Our amazing ability to communicate with people in faraway places has put me in touch this holiday season with some old friends and allowed me to make some new ones. Modern connectivity can be a blessing.
This story goes back to Danner Hall on the campus of then-Arkansas State College in the mid-1960s and involved several friends who later went their own ways and at times lost track of each other.
I've written previously about two of them -- brilliant men who died too young.
One was a Hot Springs High School classmate, Guido Hassin, who came to A-State at the same time as I did. We were among four HSHS students who received the first round of $500 scholarships offered to attract Central Arkansas students. That doesn't sound like much today, but in 1963 it covered tuition and room and board for two semesters.
Guido and I had already been close friends, bowling on the same team and often "cruising" Hot Springs together. On many occasions during our freshman year we "suitcased" home since he didn't have a car. We had different majors and interests -- he was a physics major and as a journalism student I could only spell physics -- so we drifted apart. But we made a mutual friend in Paul Madden, who turned out to be one of my fraternity brothers and my roommate for a summer and fall term. Paul was also a physics major and would be best man at Guido's wedding.
I only saw Guido a couple of times after we graduated. He became Dr. Guido Hassin, a nationally known expert on military applications for lasers and on laser safety, served as a U.S. Navy physicist, wrote a book and finally went to work for a defense contractor in Huntsville, Ala.
In 1990 at the age of 45, after 10 years of battling cancer, Guido died. I happened to be in Hot Springs to clean out the gutters on my mother's house when I saw his obituary. Although I had only work clothes with me, I went to his funeral, which was almost like a high school reunion. Then-Gov. Bill Clinton, who graduated a year behind us but had been one of Guido's neighbors and a close friend, was there.
Afterward, I wrote a column for The Batesville Daily Guard, where I was managing editor, titling it "Everyone needs a special friend." That was before the world was connected, and few people outside Batesville saw it.
Until this year, that is.
That happened because another former "Danner dormie" we all knew, David Dunham, also from Hot Springs, sent an e-mail in November to Paul about an exchange he'd had with Guido's son. Now an attorney in Georgia, David didn't know that Paul had died last April.
Because Paul I had previously connected online, I knew right away he had gone into the hospital with complications caused by a recurrence of esophageal cancer. The end came quickly. I wrote about him in this column, and I also posted that column on Facebook and on our fraternity's listserv.
Within hours the tributes to Paul, mostly from his fraternity brothers, were rolling in, and I made sure Paul's wife Joy, whom I'd never met, got them. She and their children, Brooks and Ivy, already knew what a great man he was, but they learned much about his earlier years. Many brothers contacted Joy directly, and the family maintains his Facebook page because it -- well -- keeps all of us in touch with him.
Anyway, Joy responded to David Dunham's e-mail, and David also shared some college stories, one of which involved Guido. David passed this exchange to several friends, including me, and I sent him a photocopy of the column about Guido.
In short order I received e-mails from Guido's son Bryan, who lives in Houston; his widow, Valerie Neal, who lives in Washington, D.C.; and one of his sisters, Anna Ruth Laribe, who had followed him to ASU but eventually wound up back in Hot Springs. None of them had seen the column previously.
The son, who often uses his full name of Bryan Guido, was only 11 when he lost his father.
"I did the best I could to get to know my father before he died," he wrote. "However, I knew him only through the lens of a son knowing a father, and I certainly never knew him at a time when he wasn't battling cancer. As a 35-year-old now, I also look back and know that there are dimensions of knowing someone that my 11-year-old self simply couldn't have grasped back then, no matter how hard I tried. ... Thank you for taking the time to compose this in 1990, to keep it for decades and to pass it along to someone who very much appreciated reading it; you were truly a special friend yourself."
Soon, others with connections to both Paul and Guido were involved in the online conversation, including Dick Wenham, a retired physician in Colorado Springs who also attended A-State.
And Valerie told a story about being "kidnapped" at the reception after her wedding. She didn't say by whom, but Paul and Dick, who had been a groomsman, were surely suspects.
This holiday season -- or any time -- reach out to an important friend from your past. It's easier than ever.
ROY OCKERT IS EDITOR EMERITUS OF THE JONESBORO SUN.
Commentary on 12/27/2014