This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 24, 2011 - I'm here in the public confessional not looking for absolution but hoping to employ the medium of confession as a means of examining how one deals with his conscience, when he has erred and strayed from a state of loyalty, and furthermore, how to proceed in the future in a more grace-filled direction.
Here's how I got where I am today. A dozen years ago, maybe more, I met a man named Howard H. Hays. Tim, as he was called from infancy, had had a marvelous life by the time I met him, and although he was in his 80s, he saw no reason to slow down.
He'd spent his childhood first in Glacier and Yellowstone parks and in Riverside, Calif. He was a lawyer and an F.B.I. agent and -- important for posterity -- a newsman. He was educated on the west and east coasts at America's finest schools -- at Stanford for his undergraduate degree and at Harvard for Law. He was a raconteur of the first order, and part of his eclectic repertory was his ability to recite the Gettysburg Address from memory and to silence restaurant dining rooms with a Native American war whoop.
Perhaps because he'd enjoyed so much time at Glacier and Yellowstone, he understood the essential glorious value and wonder of public spaces. When he married Susie Gudermuth and moved to St. Louis, he took a personal and philanthropic interest in Tower Grove Park. His reckoning of the restorative nature of parks and public spaces was coupled with another quality, his inextinguishable delight in this peculiar and unpredictable race of ours, humanity. Tim Hays died Oct. 14.
He was a collector of things, Native American art and prints for a couple of examples, but the most elegant expression of his connoisseurship was bringing people he found interesting together, at lunches and dinners and parties of one sort or another, for serious, satisfying conversations.
He and Susie settled together in a south side neighborhood she's been instrumental in reviving, and they lived in a comfortable, unpretentious house in Utah Place. With Tim and Susie as hosts, their home became a meeting place both for small groups and large ones, made up of all sorts of folks, all brought because their being there delighted Tim and provided intellectual challenges for him.
He was forever a newsman. Although the discussion-filled salons in the Utah Place house and luncheons in the Palm House at Tower Grove Park and dinners in restaurants on the Hill were cherished institutions he and Susie established, he believed the various media through which journalism finds its greatest reach and fluency to be the most effective means to a knowledgeable end.
News was his inheritance. His family moved to Riverside in 1924 because of Hays's father's poor health. It acquired the Press-Enterprise newspaper, which his father ran and built, and to which Tim Hays came in the 1940s after pursuing other interests. As the Beacon's obituary of him indicated, he led the paper to glory.
Because his career there was so distinguished and because he demonstrated the fortitude required to stare corruption and injustice in the eye and to reveal its perfidy, he was free to condemn what he regarded as the corruption and devolution of his own craft and to decry in no uncertain terms its preoccupation with scandal and triviality, pursuits fueling the vehicles so effectively carrying commercial journalism in its race to the junkyard bottom.
Several years ago -- I can't remember when exactly -- I began to notice that Tim was slipping, and the more he slipped the more uncomfortable I felt being around him. What began as minor memory losses became more serious. Our meetings grew less frequent and eventually stopped. That is why am I sitting here in gloomy shadows of the confessional, confounded, because I didn't have what it takes to follow the ethic of reciprocity, to lavish upon Tim friendship and affection of the sort he gave to me so abundantly.
I had the perfect offering to take him, after all. Often, I thought what a kick Tim might have gotten hearing about the work we are doing here at the Beacon every single day, and how he might have appreciated seeing the philosophy revered by him and his friend Joseph Pulitzer brought to life not on paper but in the fresh and dynamic milieu of the Internet.
Rather than having thought about it, I should have gone to Utah Place to tell him about it.
Is this commission or omission? I won't push on that. Nevertheless, the lesson I've learned is transparently simple. If your life is been touched and enriched or edified by someone, and something urges you to go to see her or him, and to give the simple gift of your presence, don't tarry. Just do it.