The Essential Earl

It was on one of our family vacations that Earl Warren Jr., or Butch, removed a piece of bubble gum from his mouth and flipped it, with incredible accuracy, into the frizzy gray hair of a woman standing nearby.

Frances, his mom, made a leap for the gum and retrieved it without the woman’s ever realizing what had happened.  This was the Butch of my early childhood…sassy, irreverent, and always good for a laugh. 

The Jewells and the Warrens lived just one house apart, vacationed together for years, and “put their suppers together” during every season of my childhood.  Because our mothers were best friends, Butch was always part of the picture and was, I suppose, my first real friend even though we were six years apart in age. 

My earliest memory of Butch is simply that he was nice to me.  When I was in grade school I was allowed to walk through the back yards and up Beeler Hill to see Frances, who usually had a chocolate pie in the oven.  After my piece of pie I’d go upstairs and watch Butch working on an old television that needed fixing or taking apart a radio he’d gotten from Billy Gene Kelly’s shop—I can still see those little glass tubes in his hands.  Other days Earl might be on the back porch playing with his juke box or on the front porch practicing Dixieland jazz on his trombone.  We lived in a town with one stoplight and two major cross streets, but as young observers of Earl’s world my brother and I discovered that there was much to see.  We marveled at his creativity, his endless catalogue of interests, and his ability to get by with almost anything.

One time my dad and Butch rigged up a private telephone line between our two houses.  For telephones they used the old wooden box phones with hand cranks for ringers.   On summer nights Butch and Phil and I climbed to our garage roof and looked for the Big Dipper.   When I phoned my brother to tell him that Butch was gone, there was a long pause and Phil—who knew this was coming—said, “He was such a big influence on my life.”  Indeed my brother, who is now an astrophysicist, says his first love of photography, science, and astronomy came from Butch.  The one and only time I will ever see Halley’s Comet was in the Warren back yard, looking through a telescope set up by Earl Warren, Jr.

On one of our multi-family vacations to Natchez Trace Earl took Phil, then 12 or 13 years old, out in a boat to fish for bass.

Here’s Phil’s version of it:
We had been out in the boat, and I got my line tangled up and had it running out way behind the boat. We pulled into the dock while I was still trying to get untangled and I started to reel in. Something really heavy was on the end of the line like I was snagged on a log, and I was heaving the line in like a deep sea fisherman.  About that time a humongous fish flopped up out toward the end of the dock and Earl yelled, "Holy Cow, you've got a big one out there!"  He ran to the end of the dock with the net and dipped it up.  The story didn't end there--when we pulled the big one in, it had a little bass inside its mouth--you can see it in my other hand in the photo."

Phil had the six-pound bass mounted and it's on his wall at home to this day.

Earl helped shape my life also, but it was first through his sense of humor.  Because we were both at Clinton’s First Methodist Church every time the doors opened, many of our shared experiences were church-related.  One Christmas during the “March to the Manger,” a processional in which offering envelopes were deposited in the manger, Butch and I queued up beside our parents.  Testing my Earl-humor, I turned to him and said, “Throw your money on the baby.”  He looked at me and replied, “You’re going to fit right in.”  Indeed the Jewell kids spent a fair amount of time trying to walk and talk just like our up-the-hill neighbor.

Earl always knew how to seize the moment.  When I was in high school, my then-boyfriend David Sensing would sit across the street from our house at night and whistle “The Sweetheart Tree,” a song that was popular at the time.  I would sit in my upstairs window, soaking it all up and feeling very romantic.  The first night that Earl figured out what was going on he appeared on his own front porch, trombone in hand, and loudly played, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”

It’s almost impossible to pin down the style of Earl’s humor, but it was fueled by the most ordinary events.  His photography was the same. I think one of his favorite photographs was the little Amish girl, taken at a flea market Clinton. “Have you ever seen such a sad little girl?” he said.  He could put a frame around life’s ironies better than anyone I have ever known.  A five minute conversation with someone in a gas station would make a twenty-minute story for Earl.   And that story would be funny and it would make you think about the larger world.

Butch started smoking again not long before his death, and he discussed this with typical irony.  “If I had seen the caliber of people in the smoking area,” he said,”I wouldn’t have started smoking again.” 

As my brother and I tried to define the void we’d feel without Earl in our lives, Phil put it well:   “It was like we had our own private Hunter S. Thompson.”

There were times when, just for a while, we needed Earl to think inside the box.  Earl could be cocky and difficult and he paid a price for that.   Just about everybody who’s been in Earl’s inner circle has had to give themselves some space from him for a while…but never permanently, he didn’t want that.

Most aspects of the Essential Earl never changed.  There was, however, one big shift.  The balky, backtalking teenager that I first remember became, in later life, a champion of his parents’ values. A recurring theme in our phone conversations was how lucky we both were to have been brought up on Beeler Hill by parents who could laugh at everything, wanted us to see the best in everyone, and above all had no time for meanness or racial intolerance.   

The last conversations we had were good.  He said, “That’s something people don’t do enough…say I love you.”  And he loved his daughters above all.  

He talked about how together Lydia was, how he and Amanda were having such good talks and figuring out “what to do with all his stuff,” and he quoted passages from the book of photographs he and Margaret had just completed. Finally he read me Margaret’s dedication (to herself) and got a big laugh out of that.

Then I told him I was not ready to let him go, and he said, “I’m not ready to let me go either.”