My Oldest Best Friend, Dick Ford

Even as a child, I knew that the superlative expression “best friend” was not really a unique category.  Within a few years of meeting Dick, I met other friends who could be characterized as “my best friend.”  I’m sure that Dick learned the same thing, and that there are some, even in the spheres of academia and art, who have been better friends than I. But Dick Ford was the first person to exemplify that category for me, the first and oldest best friend of childhood. 

"Detail of Michelangelo's Pieta" by Dick Ford
Photo by Charles M. Gatlin, Jr.

When we reconnected in 2005, owing to my sister Susan’s diligence in searching the internet, Dick reminded me that we met even before starting school:  “I recall the moment of our meeting on Slade when you walked across the street and introduced yourself a few days before the start of first grade.” He told me he was amazed that I was allowed to cross the street by myself: he was forbidden with the threat of dire punishment if he got into the street.  What he didn’t know was that was the first time I had been allowed to do so, and my mother was watching the whole operation to make sure I looked both ways, etc., as she had instructed me.

That was the beginning of a close friendship, not just for Dick and me, but for both our families. Since our dads both worked for Convair/General Dynamics, and had backgrounds coming from Mississippi, this whole thing may have been orchestrated by our parents. But from our perspective, it felt like the friendship of Dickie and Chuck led to the Fords’ friendship with the Gatlins. (In my mind, he was “Dickie Ford” long after he had dropped the diminutive form of his name.)  I can remember the families on sitting on folding chairs outside, over at our house, waiting for an eclipse of the moon--Dick and I were always interested in astronomy. Lots of weekends at Lake Benbrook, where our fathers ran trotlines, or waterskied. Some years we were in the same class a school, sometimes not.

This friendship lasted through the Gatlins moving from Fort Worth out to Springtown,  During one of Dick’s visits to Springtown, he carved a wooden version of “Sting” from THE HOBBIT. We used a piece of 1×2 pine board to carve out Bilbo’s sword and (for me) Gandalf’s sword, both of which Dick then took home to Fort Worth to finish. I had some glow-in-the-dark paint that he applied, along with other paint and varnish and plastic gems. 

When the Ford family moved to Florida, Dick left “Sting” with me, as well as his set of dinosaurs that we had spent many hours playing with, constructing antediluvian and underground civilizations. We exchanged a lot of letters in those days before anyone dreamt of email or the Internet.

Sometime late in our college years--about 1974 or ‘75--Dick was passing through \the DFW area, and he spent the night at our apartment one evening, but after dropping him off at the airport to continue his journey, we somehow lost contact for about thirty years.  In those intervening years, Dick married, had a son, and lost his wife to illness.  Then, not long after our mother passed away, my sister Susan put us back in communication. 

In some ways it felt like we’d never been out of contact.  In 2007 we had our first visit in person, in the old neighborhood where Susan still lives, where I gave Dick the wooden carved sword he made. Shortly after that trip, he wrote

            “Adam has been interested in the Sting sword since we got back. He's not used to seeing things I made that look so rustic, but he seems to like the idea that I did it when I was a teenager. I don't have Tolkien runes in my head any more, so I can't read the inscriptions without the key in the books.  Alas, minds fade...

            The time we visited was too short; let's try to make a way to have a lengthier chat next time.”

Dick managed to visit a couple more times, with Adam in tow, to my dad’s place in Mississippi during summertime, and we had those lengthier chats.  He visited once after Adam’s death, and I visited him in Mize a few years after that. In between, we kept in contact over Facebook, e-mail, and Messenger.  He kept me apprised as he began to have more frequent health problems, and in April 2019 communicated that he very likely had little time left. But he rallied, surviving more than a year more, with the help of family and friends and visiting health care people. 

That last week of his life, he posted scans of a spurt of art-making, and I commented on one piece in particular, getting a short response back. A few days later, the news came that he was gone.

There are so many memories and stories that could be told! But I’d like to close with this.

In the first email I sent Dick after we reconnected in 2005, I commented that I really liked the way he closed his message--and, indeed, it was how he closed most of the messages we exchanged for the next fifteen years:  “Be kind. Be of good cheer.”  In his reply to my comment, he repeated the words again, adding “[they are like asymptotes; approachable, but not reachable]”

We can take comfort today, on what would have been his 67th birthday, that although we have suffered a great loss, Dick has gone on to be reunited with those he loved, especially his son Adam, in a place where the words “Be kind. Be of good cheer” are no longer asymptotes, but an experience of eternity and blessedness.