Usually when I write about friends in this column I write about people here in Lawrence, people some of you may know. This is about someone I have known since 1927, or 76 years about now.
We were living in Preston, Idaho, and I saw these three brothers, all wearing straw hats, walking single file past our house. They were the Roe boys, and I'd get to know all three well, but especially the youngest, Bryce. He and I became friends immediately. We went together all the years through high school, and then a year or more in college, before he left to join the Army. In that time we took all our classes together, a fact that seems amazing today.
Bryce and I were part of the three-man team that argued in a class debate that Herbert Hoover should be re-elected in 1932. A team of three girls whomped us. We were the two who, in the same year, went to a school spelling match and were finally spelled down by two eighth-graders.
I remember 1931, when his mother, whom my mother idolized, died. I remember all the classes, all the holidays together, all the Christmases, especially, when, after obligatory family matters, we'd take off to go to a movie. In high school were in a boys' club called FADS, which the administration frowned on. We sampled cheap wine together in that Mormon town and got picked up by the chief of police, who proceeded to tell our dads.
In early 1937, Bryce, whose dad co-owned the local weekly, the Franklin County Citizen, asked me whether I'd like a job as printers' devil. I leaped at the chance: $2 a week. I had been making 50 cents mowing the lawn and the like for the widow of my dad's former boss. From 1937 into 1941 we worked together on the paper, every afternoon after school, every Thursday publication night, Saturdays. We ran presses, set type, and I made stereotypes and swept out the place. In those Depression times I think I finally was making $12 a week.
I said we went to movies together, sometimes sneaking out when we were supposed to be working. We'd buy doughnuts, two for a nickel, or cheese bit crackers. On Saturdays we'd go to the serials, "Terry and the Pirates," "Jungle Jim." We'd memorize the corny lines, and sometimes I'll call Bryce in Salt Lake City and ask "Do you know Jungle Jim and Malay Mike?" "Know them!" he'll reply. "They just killed my pal, La Batte!"
We graduated from Preston High in '39, and in '40 we were together at Utah State. In the spring of '40 we took a bus to Pocatello to see "Gone with the Wind," slow to come to our hick town. In the autumn of '40 we got a batching apartment at Utah State, cooking all our meals, hitchhiking to Preston each weekend to work on the Citizen. We were in the same fraternity.
All through the war we stayed in touch; I still have a photograph he sent from the Pacific, and some poetry he was attempting. In 1946 he married his college girlfriend, who also had been a dear friend of mine. He got a law degree at the University of Utah, taught law there, went to Yale, had a job in Washington, and returned to Utah. When my wife and I moved to Salt Lake in 1948 we were with the Roes constantly, until we left for Denver and then Kansas.
We were often in the Roe home in Salt Lake City; our daughters and their sons were about the same age. And when the kids had all moved out we began to take trips together.
The first was into the national parks of Utah and Arizona. Next came a trip to San Francisco, the Redwoods, and Yosemite, a trip marred by the Roes' Volvo, which broke down three times. Once we met in Vancouver and went to Alaska together. Our last trip together was to Boston, Maine and the Maritime Provinces, when it was our car that broke down: computer failure.
On that trip we had intimations of the illness that would take the life of Ineda, his wife, in 1992, Lou Gehrig's disease. It has been hard to visit Bryce in their lovely apartment without Ineda there, but we almost always see him when we go to Utah.
This year our visit was a short one, for dinner. Bryce is "almost" retired from his law practice, and he had a distinguished career, once arguing a case before the Supreme Court. When we meet I remember that friendship going back to the year Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and Al Jolson sang in "The Jazz Singer."
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