Out of the Raft After Fifty Years

Phil's Note on October 14th: This post is from earlier this year, but I've moved it to the top of the list for a couple of days. It's a memory of a long time friend, Garland Ellis, who passed away last March.. I've just received an email list of other members of our Longview High School Class of '67 and moved up the old post so other high school friends of Garland might easily find it and read about him.

Here's the original post about Garland, and, yes, Leonard Nimoy, who died the same week.

Leonard Nimoy-Spock of the pointy ears-passed away this week at age 83. I was a high school nerd during the TV run of the original Star Trek series, and was a big reader of science fiction – Heinlein, Bradbury, Clark and others. As a SF fan it was a pleasure to see the first “serious” effort to bring the genre to the masses through television. Forgive me for referring to episodes like “The Trouble with Tribbles” as serious, but on the whole, Spock and Kirk’s Star Trek was thought-provoking and great fun. And, seeing a space western on TV somehow added a bit of credibility to the SF paperback books which I always seemed to be reading.

Someone sent me a You Tube link to an interview with Nimoy in which he relates how he borrowed the split-fingered Vulcan greeting sign from a Hebrew ceremony he attended as a child. Essentially, the hand-sign is a Jewish blessing that Nimoy himself decided to use when he greeted the first other Vulcan character to appear on the show. He wanted a Vulcan-specific “handshake” to greet her. That Vulcan was a Jewish Italian actress who knew the religious origin of the hand-sign, and responded in kind, and the split-fingered symbol took off on a life of its own. “Live Long and Prosper.” I’m glad that Leonard Nimoy was able to both live long and prosper.

Yesterday Nita and I got one of the phone calls we all dread. The caller was Raz Ellis, the distraught wife of Garland Ellis, who called to tell us Garland had died just a few hours earlier. Garland was a friend of fifty years, one of the guys who I ran with in high school and college and with whom we’ve maintained a long-distance friendship, usually by phone calls these past few years.

Garland was a career Navy officer who did tours on the USS Chicago, which was a heavy cruiser, and on one of the giant aircraft carriers, the name of which I’ve lost. After retirement from the Navy, Garland stayed in San Diego where he worked in the defense industry, as a liaison between contractors and the navy. 

I can tell stories of us misbehaving as adolescents, driving to Bossier City, Louisiana to legally (and stupidly) drink pitchers of beer at Shakey’s Pizza joint and Singapore Slings at the Carousel bar. Stories of paddling down the Sabine River in deep East Texas, years before the film Deliverance was made. Stories of Garland’s and my great dirty dish war in college, a week-long stalemate when we each stubbornly refused to wash the dishes in the sink, swearing it was the other guy’s turn. Another roommate finally washed the damned dishes to break the gridlock. Stories of camping at Big Bend National Park and backpacking in Colorado with our wives, and stories of the summer month we spent in Japan as houseguests of the Ellis’s while Nita was pregnant.

When our grandson was born a few weeks back, Gar called right away to congratulate us.  I told him of finding a long distance phone bill in son Todd’s “baby book” from 1981 when Todd was born. Among the expected calls to family was an eight minute phone call to Japan to let Garland know that the kid who got a free ride up Mt. Fuji in his mama’s belly was now on the ground.

The photos are of Garland and me when we both were young and fit. Once Gar joined the Navy it seemed he was always “in uniform,” squared away, even way up in the Rocky Mts. The action photo is one Garland never really liked, but I enjoy, since it’s me trying to keep his big ass in the raft, and not the other way around, as it well might have been that day, the way that rubber boat was bouncing through the rapids.

Good memories of a long friendship. And yesterday, at age 65, Garland had a heart attack and fell down the stairs at home, to die at the hospital some hours later.  Just…damn.  

Peace Be With You, my friend of fifty years. You did prosper and you did live well, but I sure wish you had stayed in the raft with us a little longer.