Kiki's Grandfather

A few years before Jack Maynard retired, one of the business agents stopped by his office just before lunch. Out of earshot of the secretary, he asked Jack for $30 to help pay that month’s insurance premium. His boss knew him to be a solid family guy: three kids, a pretty wife, no more than the occasional boozy evening, no poker debts, no girls. He was the one who opened negotiations on organizing the prison guards at Terminal Island and the bakery drivers at Oakmont Mills. He worked with the lawyers to close on the master agreement for Buy-Rite Foods. The man suggested collateral, but Jack said not to bother and gave him enough for three payments. The man’s face was the color of lead.

A few years before he retired, Jack bought a mobile home and planted it on a leased lot on Flathead Lake. Every morning during his vacations, he got up at 5:15, earlier than Olive or any visiting children or grandchildren, and when the sky was clear he drank his coffee and watched the sunlight hit the highest glaciers in the national park to the north. At the lowest angle, two or three mountaintops flamed orange in first light, then softened as the light moved down the slopes and eventually spread across the whole valley and the long expanse of water to where he sat. By then, he’d be reading the Daily Inter Lake and missing the Los Angeles Times. By 6:30, he’d be wondering how hungry the salmon were that day.

In Pocatello in 1917, before he left high school to join the army, Jack almost drove over a cliff while hauling an off-balance load for Bistline Lumber. It was icy, the mountain road narrow. Several times later in life that moment rushed back when he felt the right front wheel lose purchase and the fore of the truck drop a few inches to the side where the packed dirt ended. When he corrected, the load shifted, forcing the back wheels to skid toward the drop-off. Not even five seconds of dread, but the moment haunted him enough to keep him awake the night before his first daughter married, the night of his sixtieth birthday. Even though Jack prayed all his life, he wondered then and since if fate took over when life happened too fast for prayer.

Wilbur Milken left a security deposit at Jack’s office anyway: two deep-sea fishing rigs with heavy-duty reels and steel line, a 9-1/2 foot custom-made bamboo rod, two fly reels, and a tackle box stuffed with line, leaders, and flies. They blocked Jack’s office door the morning after the men had talked. Six weeks later, Wilbur was dead of blood cancer.

Sometimes he found it hard to explain to his grandchildren why, when they pulled a salmon into the boat, they didn’t either kill the fish right away or throw it overboard. After all, when they landed trout at Rock Creek, he showed them how to use the back of their knives to knock out the fish before setting it in a bed of leaves in their creels. In the middle of the lake, fresh-caught fish usually danced on boat-bottom while one of them re-engaged the engine and steered toward a landmark as the other let the trolling draw the tackle out again. Once the rod sat in its cradle, bent with the boat’s motion, someone threw the exhausted fish into the ice chest, where it flopped around a few more times before dying. Sometimes, to explain all the hurry to get the line back at depth, Jack said, "You can’t catch anything if the bait’s not wet." Sometimes he just said, "What a beautiful dancing fish."

The week of his retirement, Western Union delivered congratulatory telegrams twice a day to his office. Fourteen hundred people, including a bishop, an ex-governor, and two U.S. senators, showed up at the Century Plaza for his testimonial dinner. From the dais, he looked out at the crowd—his children and grandchildren at three of the front tables, friends and wives of friends, representatives of all the locals from LA to Albuquerque, representatives from industry, everyone from the Western Conference, all but one from the national office in DC—and he was not sure he could give his speech. A powerful friend from the other side of the bargaining table, Thomas Vick stood at the mike, remembering how Jack had brought him to believe in the labor movement. "Jack Maynard wasn’t just about higher pay and benefits, although he always demanded them for his drivers. Pappy, as the rank and file liked to call him, was never about threats and humiliations. Pappy brought every issue around to dignity, and he fought every fight based on that." Tom’s voice went in and out of Jack’s awareness. In no time, everyone was standing and clapping and someone was pulling his chair back so he could stand up and he was shaking Tom’s hand over and over until finally he was alone at the podium.

After he retired, Jack and Olive spent April to October at Flathead Lake. His best friend and former secretary-treasurer, Johnny Arnett, rented a cottage a few miles up the west shore, and he fished with him most days. Johnny grew up in Hell’s Kitchen and married an Old-French, old-money Louisianan who made him feel unworthy of her each day of their marriage until she died of an aneurism. After finding out he had diabetes, Johnny retired at 59. He was the one who, without fail those afternoons—the fishing behind them, the naps taken, the crackers and smoked kokanee set out on the patio table, the first scotches in their hands—would look out toward the water, over boats bouncing in their slips, and say, "It’s not such a bad life."

After he corrected the truck’s drift the second time, Jack stopped in the middle of the road and took some deep breaths. The canyon had darkened since he left town. He felt cold sweat on his forehead. Fifty years later, the Times reported Jack’s testimonial was held the same day Jimmy Hoffa was sent to Leavenworth for jury tampering. As predictable as his friend those late afternoons, Jack always said the same thing back to him.

"Johnny Arnett," he said. "You’re a beautiful, beautiful man."