I think it would have been, 1995 or thereabouts. I had moved by then a few floors down at Time Inc. from Sports Illustrated to LIFE magazine, which, in this period, and for four or five more years, was and would be a successful monthly. The deputy editor at LIFE was the great Jay Lovinger, to whom many writers in New York pledged allegiance. Jay knew that I, like him, was a fan of baseball and rock ’n’ roll, and that perhaps, therefore, a fan of Mantle and Garcia. Jay asked if there was anything to be done about these coincidental deaths in the same news cycle. I worked up a little riff to accompany two wonderful photographic portraits from the archives. The words, which I guess could be vaguely characterized as a tone-poetic double eulogy, had something to do with how Captain Trips and the Mick were very different people, certainly — but surprisingly similar in many ways. Each was a supremely talented, successful, friendly and generally happy individual with inner torments and demons. If they were outwardly seen as inspirational Americans, even heroes of a sort, they didn’t necessarily aspire to or welcome the role of role model. Exciting and vital as they seemed in performance, they died too young—deaths hastened by addictions to booze (Mickey) or other substances (Jerry). I wrote something along those lines in an elegiac, allusive, manner that probably profited from actually reflecting how I felt—it came from this boy’s heart. And I’m sure it profited too from Jay’s edit.

The Mantle photograph had been made in 1951 by LIFE’s late, very great George Silk. The Jerry image used by the magazine was the famous Captain Trips portrait by a well-known chronicler of the vibrant 1960s San Francisco scene, one Herb Greene. Herbie, as I came to know him, had survived the Bay Area bacchanal (if barely) and was now living, healthily, with his wife in eastern Massachusetts—not far from where I grew up in Chelmsford, in fact.

Now we get to Ken Marsolais’s epiphanic idea. At the arts center in about 2003 or ‘4, so not quite a decade after Jerry and Mickey had died, Ken and his associates were faced with a fund-raising challenge that was to culminate in Mount Kisco’s idea of a gala evening. Somehow, Ken already had a connection with Herb Greene, and Ken thought to arrange, as a centerpiece for his big bash, the opening of an exhibit of Greene’s iconic photography. On the walls of Ken’s largest room, he would hang the best-known images of several bands shot by Herbie, iconic acts such as Janis and the Holding Company, the Airplane and, most famously, the Dead. Why he thought to do this at this time in Northern Westchester in the state of New York—you’d have to ask Ken that.

Herbie agreed to come down from Massachusetts on the big night to say a few words. As he so agreed, he asked Ken if he knew a guy with my name. Herbie mentioned the spread in LIFE that had run long before, the one about Jerry and the Mick. Ken heard the byline and said to himself and maybe to Herbie, “Eureka.” Or, perhaps, “Bingo!”

Ken suggested to Herbie, then later to me, that an extra, affordable item to auction in quantity, beyond Authentic Herb Greene Prints themselves, could be photo-statted copies of the LIFE piece, signed on premisis by the photographer of the portrait and writer of the accompany essay. Ken called me to ask if I might drop by and personalize the stats alongside Herbie. I quickly said yes, and when Luci and I showed up that night I was finally introduced to my collaborator Herbie, who gave me a big hug, a 1968 San Francisco-vintage hug. We were instant soul mates. It was as if we went way, way back together.

And by now, in 2020, we have indeed gone back a ways. As friends, we’ve stayed in touch since Herbie’s visit to Mount Kisco, and this particular little reminiscence that I’m in the middle of has two themes, I guess: 1) The Passage of Time, and 2) You Never Know. (Plus an implied side lesson for the kids: Be nice to people. They will come back around. Just wait and see.)

Time did pass, as it does, and one year at work I found myself charged with putting together a LIFE Book on fifty years of the Grateful Dead. My first call was of course to Herbie. I proposed that we not only dig deep into his collection but feature in the book a profile on the photographer, Herb Greene, himself. I told Herbie that my daughter—who had, 18 years prior, attended his and Cindy’s preschool at the NWCA!—had developed a serious hobbyist’s interest in photography: that she was in fact the photo editor of her college ‘paper. I wondered, in a shamelessly nepotistic exercise, if she might make a present-day portrait of Herbie to accompany an interview that I might conduct. So, my daughter and I visited him in Massachusetts and as I talked casually with Herbie for the piece in his small, sunny kitchen, my daughter moved about like an unobtrusive Annie Leibovitz, if such a thing can be imagined, and made her pictures. Herbie reviewed her work in the viewfinder, applauded it, offered some tips, and bid us adieu. As we drove south, my daughter was headed to her first professional photo credit, and her old man was proud as a peacock.

Even while she had been getting into photography, her younger brother had been getting into, of all things, the Grateful Dead. I was surprised to find him not only savvy but enthused when, during the production of LIFE’s Dead book, he learned that my morning phone call had been with a woman named Grace Slick, who had asked me to call for our interview at 5 a.m. California time since she rises with the birds these days. (Herbie had given me her number.) “I’ll tell you,” I said to my boy, “when I was your age, Grace Slick caused a lot of inner commotion for lads like me.”

“I know who she is, Dad,” my son said with some sang-froid.

Last summer—the summer of 2019—I perceived up ahead what might make for a second convening of Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia, at least of baseball and the Dead. I acted. Our older daughter acquired three tickets for a Red Sox/Yankees game at the Stadium, and it was determined I’d accompany her along with her brother. Meantime, I clipped from the paper a notice of an upcoming exhibit of rock paraphernalia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show, co-organized with Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, was called “Play It Loud.” I knew my kid would leap at such a chance to experience some high culture: Ringo’s drum kit, then maybe some Renoir, a little Rodin, back to Johnny Rotten’s bloodied performance wear . . . I proposed to him that the two of us would spend the afternoon at the Met before taking the 4 Train north to the ballpark, where we would meet his sister in our seats.

We walked up through Central Park together and I told him how many times I had enjoyed the same route alongside Mom: on our way to Tony’s birthday, walking through the forest of Christo draperies, jogging—getting in our miles—in anticipation of trying the marathon . . .

Many of the items in the exhibit fascinated him, none moreso than two of Jerry’s customized guitars, nicknamed Wolf and Tiger. I enjoyed the show as much as my kid did, and whispered to him reviews of long-ago concerts as we paid hushed homage to Pete’s trashed ax, Jerry Lee’s oft-hammered Petite Grand, Bob’s Stratocaster that Changed the World at Newport in ’65, Keith’s Les Paul Gibson that, with its customized paint job, could be seen from the nosebleeds . . .

The Sox lost that night, but Devers homered, and we three enjoyed a fine family time. We rode MetroNorth home in a crowded car, and the kids pointed out that the drunk young woman two rows up, the one with all the foul language who was bragging about heading for Princeton, was from Greeley High. She’d been in town for a rock show, not the game.

Family, high art and low, baseball, beer, gossip: Everything about that All American evening was perfect.

A few weeks later, with the Mets gone on a roadtrip, Dead and Company were playing at Citi Field in Queens. D&Co is the most prominent of the post-Jerry incarnations of the band, and Jack and his friends were pumped to attend. Jack chose to wear his T-shirt featuring a Garcia-drawn artwork promoting, of all things, that Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow. (He’s acquired a lot of Dad’s hand-me-downs in the past few years. I have no idea when or how I came by that item.) At the concert, John Mayer, who has assumed Jerry’s lead-guitar duties in Dead and Company, strapped on Wolf, which was on loan after having been transported under what I’d guess was heavy guard from the museum to the ballpark earlier in the day. Jack said later that Mayer had been psyched like a little kid.

Long after midnight, Jack returned home and crashed immediately. He fell blissfully asleep on his bed, perhaps nodding off with thoughts of the guys: those guys on his bedroom wall, featured in two personalized Herb Greene prints that hang there: bushy-bearded Jerry in one portrait, and then Jerry and his bandmates hanging at the corner of Haight Street and Ashbury in 1967.

Time passes, little things happen, they come together, they come together again later, they’re always coming back, and you never know, do you?