A few years ago, I received a sad telephone callinforming me that one of my good friends from college, Peter Rothwell, hadpassed away.
“Rocky,” as he was generally known (the childhood nicknamecame from the Rocky & Friends cartoon show and stuck), and I had been intouch on-and-off during the years since college, but not recently. I sort of knew what he was doing and where helived, but I didn’t know that he was ill.
Rocky was a lovely guy – kind, extremely intelligent,musical and quiet – tending toward the solitary, but not unsociable when hefound himself in a crowd. Because he was so modest and reticent by nature, he exuded asort of mystery and was (I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this) a bit charismatic. That is to say, when you were in his companyyou liked being there and wanted more.
We last saw each other sometime in 1999. Rocky traveled uptown from the financialdistrict where he worked to join me for lunch at a beautiful restaurant I liked a lot called Aquavit, whichwas located in the former Rockefellertownhouse on West 54th Street where Nelson Rockefeller sighed his last sigh. (Quite a story there. Perhaps you remember it.)
Rocky looked good. There was silver through his hair now,but he was fit and still smoking cigarettes like a professional. It was great to see him again and unexpectedly uplifting to find him pretty much unchanged so many years after graduation. He began by telling me about his career. Like so many of my college friends, after a false start in graduateschool (NYU for psychology), he gravitated to software design. His currentwork had him developing new and improvedways for printing computer codes on bank checks. He related as much detail as he probably thought Icould stand on this subject and then turned to other matters,including a fairly shocking and politically incorrect story about LeonKlinghoffer, the wheelchair-bound American who was pushed off the Achille Lauro in 1985 by Palestinian terrorists. Rocky told methat he had once worked for Klinghoffer and that nobody who knew the man (who was apparently chronically obstreperous) was the least bit surprisedthat he would be thrown overboard bysomeone someday -- it was only amatter of time.
The tunny or false albacore
Then he got to the heart of the matter.
He wanted to tell me what his life was all about and why, inessence, we would probably never speak again.
Rocky had grown up as a fisherman. I knew that he enjoyed spending time on thewater with his father, joined sometimes by his brother and sister, more thanjust about anything. In adulthood, Rocky’s fishing took an usual turn, however. The pursuitof striped bass eventually gave way to the greater challenge of ocean saltwaterflyfishing (mainly off Montauk, New York) and a quest for an inediblesportfish known as false albacore or tunny. Tunny-fishing was a never-ending, early morning-to-night gameof Nearly-Impossible-To-Catch-And-Immediately Release, and Rocky explained that this was now essentially hiswhole life. All other professional andpersonal activities were subservient to and waited upon this one.
He didn’t pontificate; he didn’t bore. In fact, even though I’m not a fisherman and to a large degree find sportfishing objectionable as an activity, Ifound what he said utterly engrossing. He knew and associated with other fishermen (on land only; on the water, withthe possible exception of family members, he worked alone), but this wasbasically solitary, highly concentrated and satisfying intellectual andphysical work for him. You always strove toimprove your performance, but the results were eternally uncertain; you could never confidently predict or “game” the outcome. When we got up from the table, Rocky surprised me by giving me apicture of himself on his boat, and at that moment I really did feel pretty sure I would never seehim again. Weird, but by that time I wascoming to appreciate that life was weird.
After Rocky passed away, I learned that he was basically alegend on the east end of Long Island, considered one of great men of his sport, as well as being acapital fellow.
What prompted this reverie (and this may seem like an oddjump) was an article I read yesterday in the Swarthmore College Daily Gazette, an online campusnewspaper, recounting how Swarthmore students, in the wakeof the various national “Occupy” events, had now embraced the despicable “humanmicrophone” as a preferred form of on-campus political “communication.”
"Scroll neck" from Ampeg bass guitar. This was the instrument Rocky played (quite well). Rick Danko also.
Apart from the fact that the horrid (and stupidly named) "human microphone" easily sets up the obvious, butfunny, “I [State Your Name]”/ “I [State Your Name]” call-and-response joke fromthe movie “Animal House,” the very idea of students at my (or any) college parrotingin monotone unison quasi-celebration other people's unmediated, unconsidered words, rather than developing, speaking andexchanging their own thoughts, is sick-making. Also (and this is getting Swarthmore-specific), our campus is tiny and students do not lack means and opportunity for electronic amplification (or anything else for that matter) there. Consequently, the "human microphone" device is gratuitous, self-indulgent and (all-time favorite college word incoming), "fascist."
Ampeg bass guitar with distinctive scroll neck.
My latefriend Peter Rothwell was a quiet person who always spoke his thoughts deliberately, forthrightly and confidently. “Critical thinking,”that contemporary campus cliche, came naturally to him and grew out of his brain, his education and his personal discipline; he didn’tneed to put quotation marks around the phrase, pose in front of a mirrorsinging “Look At Me, I’m Wonderful” (a favorite Bonzo Dog Band song of ours) reflecting on its or his own personal glory, or amplify his non-musical thoughts through a humanmicrophone. (For his musical thoughts, he had a big bass amp.) If Peter knew about this Swarthmore development (andI hope and trust he does), he’s shaking his head in amused disbelief, lighting upanother Lucky and planning his next foray on Long Island Sound with no worriesabout the future, glad that we graduated and grew up.
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