March 19, 2021
March 19, 2021
Hi. Please forgive this very belated entry, but I've only just seen this page for the first time. I was born in 1952 in Baton Rouge. Clay was one of my parents' closest friends and one of my father's colleagues in the Geology Dept. From earliest childhood, Clay was like another parent to me, often filling in with the duties and obligations that a busy father can't always provide. In those days, Clay rented a house (little better than a shack) just north of Tiger Town overlooking the Campus Lake. He held wild parties there almost every weekend, and due to my parents' poverty--they were too poor to afford a baby-sitter--I attended most of them from the age of about two on. Usually I was put to bed in a back bedroom where I would fall asleep to the sounds of music and loud talk and laughter, the sounds of people having fun. And believe me, modern people have no idea how to have fun. Clay and most of the grad students at LSU were veterans of the war, and they drank and flirted and brawled hearty in order to forget. The neighbors finally complained, and the city forced Clay to rent Jiffy Johns; I can still remember them ringing the house. I bet that's a story Clay never told you! One night, Oscar Paulsen and another grad student got so soppy drunk that they started sobbing in the front seat of Oscar's car, parked in the lawn in front of the lake. The other guy started demanding that Oscar punch him; when Oscar refused, he finally screamed, "OK then, I'll punch you!" and socked him in the eye. Unfortunately, this released the emergency brake, and the car rolled into the lake, where it capsized. It fell to Clay, of course, to go bail them out of jail and hire a truck to have the car towed out of the lake. Clay was always the adult in the room. He possessed all the qualities that made for a wonderful boss and father, gentle and soft-spoken, yet dogged of purpose and always shrewdly on the ball. Handling people was what he did best, because he loved them. When Oscar wrecked his car in a drunken spree in Mexico, fracturing a number of bones and injuring his skull and spine, it was once again Clay who went down there and brought Oscar back to recuperate at his house. And Oscar was a terrible patient! Believe me, I know, because he growled at me plenty during his recovery. It was Clay who took me to my first dozen LSU football games (my father hated football), giving up his precious tickets to a very little wide-eyed boy when he could have lavished them on dates instead. I remember during one game he kept turning his binoculars away from the field and staring at a section of the stands. "What's the matter, Clay?" I piped up. "Don't you like the game?" "Look, Chris," he replied with true reverence in his voice, "The Golden Girls." And this was my first introduction to those goddesses of the gridiron; I always assumed I would marry one of them, but alas, my wife refuses to keep wearing the costume these days. It was Clay who first introduced me to television (another thing my father disapproved of). I can still remember the black and white set he kept in the front room--as a special dispensation, I was allowed to go over to see televised road games, and that was how I got to watch the famous Billy Cannon game live and jump up and down and scream with Clay and all the rest of the gang when he ran for that touchdown. Well, I could go on all day with these stories. I do remember Clay's first date with Louise and how smitten he was, He came over and had a long talk with my mother about her after a few weeks. My mom warned me he was serious about her. Then after they got married, my good times with Clay came to an end. He sold the party house and took up the things that were a man's. And so in time did I. I guess I was his practice kid, and to me, well, let's just say wherever I am in the world I never miss a Tigers game, in good times and in bad (even by shortwave when I lived in Europe). And whenever I watch the team play, it's always Clay who's sitting there beside me.