Tag: Sometimes a Great Notion

It was a dark and stormy night.  Coastal rains pounded the Oregon Coast.  STOP!

Mike Wickre would have ridiculed this opening, but Mike Wickre is gone, so I’ll write it my way, mindful of his dismissive wisecracks from beyond.

With little notice, an old friend passes away.  A Facebook message warned of Mike’s imminent demise.  Days later, a concluding text informed his life was over.  Then silence. Whoosh! Gone!! Only his Facebook page remains – that’s death in the digital world.

Word leaked out, there would be no service.  Mike didn’t want one.  No gathering of friends to bid adieu to an old pal.  No farewells, no sharing of memories, none of those anecdotes and stories that lessen our collective loss.  A fading remembrance swallowed by emptiness.  As Jeff Lynne poignantly asked in the best ELO song that nobody’s heard, “Is this the way life’s meant to be?”

I regret there being no funeral or Celebration of Life.  Rituals are important for saying goodbye.  The world is a poorer place, if as it seems they’re going out of fashion.  The deceased’s wishes are usually respected, though with Wickre, I’m tempted to disregard his desire – to poke back, as he so often poked others.

Most would agree – Mike was a difficult individual.  Kristofferson described him best – a walking contradiction, partly truth, and partly fiction.  Need I add: eccentric, bombastic, irreverent, nutty, sarcastic, and cynical, with an over-arching egotistical approach to life.

But he had a charm and charisma that’s hard to ignore.  At the end of the day, he made me a better person.  But half the time aggravated the hell out of me.

The obituary nobody else wrote, so I did

Michael Irwin Wickre was born to Marilyn (Smith) and Raymond Wickre in Bremerton, Washington on Oct. 3, 1955.  His grandmother was a Lakota Sioux.  Mike took pride in his Native American heritage.  He said she was “white as china,” and died without a clue. Fittingly the family moved to Lakota Beach in Federal Way where Mike attended Lakota Middle School.  There he became close friends with Brad Broberg, who remained one for the rest of his life.

The Wickres moved to Enumclaw in 1969 when Mike was in 8^th grade. They lived on S.E. 408^th Street in the foothills east of Veazie Valley. Mike’s younger brother, Alan described their small farm as “the last house before the hill. We had cows, horses, ducks, chickens, rabbits, and geese.  From the creek, there was a pipe to our man-made pond.  It was a great place to be a kid.”

One of Mike’s first Enumclaw friends was Joe Cerne who remembered his dry-witted humor and quick tongue.  “Mike was the funniest guy around,” Joe recalled, “I never laughed louder than being with him.”  Kevin Rustvold remembered how he loved playing pinball and foosball, but remained a serious germ-a-phobe all of his life.  Mike’s class became the first 9^th graders to attend high school since the new building opened in 1962.

Mike graduated in 1973 and found work at Weyerhaeuser, saving money to attend a four-year college. He was proud of his time in the woods and shared plenty of stories about planting trees and setting chokers.  He also worked at Hygrade’s meat packing plant on the Tacoma tide flats and chronicled the time he shoveled pig guts into the grinder.  He remembered the plant as “a five-story pile of filth on a site so toxic it is still uninhabitable for rats,” then added, “It got worse.”

Mike labored at gritty jobs and took classes at Green River Community College.  He hung out with Enumclaw classmates, Tony Pedrini, Kevin Rustvold, John Kochevar, Mike Shook, and Steve Dunning.  Most were involved with the Enumclaw Soccer Club and played for the G.R.C.C. Gators.  (Mike and Steve are seen photobombing the team in a nearby picture.)  Mike had an entrepreneurial spirit. He started a company called Acme Hornet Hunters, whose business was to remove wasp and hornet nests while selling bees to high school biology classes. It wasn’t a stinging success.

After earning enough money and Green River credits, Mike enrolled at Western Washington University in Bellingham. He majored in journalism and wrote for the Western Front student newspaper.  Mike was always attracted to the bizarre and enjoyed his first big journalistic success with a Feb. 10, 1978 article about human cloning. It was picked up by wire services.  He graduated from Western in December 1979 and moved home, throwing himself into the Enumclaw scene.

Mike joined Greg Lovell and Tony Pedrini in renting a house on Griffin Street across from where the new Four Seasons restaurant was being built.  They called their bachelor pad the No-Tell Motel.  He sang backup in Kevin Rustvold’s band named Sphincter.

With Pedrini and Rustvold, he coached Jack’s Scrappers, an Enumclaw girls’ softball team.  After-game parties at the No-Tell Motel featured Rainer beer.  They collected the empty bottles until a pickup load generated enough funds to purchase a refrigerated keg tap.  Celebrations typically started Thursday night after softball and often extended till Friday.  The No-Tell bachelor party ended two years after it began.

In September 1980, he joined the Enumclaw Courier-Herald and worked under its legendary editor, Robert “Bud” Olson.  Mike was the paper’s only reporter.   Small-town newspapers don’t pay much, so he quit the Courier-Herald in April 1981 and joined a marketing guru who showed him the ropes for selling advertising.  The job fit his journalistic background and business initiative.  That training propelled Mike to a very successful career selling newspaper, TV, and radio ads.

On Sept. 18, 1982, Mike married Nancy Ann Johnson, a Dakota Indian. She was the adopted daughter of an English author, Emilie Johnson who wrote “My China Odyssey.” Mike and Nancy bought a home in Northshore between Tacoma and Federal Way.  With what he learned about selling ads, Mike opened his own marketing firm, AdStrategies, LLC, which he later operated out of a condo just above the Tacoma Dome.  He earned bucket loads of money as a one-man advertising agency for auto dealers, car shows, and RV sales firms like Baydo’s.

Mike and Nancy’s marriage fell apart in the 2010s when Mike moved full-time into his Tacoma condo.  Nancy died in October 2015.  Three years later, Mike met Jacinta Mwihaki Njeri online, a nurse who goes by the name Dee.  She was attracted to his humor and found him to be a very funny guy, as almost everyone did.

The couple married on Sept. 19, 2020.  Dee told me that Mike liked to cook and was a good one.  He also enjoyed watching sports on TV, especially baseball, and also World War II histories.  A few months before he died, Mike wrote, “In case I croak, I am on record. Greg Wasell and Steve Bunker were the funniest guys I ever met. Greg was always thinking ahead for a prank. Bunker made planting 800 trees a day fun.”

In early December 2023, Mike fell, hitting his head which caused bleeding in the brain.  He lapsed into a coma and died at Tacoma General Hospital on Dec. 29, 2023, at age 68.  Michael Irwin Wickre is survived by his wife, Jacinta (known as Dee), his mother, Marilyn, a sister, Marla Wickrefujimoto, and two brothers, Alan Wickre and Ryan Wickre.

Mike’s ashes are buried at the family’s Tokeland cabin with a lilac tree planted above. Really, Mike?   Planted beneath a lilac tree? After the last shovel full of dirt was stomped on his remains, Wickre’s ghost whispered a snarky retort, then spit a wad of chew on the grave.

The Wickre I Knew

I first met Mike Wickre in the spring of 1975, the last quarter of my senior year of college. I was living at home and worked afternoons at a coal mining job in Ravensdale.  When the job ended I found myself with lots of extra time.

It was good to be back in The Claw.  I was taking a tennis class so walked the block to my elementary school, J.J. Smith, to hit balls against a cinder block wall.  One day Mike stopped by and struck up a conversation.  He remembered me from school.  Two of his friends, Scott Veenhuizen and Jeff Wasell shared a small rental a couple blocks away. Mike invited me over to hang out and play Foosball.  The evening gatherings typically consisted of beer, pot, Foos, and banter.

We became friends … sort of.  With Mike, you never really knew where you stood, except you were standing beside a guy with an engaging smile and captivating personality.

In the mid-1970s, a commune-influenced, all-you-need-is-Love, whole-grain aura still burned astrologically bright within the faux hippy crowd around Enumclaw.  But Mike’s bruising personality tolerated no such sentimentality.  He was a tough-minded logger who worked in the woods and shoveled pig guts at a packing house.  Yet behind his barking bravado lived a literary wannabe.  And even deeper lurked a misfit hiding his awkwardness.  Mike once confessed, “Yes I know I am socially retarded.   Let me know if you can work with me – your friend, Mike.”

A college classmate, Bruce Hyland reflected on the dichotomy, “An interesting thing about Mike … he seemed to have one foot in the hard-scrabble, Enumclaw working man’s life and the other in the civilized world of writer/soccer player/college life. And he didn’t quite fit in either.  He always straddled between the workingman and the effete world of journalism.”

I never grew close to Mike because, at some primal level, I feared his explosive outbursts. Still, I liked being around him. Mike was that kind of guy – a cunning sense of humor delivered with a biting tongue.  Mike’s favorite quote, one by Winston Churchill captured his antagonistic personality, “He has all the virtues I dislike, and none of the vices I admire.”  Wickre loved Monty Python’s skit, “The Argument Clinic.”

Like many great friendships, ours blossomed on the sporting field.  Mike invited me to join the Dolezal Chiropractic slow-pitch softball team that Ken Prince captained. By the spring of 1977, I was working as a management trainee at a bank and living in Seattle. I drove an hour to Enumclaw for late afternoon games.  We kicked off the season on April 23, playing a double-header on Saturday, one morning game and one in the afternoon.

After the second game, we celebrated our loss at the Logger’s Inn in Buckley.  It was Wayne Podolak’s 24^th birthday which entitled him to a free 72-ounce birthday mug. We all got slowly plowed.  Mike, Greg & Jeff Wasell, and I ended up at Lioce’s in Auburn for more beer and pizza. We nearly ended the night in a bar fight.  Mike was the kind of guy you wanted by your side in a bar fight.  That’s how you built friendships in your twenties.

A few months later I recorded our team’s lineup in a June 13 diary entry:

Catcher –Mike Ackershot and me
Pitcher – Ken Prince
1B – Chris Coppin
2B – Dan Darby
3B – Donnie Robinson
SS – Wayne Podolak
LF – Mike Wickre
LC – Dave
RC – Jeff Wasell
RF – Greg Wasell

Les Hall also played but was absent.  That day we lost to the Lee Restaurant roster headed by Keith Fugate, Kim Kuro, and Stan Fornalski.

At the plate, Mike belonged to the “go big or go home” school of thought.  Every swing was for the fences.  The guy could hit softballs a mile and often did.  Win or lose, the real team bonding started afterward at one of many local drinking dives.  That night we ended up at the Alcove Tavern.  Enumclaw had five or six downtown saloons within a block’s walk, all of the same ilk – neon-lit, smoke-filled, fading posters, pull tabs, pickled eggs.

That summer we waterskied at Lake Sawyer where Mike was witness to a bee flying up my nose and stinging me.  As Mom applied meat tenderizer to my nostril, Mike lost control laughing. He never let me forget it.  That same afternoon Mike got sick after drinking too much beer and vomited on the deck.  Afterward, he marveled at how nice my mother was, “She didn’t even yell at me.  She was always smiling.”

A week or so later, I wrote in my diary, “Friendship is nothing more than shared experience.”  Mike was a shared experience.

He began joining other events with our gang of friends.  We played poker with a longstanding circle of my pals.  Here’s how Mike described us:

“I played with you old bastards – Keith Hanson, Jim Clem, Pode, Lester, Wheels – smart guys, smart asses. I don’t know if I ever laughed so hard.  I had just started a business, scared stiff, no income, playing poker.  And for about three hours, an escape for me, it meant a lot. Old Rugged Cross, high-low split – best game ever.  I sure would like a rematch with those guys.”

It was Mike who introduced us to Old Rugged Cross, a card game we still play to this day.  In a February 2021 message, Mike continued with memories from high school:

“Nothing but respect for all of them.  I had to hit Jim Ewalt in the balls in high school choir, but he respected my authority.  In the bass section, those guys were big – Ewalt, good ol’ Bill Tuk, and Randy Verhoeve took turns punching me in the seeds during breathing exercises.  And it always hurt.  But within a week I had hit them all in their egg bags.  I lived to talk about it.  That’s why I respect those guys because they respected a coward like me.”

Wickre also joined our last two beer smorgasbords in 1978 and ‘79.  What’s a beer smorgasbord?  When a bunch of guys bring assigned half racks of beer to a party whose purpose is to blind taste test the most popular brands until everyone’s blind drunk.  Mike was proud to be there and later bragged:

“It’s important to note my early successes amongst you old bastards. That night I was ‘Rookie of the Year’ and ‘MVP’ for identifying three of 15 beers. We ate saltines, and Podolak, Copperman, and you danced on the balcony in your underwear to celebrate Dale Troy going ‘In the Navy.’  It was also the night my incredibly rich, hot fiancé left me on the Veazie Flats, and that was that.”

He added a concluding coda: “Les Hall drank a pitcher of beer through his jockstrap, which he proudly never washed – for several years judging by the stains.”

In February 1980, Mike called me from the Courier-Herald.  The nation was in one of its periodic freak-out moments with 53 Americans held hostage in Iran and energy costs soaring.  I worked for Palmer Coking Coal Company in Black Diamond. We were experiencing a surge in demand selling coal for home heating.  Wickre came to our sales yard and interviewed my uncle Carl Falk and me.  Mike was a sharp reporter who quickly grasped our market position and wrote a fitting article.  He even doubled as the Courier-Herald’s photographer and took several photos he used in a story appearing on the front page of their Feb. 28, 1980 issue.

In time Mike joined our golf group, the Duffers’ Golf Association (DGA) winning the four-round summer tournament in 1988.  The winner was awarded a passed-along Green Jacket that he kept in the trunk of his car that winter, where it was ruined by battery acid.

Most of the golfers attended the Mariner home opener. Before carpooling to the Kingdome, we assembled at a convenient south-side tavern for pre-game warm-ups.  Mike drove that night, joined by my cousin-in-law, Ron Thompson, and me. Mike proudly wore a new Mariner hat.  From the backseat, Ron snatched the cap from his head.  Mike sternly asked for its prompt return as a drunken Ron Thompson mocked him. Mistake!

Tensions flared. Ron raced from the car with Mike in fast pursuit.  He chased him with a ferocity that scared the living daylights out of me. Wickre’s primal anger gave me the chills.  I interceded with a patient pleading and Ron was spared a thrashing. You could give Mike the business, but crossed a line at your own risk.  I never came close to crossing it.

Mike’s sporting life

Mike often reminisced about his high school years. In order to tell a coherent story, I’ve parsed through his blather and bluster in various Facebook missives and private messages. Let’s call it Wickre lore.

The school yearbook lists his 9^th-grade activities as choir and French club, but he also joined the baseball squad under Coach Ron Miller.  Mike told the story of having to give his up uniform mid-season to Mark Vannatter, a classmate and son of school administrator Don Vannatter. Wickre growled, “I like baseball.  I just don’t like baseball coaches.”

As a sophomore in 1970, Mike turned out for both basketball and baseball, and continued with choir.  On the baseball diamond, he bristled under head coach Frank Osborne’s dictatorial style, but was mesmerized by his instruction.  Like most players, Mike called him by his initials, “My mentor, F.O. taught me life lessons, and how to hit. He turned me into a varsity pitcher.  But he didn’t understand that I won’t back down. You could have made a movie of me and Frank.”

Mike called Osborne his Oedipal coach, a Freudian reference to jealous feelings a son has towards his father.  As a sophomore, Mike was the team’s fourth pitcher which meant Fungo bats and shagging balls.  He recalled Coach Osborne’s superstitious nature, “If you shagged infield balls and the team won . . . guess what?  Wickre’s shagging balls for the rest of the season.”

One of Mike’s true joys was being around that year’s top pitcher and Hornet team leader, Jim Clem.  Wickre called Clem “his all-time mentor.”  Mike laid it out in a private message:

“I have a little manic attack going on.  I have to tell someone this tale to stop laughing.  I was a gangling sophomore.  I played baseball in the 4^th grade and said ‘No mas.’  So here I am, geekier than geek, and I sit down next to Jim Clem.  Like sitting next to one of the Apostles. He talks to me.  I think he was wearing an ascot.  I am having a legend speak to me – my eyes wider than my ears.  When I found out Clem was going to be my coach, I did three somersaults. Then he leans over and lets me in on a secret, ‘F.O. is the biggest prick you’ll ever meet.’”

“My two finest coaches were Doug Baldwin, wrestling at Lakota Jr. High, and Jim Clem, baseball at Enumclaw High.  Both encouraged … not a negative word.  Blessings to both for turning a boy into a man.  I hope I can pass it along.  And actually try to be like Clem who told me his simple mantra, ‘Wick, I get better and better every day.’”

His senior year Mike joined the baseball team but didn’t finish the season.  Here’s how he described that truncated experience.  “Irony is fun when you play along.  F.O. kicked me off the Varsity Hornet baseball squad because I had long hair.  Now, I have no hair.  Karma’s . . . a bitch.”

Which Mike Wickre

Bruce Hyland, a friend from college made a number of acute observations about Mike.

“We met at Western in the journalism program. I had moved from upstate New York after the service and was going to school on the G.I. Bill.  Most everybody else seemed young and soft … Wick, on the other hand, was clearly more worldly wise … audacious, witty, with no B.S.  We clicked from Day One.”

Three decades and a whole lot of changes passed before Bruce reunited with his college friend.

“When I finally came out for a visit after some 30 years, Mike put me up at his place, gave me a car to use, fed me, and lost to me at Cribbage (just like in college).  We went to a college newspaper gang reunion at a Tacoma night spot that some alums organized because I was visiting. We had a great time.  Played a round of golf the following day.  He was seeing (and I met) an assortment of sketchy women who knew that old saw about God giving men two heads, but only enough blood to run one at a time. A good friend in every way.”

By autumn 2016, some six years later, when he returned for a college newspaper gang reunion, Bruce encountered a changed Wickre:

“He’d been on meds for some kind of operation plus he was taking something to help him sleep.  He’s virtually medicated all the time. And weed was legal so he was always tokin’ up. Lives a very isolated life … seems to be getting more irrational.  He was wary and even paranoid … accusing me of screwing up his seriously screwed-up car.  A very different personality.”

Mike made me a better writer

I hadn’t seen Mike for over a decade.  We last crossed paths around 2010 at Gold Mountain and made plans to connect on the golf course.  Instead, we connected on Facebook.  Mike discovered my interest in writing, which I practice on that illiterate social medium called Fakebook.

Now I could enjoy the fullness of Mike’s wickedness. As the Prince of putdowns berates me publicly for overusing personal pronouns – I, me, my.  And says my sentences are too long.  “Keep your sentences short, like Hemingway.” And my paragraphs needed to be shorter.  “Let the words breathe,” Mike counseled.

This typical Wickre response came after reading one of my essays:

“As you know, I usually embarrass you worldwide.  So this is just us boys.  I consider you a great friend, and an easy target. Put Billsie on the tee, and I will give him a proper whack.

“I like tightened copy.  Reporters in the type era were paid by the published inch.  Copy editors were paid to cut words.  See last sentence.  So these idiots that worked for newspapers had to get to the point, tout suite (French for immediately).”

Then a few weeks later:

“Look at you improving your writing.  Paragraphs are fun, every 30 words, just easier to read.  I like when you reach out a bit more in your descriptive – you are on the right track – push the edges and you will get there.  I want to see fire … rage … laughter, tears, and resolution … 1,000 words, no plagiarism or misspelled words.  Lean into this manifesto … don’t let me down.”

And more encouragement:

“I like your tighter writing. You might enjoy the down-to-bones approach of Hunter Thompson and Mark Twain.  Avoid Faulkner, who is verbose.  Flowery puff is just not good.  Capote wrote tight. Condense.  Hemingway wrote some books I am told. Use short sentences with vigorous language. You have the skills but your writing is generally weak and in the passive voice. Your facts can’t be questioned. Use active verbs, and avoid the word ‘I’. You are smart enough to do better.  I have hope.”

Plus advice on what to read and why:

“If you haven’t read it, try Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion” – about loggers. Best book I have read outside the Bible. Read both three times. Some of it stuck. You will get lost in it. It’s set in Oregon, but could have been Enumclaw. But, a crappy movie.”

You’re on my bucket list

For the last five years of his life, I tried to set up a dinner to reconnect.  My efforts began in 2019 with offers to host a restaurant meal with two close friends, Jim Clem and Tom Cerne.  Then came Covid, which tanked plans for nearly two years, much of it due to Mike’s germ-a-phobe consternation.  He kept dodging my efforts with outrageous requests and changing demands.  By the fall of 2024, we made progress toward our long-planned get-together which I thought was getting close.  It didn’t happen – my sad regret.

One of Mike’s last messages to me: “You’re on my bucket list.”  Now I’m left with the loneliest words in the English language, “If only.”  Our dinner reunion will never be realized.  If you have plans to meet an old friend someday, remember John Fogerty’s fateful song, “Someday Never Comes.”

A Farewell to Mike

It was a dark and stormy night.  Coastal rains pounded the Oregon Coast.  My wife and I made our way to Kyllo’s, a seafood grill in Lincoln City where the D River flows into the ocean.  When guided to our table, we passed a nautical display featuring an Ernest Hemingway quote.  I snapped this photo knowing Hemingway was Mike’s favorite writer.

Later that Saturday night I sent it to Mike via Facebook Messenger. He replied within a minute, “Listen to Ernest …”  On Sunday afternoon, Dec. 10, 2023,  Mike wrote his final Facebook post, “Thanks to Bill Kombol.”  I didn’t see that post until after he died.

The title photo standing atop this essay came from “A Farewell to Arms.”  At our Lincoln City home, we have accumulated a nice collection of decades-old books, among them a first-edition hardcover of Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel.  Its binding is secured with black tape and the inside cover is stamped ‘Discard.’  The imprint of Enumclaw Public Library is scratched over by a black crayon.

I researched the quote from the restaurant display hoping it might be from “A Farewell to Arms.”

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep.  Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.  And when you get angry, get good and angry.  Try to be alive.  You will be dead soon enough.”

Here’s an irony Mike would fully enjoy, it isn’t a Hemingway quote.  It’s by William Saroyan, a novelist, playwright, and short story writer of the same era.

Sometimes a Great Notion

On numerous occasions, Mike urged me to read Ken Kesey’s “Sometimes a Great Notion.”  I’ll be honest – he practically bludgeoned me.  Mike read it three times.  The best book he ever read besides the Bible.

Several years before he died, I bought the Audible version of Kesey’s second novel.  Many critics consider it his greatest.  Tom Wolfe, who later chronicled Kesey’s exploits with the Merry Prankster, took note of its brilliance.  After seeing its 28-hour length, I promptly lost interest and the recording collected digital dust.  When Mike died, I knew what must be done.

“Sometimes a Great Notion” tells the story of an Oregon family of gypo loggers.  They are led by a hard-headed patriarch, Henry Stamper who has two sons, Hank the stubborn first-born, and Leland, the sensitive half-brother, from a second and much younger wife.  Leland moves east with his mother, attends Yale, but returns to the family logging show to settle scores.  Conflicts between father, brothers, workers, and log mills brew in the old-growth forests as union forces seek to stamp out the family’s independent ways.

Upon finishing the book, I began to see why this novel so appealed to Mike.  Resistance to authority, the life of loggers, a college man’s struggle against convention, a consciousness-raising literary style – it’s all there.

I finally understood why he so wanted me to read it.  I began to glimpse the specter of the boy he was.  And perhaps the man he wanted to be.  Reading “Sometimes a Great Notion” became my requiem for the repose of Mike’s memory.

Rest in Peace, Mike – under that lilac tree.