My Life Is Disappearing Before My Eyes II

Jerry West (1938-2024)

The woman on the phone spoke with a throaty, cultivated, Southern accent.  She had called to speak to my father.  But when I answered, she said, “David.  This is your Aunt Georgia Wade.”

She wasn’t really my aunt.  She was one of those Southern aunts, women who used that title to mean she was a close friend of the family, which she certainly was.  Of all the patients that we worried about when my father died, some years later, Aunt Georgia was right at the top of the list.

I don’t know when she hooked up with my father.  In the days of my childhood she was always around; as we sat eating fresh lima beans in the summer (with no idea of what a rarity that would become; I haven’t had a fresh lima bean in years), my father would say, “Those are from Aunt Georgia,” though that almost went without saying.  The fresh limas were always from Aunt Georgia.  She would bring them by the bag full.

She loved my father and therefore loved his family.  One summer I worked as a receptionist for my father on Wednesdays, his half day (so he could give the regular woman the day off), and I can remember Aunt Georgia sweeping into the office as if she couldn’t wait to see me.  I was, I believe, ten years old at the time.

My father was a dermatologist, but Aunt Georgia was not seeing him for that, though she may have originally.  She was somehow convinced that she had some form of cancer—I never heard what—but couldn’t find anyone to diagnose or treat it.  She was apparently a raving hypochondriac.

My father had a strong interest in what was then called psychosomatic medicine.  He once wrote an article about it in a medical magazine, the only article of his that I was ever able to read (he acknowledged that many diseases of the skin had a connection to the psyche, and cited the Book of Job as an example; as things got bad for Job, he broke out in boils, among other things).  I also think he had genuine compassion for Aunt Georgia, who couldn’t find anyone to address her concerns.  He said that he would treat her, with x-ray treatment, but because he was a dermatologist, he couldn’t do that on the books, so she couldn’t pay him.  But he would be glad to treat her just the same.  I guess he thought it would make her feel better.

She thought it was saving her life.  Hence our worry, when he died of leukemia, in 1965.

Because she couldn’t pay him, she was always doing things for us, especially bringing fresh produce from her garden, in mammoth quantities.  She also looked for various occasions to do other things.  It must have been around that year that I worked at the office, ’58 or ’59, that she got an idea of one particular thing she could do.  She lived in Morgantown, and heard that my brother Bill liked basketball.

He was obsessed with the game.  Ever since we had moved to Claridge Place (I believe that was around ’54), and my father had put up a good backboard and a basket outside our garage in the back (that first day, about ten kids from the neighborhood showed up.  I don’t know how they got the word), we both spent hours, many days, shooting baskets, and developed a deadly outside shot (shooting from the left side, our shots developed a high arc, so they could get over a telephone wire).  Bill in particular not only practiced obsessively, but followed the game the same way, and learned everything he could about it.  He was especially obsessed with Pitt’s All-American guard, Don Hennon.

Hennon was only 5’8”, but he was a first team All American one year and second team the next.  His father, Butler Hennon, was a famous coach, and had a number of unorthodox coaching methods, making his players wear taped-over glasses so they couldn’t see the ball they were dribbling, making them wear gloves so they would improve their touch, making them wear winter boots in the gym.  Bill actually did these things as he practiced out back (he didn’t mind looking weird.  I on the other hand never wanted to be, or look, weird.  I was content to be a half-assed basketball player).

He also followed the college and pro game and was aware that West Virginia had a great team and a great coach, Fred Schaus.  Aunt Georgia lived in Morgantown, and was undoubtedly a major supporter of the university.  She decided she would ask Schaus over to her house for dinner, and ask us to come as well, so Bill could meet this great and famous coach and, as it turned out, his beautiful wife.

As Faulkner once said about going to the White House from Mississippi, “That’s a long way to go for supper.”  This wasn’t that far, but we did go, at least Bill, my father, and I (my brother Rusty was just three or four, so I imagine he and my mother stayed home).  I don’t remember much about the dinner, though I think we had fried chicken.  I do remember that, of all things, we roasted chestnuts on an open fire.  (Too bad Nat King Cole couldn’t be there.)  I don’t remember the conversation.  I’m sure Bill pumped Fred Schaus for all the tips he could give him.

We then had great tickets, my memory is that they were in the first or second row, when West Virginia played Pitt.  I think that there were wooden bleachers in the Field House in those days.  I also remember that the popcorn was terrible; they didn’t doctor it up the way movie theaters did.  Two All American guards were facing off in that game, including one of the most famous men to ever play, and I wish I could say I absorbed all the nuances of the game, but I don’t remember much.  At halftime, West Virginia led by just one, and Schaus’ wife, when I turned and looked at her, held up one finger and said, “Whew.”  West Virginia pulled away in the second half.

That was my brush with greatness.  Fred Schaus led the Mountaineers to the NCAA finals, and he later coached the Lakers when West was with them, famously having great records but never quite winning the big one.  He later coached for Purdue.  He himself had been an All American at West Virginia, and played for a while in the NBA.  He had a distinguished career.

Aunt Georgia didn’t die until 1985, at the age of 87, so I guess she didn’t have cancer in the sixties.  Schaus died in 2010, Jerry West just this year.  Don Hennon, as I write, is still alive; he was drafted by the NBA but decided to go to medical school instead, and was a doctor in Pittsburgh for many years.

He would have gone to Med School in 1960.  Maybe my father taught him.