Avatus, Jim, and Ernie, at Syracuse

As if to show that it is never actually too late,  yesterday something happened that was an absolute first for me, or so I believe.   I saw a movie about the life story of a historical personage that mentioned another person that I actually knew and was even in their vicinity for several years., albeit in this case far back in geological time, in my childhood that admittedly now is only a dark murkiness in which tiny memories have glints that just barely allow them to be made out with anything approaching clearness.

This person's name was Avatus Stone, though we knew him as Avatus Moore, and he was a classmate at Smothers Elementary School, in northeast D.C., during my time there from 1937 to 1943 or however long he was there. I'm thinking he didn't show up right away.

We weren't "husk buddies" or anything, but we did have something or another to say to each other from time to time, and that distance was partly because he was inordinately fond of an activity that was never my thing in any way.   He participated in a lot of fist fights, though whether they were instigated mainly by him I don't recall, if I noticed.

After graduation we went to Browne Jr. High, and there our paths parted, sharply.   Going to Browne was for me exactly like entering a prison camp, because its principal, a devil named Stinson,  ran such a harsh regime compared to anything we had seen at Smothers that it was as if we were regarded as criminals the instant we stepped inside Browne's doors, and one day during lunchtime, another guy and I had a little session of the usual horseplay in which we pretended to be battling, and this evil rascal grabbed us and sentenced me to spend my lunchtimes without any lunch standing in an empty classroom through the rest of the semester. 

My mother, who understandably and with extreme accuracy had an entirely different view of me, did not take kindly to that at all, and she promptly had me transfered to another school that had the added advantage of being much closer to my stepfather's law office in northwest D.C.   That school was better though not by much, and it had a full complement of kids who were actual criminals, and for them fighting and much talk thereof was their religion.  But I had time to fully establish my credentials as a bonafide weirdo who could never be seen as being any part of that game, a talent that has stood me well ever since in a wide variety of settings  regardless of the surrounding genetic hues, and, aside from occasional taunts, they left me strictly alone, which is all that anybody can ever ask, isn't it?

Meanwhile the rest of my former contemporaries in elementary school matriculated at other places, and, aside from once in high school, I never saw any of them again.  But while at Dunbar High, I heard that right across the street, at Armstrong High, Avatus Moore, now somehow named Avatus Stone, had gone on to become nothing less than that big be-all and end-all, a genuine, football star.  He was a quarterback, with a great throwing arm and also an expert punter, and from there he went to a genuinely bigtime, "white" university, Syracuse, somewhere in New York state, where, however, he was relegated to being "merely" a running back, because at that time no Rainbow, i.e. "black," was thought to be smart enough to be a quarterback.   --As if you have to be smart to play football at all, though there is the question of how anybody can be otherwise, if we are to believe that the players really can understand all those crazy, complicated plays that coaches are so fond of mapping out on blackboards. and clipboards.

As the first Rainbow player to be recruited at Syracuse by a coach named Schwartzwalder, which, by the way I think means "black forest" in German,Avatus Stone became the first in what turned out to be a little dynasty of such players, because following him came one of football's greatest players ever, the absolutely indestructible and unstoppable fullback, Jim Brown, and he was succeeded in turn by Ernie Davis, who was the main character in this movie, "The Express," just as he was the towering figure in the fabulous year of 1961 when Syracuse went undefeated and became for the first time the national champions, in the process trampling a monster team called the Texas Longhorns, and, adding insult to injury,  in their bailiwick, in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, the town where a little later Kennedy was shot, in the same year, 1963, that the life of Davis himself ended far far too early, when he was barely into his 20's, due to leukemia.

As we got ready to look at this movie, I told my wife about Avatus Moore, later Stone, and I wondered if he would be regarded as having been important enough to be mentioned, though his name was never nationally known, and though the pool of the people who had known him, especially in elementary school, had to be shrinking fast.   But  indeed he was mentioned, a couple of times, though a character representing him was never included in the film.   The story of his short career at Syracuse was briefly presented as an example of the wide and high hurdles of prejudice that a Rainbow player had to face even in such a supposedly enlightened Northern setting as that citadel of higher learning.

According to the warnings given to Ernie Davis, and I assume Jim Brown earlier, there being a near total absence from Syracuse of Rainbow coeds, Avatus Stone had dated a so-called "white" girl, and that was a huge no-no.  From then on he had been hounded so badly that soon he had had to leave the team, and not only that but he disappeared to no one knew where, and there the matter, where he is concerned, rests to this day.

Having heard that, and as I wonder what happened with him and where he is now and in what circumstances, provided that he exists anywhere,  though in the intervening years I didn't think of him at all for decades at a time, if ever,  his story has been added to the huge stew of mysteries that keep stirring through my brain, and the answers to which I know I will never get.

Meanwhile I keep thinking of how perfectly incredible it is that the brain, which, after all, is only a piece of somewhat mushy gray meat, can nevertheless retain things as slight and insubstantial as memories for not only seconds but also for 70, 80, and more years.

 This is a part of why it is really such a crime to kill anybody or anything else that is animate, even insects, because they are such miracles of construction.