The morning was cold here today, grey and leaden. Perfect to make someone special–very special–smile as bright as the sun. How? Easy: a simple gift, an expression of deepest love, and a quiet exchange of trust, all of this touched with an unspoken commitment that is as old as the earth itself. That is how.
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I first met Theodore O’Leary here, in Kansas City, in 1995. He had been book critic for the Kansas City Star since 1940, a correspondent for Sports Illustrated for 25 years, and a respected man of letters whose reputation carried all the way to the New York Times. As if that weren’t enough, he’d also played KU Basketball for Phog Allen, and had been one of his star forwards from 1930-1932, lettering in the game. He was one of the last surviving links to the inventor of basketball, James Naismith, whom he knew personally. While at KU, Ted earned a Phi Beta Kappa key for academic excellence. He also resigned from the fraternity he belonged to then, because he found the place a bastion of ignorance and bigotry–and basketball players didn’t resign from frats in those days. I’d never known a man like Ted.

I submitted to him my what I considered my first mature novel, Walk By The Sound, hoping he would give me some feedback. A month later the phone rang, and this ancient voice on the other end said: “Young man, I’m happy to tell you that I feel this is one of the finest books to have ever come from a writer in this region. Would you like to come over for a drink?”

Needless to say, I was floored. Needless to say, that was the first of many drinks in Ted’s wonderful, rambling, beat-up house. It was filled with 10,000 books, most from his reading, many submitted by publishers over the years–including first editions by Hemingway, Welty, Durrell, and the like. He drank martinis, I drank bourbon. I’d fix em, then we’d sit in his old kitchen and talk as he petted his greasy, ancient, feeble cat. Heck, everything there was ancient. That’s one of the things I loved about the place.

Lord the things Ted saw as a journalist over half a century. I’ll tell some of those stories later–many of them glorious, some repulsive, some simply a reflection of the human condition. But baby he’d seen it all. He died in 2001 at age 90. I, and many other writers, still miss him. There was no one else like Ted O’Leary.
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The pieces at the top are by John Kudlacek, a skilled ceramist who needs no introduction, let alone an explanation.