"When I Was a Dynamiter"

Me at 14, visiting Lee in Wilmette.
Oddly, I can't find a photo
of Lee himself. 

I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve.  Jesus, does anyone?
--"Stand By Me" (narrator)

If we're lucky -- whether boy or girl, rich or poor -- we had one or two friends as kids with whom we were so close that we took our friendship for granted.  Sometimes we keep these friends for a lifetime.  More often, however, we move apart or drift apart as years go by.  Years later, we look back and wonder whatever happened to good old so-and-so.

If in your declining years, your childhood friend writes a memoir that reawakens distant memories, you're doubly lucky. And even luckier if the memoir illuminates not only your friend's personal life, but also the life of his entire generation and of his country.

My friend's name was Lee Quarnstrom, and his memoir, available from Amazon, is entitled When I Was a Dynamiter.  To briefly summarize, Lee was an early member of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters," a friend and confidant of beatniks such as Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, a tramp, a wanderer, an editor of Hustler magazine, a buddy of Hustler owner Larry Flynt and of journalist Hunter S. Thompson.  And, in later years, a reporter, a columnist, and an editor for the San Jose Mercury News.

Lee's book is described in fuller detail on the Amazon website, and in readers' enthusiastic reviews on that website (including my own).  If you have any interest in America in the 1960s, and/or in the fascinating folks who lived during that era -- I urge you to buy the book, or download it on Kindle.

As I did myself, in part for those very reasons.  But reading the book also brought back happy memories of my own childhood. 

Lee and I met in first grade, and shared the same classroom every year through fourth grade, after which he transferred to a newly-opened parochial school.  Because we lived just a few blocks from each other, however, we continued to see each other almost daily.  In sixth grade, his family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, and later to Wilmette, Illinois.  They returned to his home town each summer, however, and Lee and I spent much of each summer hanging out together.  When we were 14, I traveled to Wilmette and spent three weeks with his family, a dramatic episode in my own life that reinforced my already strong inclinations toward becoming a compulsive traveler. 

We took each other's family for granted.  We were in and out of each other's house, ate each other's food (I don't recall his mother's being the cook from hell described in his book), and treated each other's parents as the pleasant but vaguely irrelevant individuals that they were.  His dad was city editor of our local newspaper, county coroner, and two-time unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress.  I was fully aware of all this, but not impressed.  He was just Lee's father, a guy with an inexplicable fascination for heavy-weight boxing matches.

We visited for the last time as kids at the age of 15, the summer following ninth grade, when he spent a couple of weeks at my house, before and after attending Y Camp at the base of then-still-intact Mt. St. Helens, followed by our taking the train and ferry together to Mud Bay in Bremerton where his family was staying with relatives.  I enjoyed our visit, but as I look back I can see the first intimations of diverging lives -- the first time it had occurred to me that he was an extravert and a social adventurer, while I was an introvert with a much more cautious personality.

But nothing of that troubled our friendship between 5 and 15.  The wonder of childhood is the ability to spend hours happily without -- as you look back -- being able to recall what you'd been doing.  We were both excellent students -- top two kids in our class -- and we were both obsessively verbal.  And so we talked -- a lot.  We played endless games of Monopoly, with innovative rules of our own devising.  We traded with each other, as his memoir reminds me, from our vast collections of comics ("funny books"). We developed stamp collections that we treated as competing empires, but empires that maintained trade relations with each other . 

Neither of us had any interest in team sports, a lack of interest that by fourth grade or so would have thrust us both out of boyhood society, but for our redeeming qualities.  Such as -- of course -- our mutually outlandish senses of humor.

Lee spent our older years together trying to convert me to his own religious faith, while at the same time -- I now learn from his memoir -- he was already drifting away into indifference at best.  But as Scott Fitzgerald reminds us: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."  Ironically, he may have planted the religious seeds that took root in my own mind several years later.

We wrote each other, occasionally, following that fifteenth summer.  At the end of our junior year, we learned, to our surprise, that we had both been selected chief editor of our respective high school newspapers.  Journalism ultimately became Lee's career.  I eventually became an attorney, but journalism probably had a lasting effect on the way I think and -- sometimes -- the way I write.  I saw him once while in college, and received a few letters from him over the years.  He once sent me a column he had published in the Mercury News, re-publishing a column his dad had allowed him to write in third grade for the Longview Daily News.  The column included his youthful observations of my own third grade peculiarities. He named names.

Lee and I met in person for the first time in years about six years ago.  We've kept in touch virtually every week -- the wonders of email!  -- ever since.  He's still smart; he's still funny; he's still nuts.  I had good taste as a kid in my choice of friends.