The Gentle Giant | Dave's Place

Guys I’ve Done Time With: Creston Baumunk 1948-2013

What Is Friendship?

I remember the first time I ever talked to the man, when we were standing in the lunch line at Shady Side Academy Middle School in eighth grade. We’d acquired some new students that year, and several were giants, towering over the rest of us. Creston was six feet tall in eighth grade, he told me as we stood there, and he was laughing. He seemed proud of being tall, also slightly self-conscious; he had that slight stoop that big guys get, as if he’d like to be down there with the rest of us. That’s what I remember most from Creston in those days, that stooped posture, and the way his eyes kept blinking, from wearing contacts. He was one of the earliest contact wearers—this was 1961—and jumped at the chance to get them. He told me that the day he found out he needed glasses he cried all day.

I rejoiced the day I got glasses, at age 9. I could see! At last! But Creston wanted to be like everybody else. A little shorter, and not wearing glasses. He’d stoop and blink like hell trying to do it.

Who knows why friendships form, how much of it is some kind of chemistry, how much coincidence? I was good friends with a couple of twins, Gordon and Gerry Hughes, and one time when we were getting together Gerry said he was going to ask Creston too. Okay by me. Somehow after that we became a foursome. We did everything together. It was a friendship that would last through some of the most important years of my life.

So Creston was big, and tall, and slightly awkward; he had a bull in a China shop feel to him; with his shouts of laughter, broad gestures. You always had the feeling he was about to knock something over, and he sometimes did. But he was also an athlete, who had worked hard at various sports, and used his size to his advantage. He would have been a great football player, but was too gentle a person for that; he played fullback in soccer, center in basketball, and in high school, along with me, took up the shot put, which turned out to be his best sport.

He could also be quite delicate. When we were doing dissection in biology, he had a close eye, a steady hand, and great patience.

Mostly I remember going bowling. Gordon and Gerry lived in Squirrel Hill, and we gathered at their place, partly because there were two of them, partly because they had the biggest house, including a basement recreation room with a stereo, pool table, and a ping pong table. At the age of thirteen we would maybe shoot some pool or play ping pong, then head for Squirrel Hill proper, where we would be up to no good (smoking cigarettes, our major vice in those days). Whatever else we planned, we always started by bowling, at a place on Murray Avenue. We could smoke there with complete abandon (Creston didn’t smoke in those days. I wish he’d kept that up). Also get Cokes, eat ice cream sandwiches, candy bars, all kinds of stuff we didn’t need to do. Gordon and Gerry were lean, Creston was big but kind of soft. I was fat. No other way to put it. I played all the sports, but I was fat.

Gordon and Gerry were excellent bowlers, Gerry in particular, but Creston was a force of nature. He stood there holding the ball with that bull in a China shop look—which lane would the ball even go down?—and he would head toward the line with his long strides, and a huge arc on the ball. Sometimes he put it where he wanted, sometimes not (with a loud shout, “No!” or his major curse word in those days, “Hell!”). But no matter where the ball hit, the guy was so powerful that all kinds of pins went down. He’d throw a ball that would have netted three pins for me, and he’d knock down eight. “Whoa!” he’d shout, as if amazed at his own power. We sat there shaking our heads.

The man was a great bowler. He could clean up on all of us. No finesse whatsoever.

I also remember basketball practice, in those days when I was still playing the game (I was fat, yes, but we had a basket behind our house and I shot by the hour; I had a deadly set shot that could break up a zone defense,[1] so they put me on the team). We had two coaches in those days, Campbell Witherspoon (who was also our homeroom and history teacher) and Jack Doherty, whom we called Jackie Doughboy.[2] They played with the scrubs, which meant they were my teammates. Witherspoon, a balding slouching guy who liked to dribble down quickly and throw up a wild running hook shot, was the guard, along with me (one of his favorite maneuvers, when I had done something he thought was stupid, was to bring the ball out of bounds by dropping it on the floor, so he would run down the court while I had to go back and get it, as if he were saying, pick that up, fat boy. He was teaching me some kind of lesson, though I was never sure what), and Doherty played center, where he could, as I once heard him say as we walked into the gym, “bang Baumunk under the boards.”

Creston was a soft gentle kid, tall, to be sure, with good basketball skills for his age, but here he was playing a grown man who had never played center but was dying to show how good he could have been, if only he’d been tall. Creston got beat up, but he held his own. Loud shouts. “Hell! No!”[3]

For all his height, Creston had a baby face. One time the four of us went downtown, and after the obligatory bowling, at a second floor alley (“With or without?” the guy said as he rented us our shoes. “What?” we asked him. “Athletes foot,” he said), we tried to get into a soft-core porn theater called the Art Cinema, and sent Creston to get the tickets, hoping he looked eighteen. Hell, he was six feet tall. No dice. So we went to a regular movie theater, and sent Gordon to buy the tickets, hoping we could pass for twelve or under. That didn’t work either.[4] We had to pay for regular tickets.

Gordon and Gerry spent every summer at River Springs, Maryland, a small community on the Potomac where their mother had grown up, on what seemed to be a plantation. The house wasn’t mammoth, but it had white pillars out front, and nearby was a field where a local guy grew tobacco (and supposedly chewed the raw leaves). The house was a hundred yards or so from the river, which was wide at that point, near where it fed into the Chesapeake, and they had a dock down there, and the boys had their own boat, a small inboard (just like the Hardy Boys!). That summer, and the following summer, they invited Creston and me to come down.

I’ll never forget the first night we got there. We always stayed up late, usually watching the Steve Allen show, which came on at 11:30, but that night we determined to stay up all night, for what reason I do not know.[5] The boys had moved on from cigarettes to cigars, which they bought at a little bar across the river—more on that later—and that first night I had my first cigar, a little cigarillo called a Webster Baby. You just puffed on them, the twins told me, you didn’t inhale. I had always thought cigars rather crude, but that night, down by the dock, I discovered I liked them much more than cigarettes. I really enjoyed my first cigar, also, of course, the thrill of the forbidden.

The Maryland night was hot and sticky, and we had walked to the dock so nobody could smell the smoke. There were no lights down there, and I had never been in a place that was so dark, and quiet, at 2:00 in the morning or whatever it was. You couldn’t see where you were stepping. The only light was the coal from the cigars. There was something forbidden about all that, and terribly exciting. It made the cigar all the better.

We finally went to bed about 4:00. We got too bored.

The twins were experts with that little inboard of theirs. We went around in bathing suits and t-shirts, no shoes most of the time, and every day we rode across the river to the aforementioned bar and grill. Gambling, for some reason, was legal in that Maryland county, and that bar had a pinball machine that paid off if you got a certain score. We put in some small amount of money, a nickel or a dime, I think, and the twins had learned to work that machine. The four of us could really work it, not quite tilting it, but influencing the little silver ball to avoid various pitfalls. It paid off handsomely. Both summers I came back with more money than I went with, even though I seemed to spend a lot. It took a fair amount of money to keep us in cigars.[6]

One time we found a beach on the far shore and pulled the boat up, sitting there and smoking cigars and going for swims. I think maybe on one occasion we got hold of a little beer. We were sampling all of the adult vices.

Several times we went out onto the Chesapeake. Once we were behind some huge vessel, like a freighter, and the wake it gave off was mammoth. We got behind it to ride that wake. Some of what we did was pretty stupid, I suppose, but I don’t remember ever being scared, just excited. We were all good swimmers. We had life vests.

After that eighth grade year, which was a good one in my life, by and large, Gordon and Gerry went away to St. Marks School, and Creston and I had to soldier along at Shady Side by ourselves. We continued to get together on vacations (our ninth grade year, I remember, we got together every day at Christmas vacation, except for Christmas. I’m pretty sure we bowled every one of those days). But Creston and I were together much more.

Going Through Hell

The following years weren’t as good as eighth grade, when we’d been top dogs at middle school and played on all the teams, done well at school. The nature of a school like Shady Side—maybe all schools, everywhere—was that freshman were low men on the totem pole and treated like dogs, sophomores were still pretty ground down, junior year you tried to come out of it but the academics kicked the shit out of you, and senior year was good, except that you had the tremendous anxiety of trying to get into college. There was something hellish about those years, especially—for me—because my father was ill, and I found out eventually that he’d been suffering from leukemia, and he died during my junior year. Living through those difficult years bonded us forever, not just me and Creston but me and the whole class. We get together for our reunions and have a hilarious time. We don’t really know each other anymore, but we have a strong bond, because of what we went through.

My most persistent memory of Creston in those years—we were both Day Boys, and lived at home—was him walking into the Tuck Shop in the morning a few minutes before class and saying, “Can you lend me a dime for a soda?[7] I didn’t have any breakfast.” Why this guy, whose parents were quite wealthy (he would eventually inherit houses in Pittsburgh, Ligonier, and Costa Rica) had to borrow a dime, always got there late, never ate breakfast, always asked this same stupid question (to which I always said no, no matter how many dimes I had) I do not know. We were all just scrambling to get by in those days, and that was his way of scrambling. The whole thing was a blur.

I don’t remember having a lot of classes with him, but we often had the same teachers, and though we didn’t get much chance to talk during the day—our days were a whirlwind of activity, right up until we played some sport and finally went home in the late afternoon—we often talked on the phone at night, trying to figure out some bit of homework, especially math homework, especially our junior year, when we both had a great but famously difficult teacher named Theodore Leaman[8] (who had also taught my father). Creston was great at biology; I was terrible (that was when I gave up my wish to be a doctor, and he solidified his). We both struggle mightily with chemistry. Shady Side Academy, in every way I can think of, was more difficult than college, but it prepared us well.

The spring of my freshman year, after I’d played football in the fall and suffered through wrestling in the winter, because it was supposed to get me in good shape, I put the shot in track. Track was my brother’s sport (he eventually set the school record for the mile), and in a way it became my favorite sport, because it was informal, the older guys and younger guys all practiced together, we had a world class coach (a man named Barclay Palmer, who had been on the British Olympic team in the shot and discus), and because I was actually pretty good at it. For years I’d read about the great American shot putters, Bill Nieder, Dallas Long, and especially Parry O’Brien, who invented the form we used; I’d known for a couple of years that that would be my event. And though our freshman football team lost every game, and I was a terrible wrestler[9], I was the number one freshman shot putter and won several meets. I wasn’t necessarily stronger than the kids I faced, but I had a great coach and our technique was superior. We put on a clinic wherever we went.

Creston too had wanted to put the shot, but he’d injured himself in basketball that winter and wasn’t able to join the track team until several weeks had gone by. He was still pretty soft, and had never lifted weights (as I’d been doing for several years), but he was naturally strong, and tall, and quick. The shot put turned out to be his perfect event (unlike bowling, you didn’t have to be accurate). At the end of our freshman year he came in and took over as first man from me, much to my chagrin, and he eventually became a great shot putter, setting a school record by a couple of feet our senior year. I was happy for him because we were good friends, but also pissed off that he had robbed me of my one success. Nevertheless, it wasn’t even close. Our senior year, my best throw was short of 46’, and his was over 56’. He was great.

Creston was an only child with a doting mother—a Southern belle—and he lived way out in Fox Chapel, apart from everything else. He constantly wanted to get out of that oppressive atmosphere, away from that isolated (though beautiful) spot, away from his oppressive (though beautiful, and very loving) mother; he wanted to drive, he wanted to drink, he wanted to smoke; he wanted to be an adult and on his own, the sooner the better. I never had that feeling, because I lived in the city and could walk out the door and do anything I wanted (if I wanted to smoke, I took a streetcar to East Liberty, where nobody knew me, bought a pack from a cigarette machine, and lit up. Fuck you, adult world). At the same time, he was a good boy, he didn’t break training rules, he didn’t get in trouble; he basically loved his parents and wanted to do well by them. All that was a conflict for him. All those things had far-reaching effects.

Our freshman year, for instance, he missed a rather spectacular New Years Eve party that the Hughes twins got me into, where all the girls kissed all the boys at midnight (the only time I ever experienced that heavenly situation), and from then on, out of nowhere, in the middle of the summer, he’d say “What are you doing for New Years Eve?” as if that were a logical question in the middle of July. It was as annoying as when he asked if I had a dime for a soda (it’s not called a soda, you moron).

That resulted in one of the most fateful nights of our life together. Our junior year, Creston had asked that question several dozen times and we wound up making plans to hang out with Gordon and Gerry that night. We both had driver’s licenses, but sixteen-year-old drivers had an 11:00 curfew, so we couldn’t drive to a party; we both planned to spend the night at the Hughes house, which we’d done before. We could walk to a party from there. As it turned out, Gordon and Gerry and had done something wrong that week, and their parents grounded them, so of all things—this must have been Creston’s worst nightmare—they weren’t allowed to go out. We had to stay at the house (which wasn’t bad as houses went. They had the pool and ping pong tables in the basement recreation room, and we could play music loud).

My father had come home sick from work that week, and hadn’t gone back. He had been in ill health for years at the point, in the hospital a number of times, and the doctor immediately put him in that week. I determined not to go out at all, but my mother argued against that; she said my father would want me to go out, want me to have a good time. She and my brother visited him at the hospital on New Year’s Eve day, and I was scheduled to be next—we always spread our visits out—but he was just too tired, said he’d see me the next day. We had done those visits so many times we had a routine. I’d get up first thing in the morning and go.

I still had that memory of the night when I’d gotten to kiss all those girls. I hadn’t had many kisses since, if any (hate to admit it). I really wanted to go out.

But we wound up just playing pool and ping pong with Gerry and Gordon, who were both thoroughly pissed off. I called home around midnight, and my father had just called, spoke to everyone individually and wished them a Happy New Year. I hadn’t been there. So I hadn’t gotten to visit that day, and hadn’t been there when he called, and I hadn’t even gotten to go to a party. The whole evening was a bust.

Then next morning my brother called the Hughes house, and told me to get to the hospital as fast as I could. He was crying on the phone. Gordon and I got dressed quickly and he raced me down there, fishtailing on the snowy streets. By the time I got to the hospital my father was dead.

I didn’t respond outwardly at all. I’d always been the stoical one in the family, tried to be the strong one (around my two much more emotional brothers). I’d been imagining this moment for months. I think I was in shock.

We had visiting hours at the funeral home the next day, and I drove my family there, dropped my mother and brothers off before I went around back and parked the car. While I was back there, the first car that arrived was Gordon, Gerry, and Creston, my three best friends, all dressed up and solemn-faced. For some reason that I still don’t understand, I didn’t want to see them out in that parking lot. I felt like I couldn’t take it. So I parked the car and headed for the funeral home as if I hadn’t seen them, but Creston yelled at me, and I turned back. He stepped up to my car, which I’d left with the door open, leaned in and turned off the motor, which I’d left running, took out the keys and closed the car door, brought the keys over and handed them to me. The look on his face was guarded, but full of concern. The three of them must have thought I was out of my mind. I think I was.[10]

The rest of my time at Shady Side was a kind of haze, though I outwardly did well. I finally started for the football team, which had been my primary ambition the whole four years. The team did decently, and I mostly played well. I was third man in the shot put, while Creston was setting the school record, but we had a great trio in that event, and I enjoyed the spring. Creston and I had both decided to go South to college, I because my brother had gone there, he because his family was Southern; I went to Duke, he to Vanderbilt.

Creston had grown into a big handsome strong guy, much more confident of himself, especially when he stood head and shoulders above everybody else in the shot put (he’d given up basketball to concentrate on the shot, went to the downtown Y and lifted weights down there, getting really strong and hanging out with some tough guys). Our high school careers, seen from the outside, looked successful They’d just been hell to go through.

Friends Again

Creston kept up with people. When I went to his funeral, which was held in Pittsburgh, there were people there from all over the country, all the places he’d lived, skied, played tennis; he knew everybody and everybody liked him. He knew the Hughes twins well until the end of his life, and spent time with them. He would have done that with me as well, I’m sure.

But I was still operating on an unconscious level, still somehow that stupefied boy who stood in the hospital and didn’t react when he found out his father had died. Something in me wanted to get away from that whole part of my life; there was a pain in it that I wasn’t ready to face. I wanted to go to Duke University, hide out in the library and study all of Western literature, and emerge at some time in the future as one of the greatest writers of all time. That was how I lived at Duke. I had a small circle of friends, but not many, and spent most of my time studying. I was doing what I wanted but also powerfully avoiding something. I wanted a girlfriend, but couldn’t open up emotionally; I finally found one who had gone through a similar trauma (her sister had died around the time my father had) and who was similarly closed down. I didn’t really understand what I was doing or why I was doing it. It was pain that would finally awaken me.

In my late twenties I began to see that I had to face what I most dreaded. I wrote some essays about my father, then wrote a novel about his death, and my life during those years, called Football Dreams. The book was widely read at Shady Side, which was obviously the school I wrote about (though I’d called it Arnold Academy); people went out and bought it then ran home to see if they were in it.[11] I hadn’t gone back to the place since I’d graduated, but for my 20^th reunion the Headmaster called and asked if I would speak to the assembled alumni. I said I would.

By that time I had begun to understand the arc of life that my second twenty years had taken, and in my talk I spoke about that, how my whole high school experience had been clouded by my father’s illness and death, how I couldn’t face the whole thing and just wanted to get away, how I discovered that I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t write anything, couldn’t really live my life, if I didn’t go back and face that pain. That was what life had taught me. I was ready to come back.

Various people came up to speak to me at the end of the talk. In the middle of the pack, standing there with a big grin on his face, was Creston.

We were friends again, would get together whenever we were both in Pittsburgh, which tended to be at Christmas holidays. I knew the outlines of his story: he had partied too much in his early years at Vanderbilt, so he didn’t get into any of the medical schools he applied to, but his wish to become a doctor was so strong, absolutely overwhelming, that he eventually went to medical school in Germany, which was rather ironic, because German had been his worst subject at Shady Side. He managed to get through med school, and eventually established a practice in San Diego, where he lived for years. He’d had a lot of girlfriends through the years; though I’d already ended my first marriage by the time of that twentieth reunion, he had never married, though his constant companion for much of the time I knew him was a woman named Paula. He spoke sometimes of his fear of commitment. I think the basis of that fear was his life as a teenage boy in that remote house in Fox Chapel with that smothering mother. He associated family life with being trapped.[12]

He had become the grown-up he always wanted to be. He had a large capacity for drink[13]—I never saw him anywhere near drunk—and also smoked excessively, which eventually became his downfall. His parents had grown more and more prosperous, had a place in Ligonier and one in Costa Rica, and he was always trying to get me to come to one place or another, but I was busy in those years and didn’t take elaborate vacations. We continued to get together in Pittsburgh. I remember one vivid time when my teenage son expressed interest in going to a hockey game, and Creston came up with enclosed box seats, probably from his father’s business. The three of us also had some fancy lunches in Oakland. He always liked to talk to my son, regale him with stories of his father when he was young.

We also saw each other at class reunions. At the last one we both attended, our 45^th, I was sitting with Paula at a dinner table (they were either finally married at that point, or soon to be) when she told me that Creston would never tell me himself, but he had recently been seriously ill with cancer, almost died of it. I asked what kind of cancer, and she made a gesture of smoking a cigarette. She said she thought he was out of the woods at that point; he’d been cancer free at his most recent appointment. I stared at him as she said that, talking to another of our classmates, engaged in the conversation, bursting into laughter as always, but with a wistful look in his eyes I’d never seen before. He’d seen something in the depts of his illness that I had never encountered.

I wished I’d made more of a point at that moment to see him again, get together and see him on my own. I got complacent because Paula said he was cancer free. Apparently patients who are weakened by a battle with cancer are often vulnerable in other ways, something that he as a doctor may have known but I didn’t. He was in Costa Rica a couple of years later when he collapsed of a heart attack during a tennis lesson. People tried to revive him but couldn’t. He wasn’t literally the first person in our class to die, but was the first to grow old—but not old enough—and die.

His memorial service was an uproarious occasion when people came from all over the country, the whole of his life, to be there; in a way I thought I knew Creston, but I knew about a tenth of him. There were many Crestons (and there were a couple of members of his family who looked exactly like him). I hadn’t seen Gordon and Gerry for over forty years; they both memorialized their friend and the friendship the four of us had, Gordon actually going to the extent of imitating the way Creston walked, and talked. He and Gerry were the first speakers of many that evening.

We’d known him when he was thirteen. Somehow or other I think that was the real man.

[1] Theoretically. This never actually happened.

[2] It was complicated. Cam Witherspoon, with his laconic delivery, lectured us on American history, including the World War I soldiers who were known as Doughboys. We were always giving names to teachers, So Doherty (who was also our football coach, and kind of a tough guy) became Jackie Doughboy. Behind his back, of course.

[3] Doherty later became a prominent Pittsburgh attorney. I see by their obituaries that these two men died within one month of each other. What a thought.

[4] A few years later we did make it into the Art Cinema. What we found was a movie about nudist camps, where people were doing such erotic things as playing volleyball. The men wore jockstraps and the women g-strings. Their bodies were . . . the kinds of bodies the nudist camp people have. Not the greatest. I’d fit right in today.

[5] I’m pretty sure we were watching at River Springs—we were watching somewhere—when Steverino jumped into a mammoth vat of jello. I guess it sounded like an interesting stunt at the time. My memory is that it had whipped cream and a cherry on top.

[6] I don’t know what was going on there, thirteen and then fourteen year old boys gambling in what was obviously a bar, then purchasing cigars with our winnings. We should have stepped up and ordered a beer. Either the guy who owned the place just put up with the local kids, or maybe he didn’t make enough money otherwise and decided to take the profits where he could. But I never smoked as many cigars in my life as I did in those two summers.

[7] Creston was from St. Louis, and revealed himself to be a non-Pittsburgher by using that odd word. We called that beverage pop.

[8] My score on the math SAT was 709. My grade in Leaman’s class was 71.

[9] Some wrestlers go undefeated, but I went defeated. I can’t remember ever winning a match, not even in practice. I think I was the worst wrestler in the history of the school.

[10] As another example of that, I have no recollection of my father’s funeral. None. I’ve talked to my brother Bill, who had told me about it, but I’ve blanked it out completely.

[11] We’re talking a few dozen people here. Not a bestseller.

[12] I don’t mean to be too hard on his mother. She loved her son. But he was her only child and she wanted to cling to him as long as he could, including a time when he was over six feet tall and dying to get the hell out of there.

[13] At his funeral his minister talked about the Creston he’d known. “He loved wine,” he said, with a big grin on his face, and I wanted to say, “That was what he served when the preacher was there. He loved bourbon more.”