Nearly 45 years ago I met him. His uncle (who had been fired from his job as an accountant with the Air Force for being a “communist”) had told me that I had to meet him. Paul was convinced we would hit it off. Turns out he was right.
Specs was a recent law school graduate and was awaiting bar exam results. He had a post-graduate fellowship and was assigned to work for legal aid.
Unbeknownst to me, he was nearly 10 years older than his classmates, who were my age. But he had been in the Navy before he started college, because of his age luckily missing both Korea and Vietnam. Working the flight deck of an aircraft carrier was still a stressful assignment -- including being right there when another sailor was decapitated by a helicopter.
But he also got to see much of the world, at least in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, including actually being in Rome for the Olympics there.
After he finished his service in the Navy, his aunts encouraged him to go to college. He had to work nights for the post office while he went to community college, so just getting his AA was a bit daunting. But as he was working towards his BA, the hand of God, or the FSM, or whoever, came out of the clouds and he was tapped, along with a couple of friends, for law school.
For those of you who weren’t born until much later, there was a leftie investigative journalist by the name of I.F.Stone. He published his Weekly from 1953 to 1971, and his work was widely respected. He had a son who was a law professor at a prestigious school, and that son was instrumental in recruiting talented young people of color to his campus. And so, thanks to the GI Bill, Specs completed his law degree and graduated with no student debt.
He was politically passionate, even having been kicked in the teeth while demonstrating in one of the famous soda fountain sit-ins. (Not the one that’s in the Smithsonian, but part of that era.) He opted out after that experience as he felt that he wasn’t a sufficiently non-violent person to eschew self-defense if anybody assaulted him again. But he refused for years to get his teeth fixed, considering the damage a badge of honor.
His uncle was right about us getting along. It was politics that provided the glue. And when the Howard Dean campaign came along and I discovered Daily Kos, Specs was fascinated with the diaries folks were writing. After the first two Yearly Kos gatherings, he decided he wanted to see what this was all about. And so he attended every single Netroots gathering with me, from Austin to Phoenix.
He loved Lizz Winstead’s early morning panels, Today in Blackness, the booths, and breakfast before the big gatherings and the panels. Over the years we saw dozens, likely hundreds, of prominent and not so prominent politicians and public servants. NRN was a major highlight of each year.
But St. Louis was beyond him. You see, during all those years we were going to NRN he was slowly declining further into Alzheimer's. And so Detroit was his last.
He loved Netroots and DK, and I read diaries to him all the time. It helped keep him mentally active and engaged. He was even able to vote in the primary in CA last year, absolutely certain of his choice.
Unfortunately his health began to go downhill more rapidly after that and we had to find a memory care facility last fall. And then, in February, he quite suddenly had to be hospitalized and passed away peacefully a couple of days later, a month short of his 79th birthday— which would have been today.
Two blessings, he never really knew dRmp was “elected”— and the last time he actually saw a picture of djt (we avoided tv news) sometime in December, Specs called him “that a**hole” —
Which only goes to show, he really did still understand.