His name was Mike Kelly and he owned a women’s clothing store
in Hope, Arkansas, back when cities had things like woman’s clothing stores
right Downtown. We’ve lost so much in America. Small stores like Mike’s represent
one of our greatest losses.
Down the street from Mike’s store was a men’s store, where,
back when any Southern man had a suit to wear to church and funerals, the purchase
of a necktie included the tying of it into a perfect, so all the owner had to do
of a Sunday morning was loosen it, slip it on and pull it tight. We’ve lost so
much in America.
But back to Mike. He looked exactly as you would expect an
Irishman past middle-age to look. Short, wiry, with a melodious voice that made
his eyes dance when he talked, he made up for lack of size with an infectious
enthusiasm that never wavered. In addition to owning the women’s store, the running
of which he left to two competent matrons, Mike ran the local housing authority.
That’s when I came to know him.
This was back in the day when actual signed contracts failed
in importance to the content of one’s character. In Hope, Arkansas, if Mike
Kelly trusted a person and spoke highly of him, that person was trusted by all,
end of story.
His wife, also diminutive, was named Margarite. They never
had children, a fact which probably made them more attentive and loyal to one
another than normal. Oddly enough, she was of the Methodist faith and he was a
devoted Catholic. When asked about this, his face would brighten, his eyes would
dance, and he would say, as if surprised by the question, “On Sunday mornings,
she dresses and goes to the church on the hill that we can see from our living
room window. I dress to go to Mass, and we have never talked any further about
it.”
Oh, another oddity: When I met Mike in 1971, he and
Margarite had not missed an Arkansas Razorback football game since 1947. Notice
I said “game,” not home game. This would continue until Margarite died
peacefully in her sleep in the mid-1970s.
If the team rated a bowl game at the end of the season, I
would always receive a special invitation to sign on to the bus tour he would
organize. Sometimes I would go.
Things were breaking up in downtowns across America by the
time I knew Mike. We were about to make, in the planning profession, the tragic
mistake of thinking that if “malls” were destroying downtowns, we only had to
practice what Sir James George Frazer called “imitative magic,” and transform
downtown into the best mall-replica we could and all would end well.
Mike trusted us, the planners. It was the only mistake I
ever saw him make.
In reality, downtowns faced inevitable doom as dominate retail
centers. America lost so much as the centrifugal force of suburban seduction
flung retail businesses farther and farther from the city center. No solution would
have saved it.
Mike died not long after Margarite. In an early instance of civil
justice, he had arranged for his assistant, a capable African-American man to assume
directorship of the housing authority. He willed the women’s store to the two
women who had run it for years. He left everything else to a niece and nephew
who came in one day for the funeral and were never seen again, refusing an
offer from a group of friends to set up a small fund for the care of the
gravesites.
I was in town the day of Margarite’s funeral and Mike fixed
supper for us that evening. When we were finishing, he said, “Don’t worry about
the dishes, she’ll take care of those.” Then, “No, I don’t guess she will, will
she?”
He had asked me to pick up Margarite’s brother at the Little
Rock airport a day or so earlier and drive him to Hope. Someone else had taken
him back after the funeral. On the way down, I had remarked to her brother about
how much Mike and Margarite had loved the Razorback football team.
Her brother never moved his head from staring out the
window. “Know what?” he said. “Margarite never cared a thing about football.
She went along because it made Mike happy.”
America has lost so much that we may never get back.
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