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LETTERS TO MY HIGH SCHOOL NEWSPAPER Young Men And Fire
All this talk about Homecoming bonfires lately got me thinking about my old friend Bill Knirck '65 (RIP). Knirck. A thoroughly decent fella. As easy to get along with as anyone I've ever known, then or since. And honorable at a time, growing up, when notions like honor could get a little tricky. He was a good guy, a great friend, and I'll just leave it at that.
Except to say that Bill Knirck was also, it turned out, and to our surprise, a lot braver than the rest of us.
KaaNURRRRKK!
So yeah, I think it was always called the "Junior Bonfire," wasn't it? Homecoming week-end. Yes. That's because the juniors were always in charge of building it—of driving around town to junkyards and construction sites and gathering and scavenging, and then piling scrap wood and boards and stolen lumber onto a shambled, jagged mountain there in that parking lot right across the street from the police station on Swift. And then, on the Thursday night before the Friday night when the Homecoming bonfire was SUPPOSED to be lit, the seniors and some older guys from around town would try to sneak up and burn it all down and ruin the juniors' fun.
This was fall of '63, Homecoming week for the class of '64.
It took a couple week-ends of driving around in Bill's old green (Plymouth?) for us to add our share to the pile. Hard work and a lot of time. And a lot of miles on his old car. And all the other old cars out there. Our junior year.
Anybody who knew Knirck won't mind me taking a moment here to remind them of his laugh—not so much a laugh, really, as a giggle, an abrupt burst of glee that would sputter out of him sometimes, suddenly, and cause us all to turn and look at him, and the grin on his face. That grin is an easy thing about him to remember.
So...The fall of '63? You should remember this because it was a pretty big deal that night. And pretty dangerous, too, looking back. Big big BIG pile of wood, about 20 or 30 feet high. The group of us juniors at its base, protecting it, and the larger group of seniors and older guys trying to burn it down.
Absolutely. Without. A. Cop. In. Sight.
Every now and then, one of the seniors would run up with a burning make-shift torch of some sort (a stick with a gasoline-soaked rag tied to its top) and toss it up on the pile. And one of us juniors would scramble up the pile and toss the torch back down. Back and forth like that, all evening long.
And then a couple hours longer until it was past midnight. No REAL violence yet, but some pushing and shoving, and as the night wore on, I began looking around for some way to just slip away unnoticed and go on home. Cowardice unwitnessed is much easier to live with afterwards than the other kind.
Finally, somebody from somewhere got a very long ladder, and a bunch of the older guys ran forward carrying the ladder between them and flopped it down at an angle running up the side of the pile.
In the movies when the guys who are trying to climb the castle wall get a ladder up the wall like that, it usually means the guys with the ladder are about to win.
And now here came Hector Alverez '64, walking up to the base of the ladder with a small, lit torch in his hand. I was surprised to see him there like that. And a little worried. Because Hector Alverez was a man among boys. Literally. He was the closest thing to a professional body-builder that any of us had ever known. He wasn't a bad guy or anything, but still. There wasn't anybody there in our little cluster of juniors guarding the pile who could take him on.
We all sort of backed away from the ladder as he stepped forward and got one foot up on the first rung, holding the torch in his far hand. We just stood there. We didn't know what else to do. And then out of nowhere somebody in a grey hooded sweatshirt bumped my right shoulder and knocked me to the side as he blew past me in a blur, and with the smacking sound of two faces colliding, he dove full-out into Hector Alverez and knocked him off the ladder.. A perfect tackle. They sprawled onto the asphalt in a tangle and the torch skittered away and stopped against somebody's shoe. A couple of the older guys reached down and grabbed the kid in the sweatshirt and jerked him up to his feet.
Hector got up too.
"Who is it?" he asked. "Who is he? I don't know him."
And a head like an angry snapping turtle poked up out of the hooded sweatshirt.
"KaaNURRRRK!" he shouted. "I'm KNIRCK!"
A few minutes later, a 22 year-old man named Jerry Stull '60 (RIP), calmly climbed up the ladder with a gallon can of gasoline and set the pile on fire. And the whole thing burned to the ground. His shirtsleeve caught on fire for a little bit there, and he toppled off the ladder coming down and hurt his leg pretty bad. 57 years later, meeting him by coincidence at Henry's in West Richland, I asked him about that night and why he had been there at a high school bonfire in the first place.
Instead of answering my question, he just looked at me and said somebody had shaken his ladder that night and almost killed him.
After all these years, two old men snarling at each other over their toast and eggs.
So when I came up for Bill's memorial several years ago at the Catholic church there on Stevens, I was proud and overwhelmed by how much so many people loved Bill Knirck. People came from everywhere. Did him proud. Packed to the rafters. And I realized that there were a lot of people there who actually knew my friend better than I did. But I didn't see too many who liked him better.
I didn't speak at the service, but I have this fantasy what I did instead. In my fantasy I'm standing at one end of the hallway in the 300 building and Bill is at the other. Completely empty. I can hear the echo of his shoes clear down there at the double doors.
I take a deep breath and call out, long and loud...
"KaaNURRRRK!!"
Then again...
"Knirck"
TDK '65''
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