Woodburn: Still feeling lucky decades later
It is hard to imagine anyone being luckier in Las Vegas than I was 40 years ago come next month. Freshly graduated from UC Santa Barbara, but jobless, I got a phone call that proved to be like a Jackpot-Jackpot-Jackpot spin on a slot machine.
A newspaper editor had tracked me down on my honeymoon, no easy feat back before cellphones, to offer me an interview for a sportswriter position. That was the good news.
The bad news was the tiny twice-weekly publication, The Desert Trail, was in Twentynine Palms — a one-stoplight triple-digit-temperatures town that was not exactly where a young bride dreams of beginning her new wedded life. No matter, Lisa and I cut our honeymoon a couple days short and took a detour through the high desert on our drive back to Goleta.
I not only got the job, I got a great boss, life-changing mentor, and dear friend in the deal. The latter happened — nearly literally — overnight as Dave Stancliff, his wife Shirley and their three young sons, took me into their home for three weeks until Lisa could join me.
Under Dave, I received a hands-on journalism education that surpassed a master’s degree and made me a better writer. More importantly, he imparted life lessons that made me a better person. For example, instead of giving a homeless person a few bucks for a fast-food hamburger, Dave would buy him or her a restaurant meal. Sometimes he even surprised Shirley by bringing a hungry stranger home as a dinner guest.
Along with a heart of gold, Dave has mettle of steel. Straight from high school he went to fight in the sweltering jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. Stories of his experiences as a soldier gave me nightmares, yet he didn’t even share the worst of the hell he saw.
Indeed, a decade before Tim O’Brien’s remarkable Vietnam War novel, “The Things We Carried,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, I learned about “The Things Dave Carried” home from that war: PTSD and physical health issues caused by Agent Orange. He bravely battled those foes — and still does — as if they were merely opponents in the ring when he was an Army boxing champion.
To say I admire Dave is a great understatement, so a recent “As It Stands” blog post he wrote headlined “The Two Most Inspirational People I’ve Ever Met” caught my eye. After all, to be worthy of Dave’s highest esteem would require someone quite special. Eugene “Red” McDaniel certainly measures up. He is a Vietnam vet who, after being shot down over Hanoi in 1967, spent six years as a POW before being freed.
“Red, who received the most brutal torture at the hands of his North Vietnamese captors, showed me how indomitable the human spirit is in the worst of times,” Dave writes now, having first met McDaniel in the mid-1970s while writing for the campus newspaper at Humboldt State.
“His positive attitude about everything in life was actually therapeutic for me (and my PTSD),” Dave continues, happily concluding: “Red is 93 years-old and is still going strong.”
Reading further along, I was suddenly struck by twin lightning bolts of shock and disbelief: “The other really positive person in my life is Woody Woodburn…”
The flowery praise that follows is, with no false modesty, unmerited. Nonetheless, the kind words put birdsong in my heart and bring to mind something Chuck Thomas, another dear mentor of mine, liked to say: “Don’t wait until tomorrow to tell a friend how you feel about them today.”
Wise advice for us all.
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Woodburn: Still feeling lucky decades later
