THE INIMITABLE DICK QUINN: MY BROTHER AND MY BEST FRIEND

1/23/19

I lost my brother and my best friend when Dick died last Tuesday.

There is a term that, while having been around for a long time, seems to have regained prominence in the last ten years or so.    That term is “larger than life.”  While it’s been around for a long time, I am confident that it did not pre-date Dick because the coiners of that term had to have known Dick.

Dick was a talker.   Years ago, we were sitting in my sister’s backyard with, among others, my dad and my Uncle Tony.   Uncle Tony, after listening to the banter that never failed to spontaneously arise when Dick and I were together, said to my Dad “Dick (my brother was a junior), I’ve known you 55, 60 years and I think I’ve heard you say maybe five sentences.   But then you produced these two boys and neither one of them ever shuts up!   What happened?   Even my sister doesn’t talk like these two!”   Dad just shook his head in his usual bemused manner; one of us probably started talking before he could say anything.   The endless back and forth never seemed to stop, and I was clearly the junior partner.

Sometimes, maybe usually, when we describe somebody as a “talker” it is far more of an insult than a compliment, but not in the case of Dick.  Nobody minded that Dick was a talker; they just loved listening to him.   At Dick’s wake, I told a family friend, Chris McFarland (and I hope I’m not butchering the spelling of Chris’s last name), who is beyond entertaining, that at the moment Dick died, Chris became the funniest man on earth.  There was nobody who could find the humor in any situation more effectively than my brother.   Chris said that Dick and I were perhaps the best comedy team he had ever heard and that it was a shame that we never went on the road, or at least on a podcast; we would have been the greatest.   If that is true, and humility stops me from completely agreeing with Chris, I was the straight man, ironically the Dick Smothers to my brother’s Tommy Smothers.   Note that, once off stage, Tommy was the smart one, so that analogy is deeper than you might think.  Dick could opine, knowledgeably, on just about any topic, on NASCAR, pro wrestling, the condition of the economy as reflected in truck traffic, the market for vintage ‘60s muscle cars, or the utter inanity of the latest tenet of political correctness.   And, like an old boss of mine, Dick always managed to think of that one thing, or sometimes many things, that nobody else thought about.   He was way ahead of everybody.  Dick used to say “Mark and I are a lot alike, only I’m better looking and he’s smarter.”   The first is undoubtedly true, the second not at all true.

Dick didn’t just talk; he held court.   In any venue in which he found himself, be it his beloved family room, his backyard, my backyard, my sisters’ backyards, or the neighborhood taverns he and I often found ourselves in on Friday evenings when we were younger men, he was the man.   The whole crowd would listen with near rapt attention, and everybody came away smarter and happier.  Everywhere he was, Dick was the center of attention; he was larger than life.  I don’t know what we’ll do when a bunch of us get together without him; it’s going to be awfully quiet.

For the last thirty or so years, Dick and I got together nearly every Friday night.  In the old days, we frequented neighborhood joints on the south side and in the south suburbs.   As we got older and slowed down (Thank God or we wouldn’t have lasted this long!), we generally hung out in his family room.   But my history with Dick goes back every one of my nearly 62 years.  

Dick and Elvis shared a birthday (a month and a date, not a year; he wasn’t that old!).  His oldest daughter Julie was born on the same date Elvis disappeared.  Neither is surprising given Dick’s affinity for the King of Rock & Roll.  He came along eleven years before I did, before we moved to the house on Campbell Avenue in St. Walter Parish where I was born.   Given that this was before the time when every kid got his or her own room, we shared the same room from the time I was about five until he moved out when I was thirteen.   No 16-year-old wants to share a room with his five-year-old little brother, especially an increasingly annoying and precocious little brother, but the times when Dick seemed angry about his sleeping situation on Campbell were few.  Dick didn’t seem to mind sharing a room with me and I loved sharing a room with my big brother despite his then being a smoker and my dad feeling compelled to open our door every ten minutes to warn Dick not to fall asleep smoking.   We even had a TV, a “portable” Zenith black and white, in our room, so we had it made, especially with the budding new technology of UHF that brought us Channel 26 with Bob Luce wrestling, Amos ‘n’ Andy (Understand that this was a different time.), and “Red Hot and Blue” featuring Otis Rush live from Don’s Cedar Club at Milwaukee and Division  (“We don’t care if you’re white, black, or brown.   We just ask that you be a gentleman, be a lady, and be 21 and able to prove it.”) and sponsored by Dell’s Furniture Mart (“We have furniture literally hanging out the windows, so hurry on down to Dell’s.”)   We’d talk about everything, from the aforementioned pro wrestling to World War II fighter and bomber aircraft to trains to the local and national political scenes to the pomposity of some local pol who had incurred Dick’s ire.

Dick and I went to the Bear game with Dad on that cold December Sunday in 1965 when then rookie Gale Sayers scored six touchdowns.  Dick still had the program a few years ago and I took it to Anderson’s Book Store in downtown Naperville so Gale, who was autographing his book that day, could autograph it.   Gale, after admiring the perfectly preserved program, asked me if I had really been there and I told him that, yes, my brother Dick, my dad, and I had been there.   He autographed it to Dick, as I asked him.   I hope Sonia and the kids still have that program so they can hand it down to Dick’s grandchildren.   

There were two live “sporting” events that Dick liked above all others:  pro wrestling at the Amphitheater and short track stock car racing at Raceway Park in Calumet Park.   Given that Dad had a pal who was  Wrestling Commissioner of the State of Illinois, a job that, in those halcyon days of Chicago politics at its best, or worst, involved little more than collecting a pay check and getting tickets for one’s friends, Dick and I would often find ourselves ring side for the likes of Johnny Valentine, Mad Dog Vachon, Wilbur Snyder, Verne Gagne, Big Cat Ernie Ladd, Bobo Brazil, the Crusher, and, our all-time favorites, Moose Cholak and Dick the Bruiser.   We were close enough to get hit by the flying blood and sweat and to see the grapplers brawling on the ring’s apron within feet of us.   My dad was alternately bemused and amused, but Dick and I couldn’t contain our excitement as the Bruiser or the Moose took care of the latest “bum” to challenge their dominance of wrestling in Chicago that they, and we, saw as their birth rights.   

We also spent many a summer evening at Raceway Park, a “short quarter” in Calumet Park watching, as announcer Wayne L. Adams put it, “the gasoline gladiators, the champions of chance,” including the likes of Bud Koehler, Bob Pronger, Ray Young, Jerry Kemperman, Ted Janiscek, and Stash Kuhlman (Number 4U) battle it out in a program that usually included qualifying, a trophy dash, three heat races, a sub-feature, and a feature race…a lot of racing for the money.   The enjoyment of these evenings was greatly enhanced by frequent trips to, as Dick would call him, the “Meister man,” with whom Dick was on a first name basis, even though I was, er, slightly underage.  And nearly every one of those evenings, be they at the Amphitheater or at Raceway Park, ended with a visit to White Castle, as did many of those Friday evenings many years later.

Dick taught me a lot of things in life.  He taught me specific things, like how to shoot a beer decades before doing so became popular.  He taught me how to strategically fold a bill into the compartment of one’s wallet that held one’s driver’s license back in the day when such positioning could somehow ease the trauma of one’s encounter with law enforcement.  He taught me how to get from just about anywhere to just about anywhere via maybe the quickest but always the most obscure and circuitous route imaginable.  He taught me how to cook liver sausage and scrambled eggs (Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.), a skill that I have lost due to the departure of my taste for eggs.   He taught me that the British Invasion was composed of a bunch of no-talents playing poorly warmed-over Buddy Holly and R&B tunes, and to think otherwise would call one’s manhood into serious question.

More importantly, Dick taught me general lessons, lessons that have proven to be useful for a lifetime.  He taught me not to be overly impressed with people’s titles.  He taught me not to trust politicians or supposed political ideologies; the former were all phonies and the latter were just manifestations of their phoniness and self-absorption.  He taught me never to jump on whatever silly bandwagon the denizens of political correctness were currently piloting.   He taught me that a man’s first obligation was to his wife and kids.   He taught me, by example, the joy of fatherhood and the elation of grandfatherhood, the first of which I have experienced with an intensity that I could never have imagined and the second of which I will hopefully experience one day.   No one loved his kids and his grandkids like my brother, except maybe his star pupil.

Many of my other passions of life, from history to politics to doo-wop to Motown to R&B to cars to pro wrestling to White Castle to simply just driving were acquired from my brother.   They will always be there, but Dick won’t be there anymore.   I won’t get the calls at 6:30 A.M., when Dick had been up for a few hours matching loads and drivers and finally found time to read the paper, informing me of the passing of a favorite wrestler or stock car driver; news of Moose Cholak’s passing was especially memorable and rough. I won’t get the calls on December 30 informing me that it was Ellas McDaniel’s birthday.  (Look it up; Dick always thought he could get me on that one but he never did.)   I won’t get the annual “Happy Broderick Crawford Day” call on the morning of October 4.   Speaking of, I won’t be spending Friday afternoons or evenings watching episodes of Highway Patrol, made before I was born, complete with a running commentary on the obvious ulterior motives of Officer Dan Matthews and the exact year and model of every car that appeared on screen.  I won’t be watching with my brother documentaries on some arcane aspect of World War II or some long forgotten plane crash, train wreck, ship sinking.  I don’t think I’ll ever be able to watch the Mecum Auto Auction again without crying.  I do think, though, that I will be able to hold up when my wife points out while we are watching The Blues Brothers, one of Dick’s favorite films, that Elwood, the young, thin Dan Aykroyd, really looks like my brother.  I won’t hear “Who do I look like?  King Farouk?” when someone suggests he buy or invest in something expensive…or maybe even not all that expensive.

Nor will I be spending Friday evenings watching The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire over at Dick’s house, which I did because I’m too cheap to buy HBO and because there was nothing like watching those shows with my big brother.   When I hear a tune by James Brown, I won’t, other than in my mind, hear, again, about how Dick saw The Godfather of Soul live in the ‘60s at some little, and long since forgotten, bar in a strip mall on 123^rd and Pulaski.   “There he was…big as life, as close to me as you are now.   I don’t know why he was there; maybe he was hiding from the law or laying low because of the leg breakers?   How the hell am I supposed to know?  But what a show!   They don’t call him the Hardest Working Man in Show Business for nothin’!”  We won’t be cruising around in a component of Dick’s fleet of cars on a hot July night listening to the oldies.   His favorite, I think, was either “When a Man Loves a Woman” by Percy Sledge or “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” by Jimmy Ruffin, but during those rare instances when a Chicago station would play Dave Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” that really got the car rockin’.   

After a long illness, Dick is happy and at peace now.   I have nearly 62 years of memories, lessons, and laughs, and a huge portion of my material, that will stay with me forever.   All those who knew and loved this man have a substantial collection of stories by which to remember Dick and to dredge up a smile when smiles are hard to come by.  

Thanks, God, for sending us Dick Quinn.