One
Uncle Rowland took Riley Griffiths under his wing the same year I transferred from Whitman College to the University of Cincinnati. Riley was an outstanding college tennis player, and my Uncle Rowland, an outstanding tennis player himself, offered housing to Riley during his last year at UC. Riley and I shared Uncle Rowland’s roof for that year, and although Riley was two years older than I, we became close friends.
It was during that time that Riley and I drove to Florida for spring break in his very hot Pontiac GTO, a true muscle car, the vacation where I began my relationship with Marianne Mesloh, the UC Homecoming Queen. It was during that time that Riley and I met a couple of young ladies, spending the evening with them, adding Paisano (a very cheap red wine) to their dog’s Gravy Train, then arriving at Uncle Rowland’s at dawn with just enough time to cut the lawn with Rowland’s hand mower before he woke up. I was never the tennis player that Riley was, but I was good at table-tennis. We teamed up for the University Intramural Championships. We lost in the finals.
It wasn’t long after that that Riley graduated and married his long time girlfriend, Carolyn (CJ), and we parted ways.
After Jadyne and I were married I tried to enroll in RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design, hoping to make a career in art photography. I failed. Thinking that it was just temporary, I had a year to wait, no job, and a need to get one. Riley offered me a position selling furniture at the Wholesale Furniture Depot, a business that he and a childhood friend, Dan Grubb, were opening in Blue Ball, Ohio, a couple of miles from Middletown, home of Armco Steel and later featured in the book Hillbilly Elegy.
At the Wholesale Furniture Depot…
Riley and Dan bought .38s in case of a robbery. I took the .38 to the field in back and set up a can on a post and fired it once. Missed. The last time I’ve touched a gun.
I burned cardboard furniture boxes in a wired frame container in the parking lot. The wind and embers conspired to start a fire in a neighboring field.. Riley called the store, expecting me to answer. A customer picked up. Surprised, Riley asked, “Where’s David?” The customer replied, “He’s outside trying to put the fire out.”
A little boy came in asking to use the bathroom. When we answered his father said, “No problem, Fat Boy can pee out Door #23.”
A gravel parking lot surrounded the Depot. When Shannon was born she had trouble sleeping, so CJ drove in circles in her black Studebaker Lark, waiting for Shannon to fall asleep.
Jadyne and I ordered a Flexsteel chair from a catalogue. When it arrived Dan took it off the truck and exclaimed, “Who ordered this? It’s hideous.” I was there, too. “I did,” I said, embarrassed, as it was, indeed, hideous. “I can’t take it,” I said. “I had no idea that it would be this ugly.” “We’ll never sell it,” Dan responded, disgustedly. A week went by. Two, maybe two more. The chair on the floor stayed. A customer came in and said, “Oh my, that’s so beautiful!” I was on the floor. “Yes, it is,” I agreed. “It’s Dan’s favorite piece of furniture!” I added, as Dan was standing next to me. “Isn’t it, Dan?” I asked. “Won’t you be sorry to see it go?” Smirks can last a long time.
One day a customer came in, sat down on a sofa. “How can I help you?” I asked. “I’m waiting for my sofa,” he replied. “It was promised in six weeks, and today is the sixth week.”
I was a good salesman, so good in fact that a couple who had bought furniture from me came in and apologized for trying to hire me away from WFD. “We’d like to offer you the manager’s position at our bait shop in Franklin,” the woman said. Touched, I told her that I was pursuing my Masters degree at Miami, but I appreciated the offer.
Bleeding heart CJ went to a Christmas tree lot and asked for the most pitiful tree on the lot. Amazed, the attendant showed her one. He said, “I’ve never heard anyone ask for that!” Jadyne and I went back to the lot the next day and found the salesman. “I want the most pathetic tree on the lot,” I said.
One night Jadyne and I went to an upscale restaurant with a men’s jacket requirement. Although they had a selection of sports coats to offer me I had come directly from my gig at the Wholesale Furniture Depot, and I had my light gray warehouse jacket with big blue letters emblazoned on the back that read in three lines, “Wholesale Furniture Depot.” We were seated in a corner.
The thoroughly remodeled Wholesale Furniture Depot, Blue Ball, Ohio
Riley is wearing that beautiful jacket, apropos for a gentleman to wear at a fine dining establishment.
After working there for a year, failing to get into RISD for the second time, getting a Master’s Degree, teaching for three years at Talawanda HS, having a son, Jadyne and I decided that our proposed one year stay in Ohio, now five years, was enough. I left the Wholesale Furniture Depot, Middletown, Hamilton, Oxford, Talawanda HS, and Ohio in 1975, and with Greg’s help, packed up a U-Haul truck, attached a Volvo station wagon to the back, stuffed two basset hounds in the Volvo, and headed across the country to Santa Rosa, and a new position teaching English at Cardinal Newman HS in Santa Rosa in 1975.
I only saw Riley one more time, at Rowland’s funeral in 2000. We talked briefly. He had parted ways with Dan, closed the Depot, opened a new store called “Gracious Living” and stayed in the business in Monroe, Ohio, a few miles north of Cincinnati. He renamed it “Riley’s Furniture and Mattress.”
Jadyne and I just returned from a brief trip to Oxford to see the solar eclipse, touching base with a life we once led more than fifty years ago. “Whatever happened to Riley Griffiths?” Jadyne asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “I suppose he’s still selling furniture.” He isn’t. She found his obituary in the local newspaper, The Journal News.
Riley was a friend, someone I admired. By offering me a position in his first venture he was instrumental in shaping the direction my life would take over the next fifty-four years. One thing often leads to another—the job, my failed attempts to get into RISD, my subsequent master’s degree, my three years teaching in Ohio, my move back to California, five more years teaching, and finally, my willingness to be as adventurous as Riley was, leaving all that behind and making a career and a life in a new career, photography, as a one-man band, succeeding because of my own adventurous spirit, supported with love from my wife and family.
Riley died five years ago. I wish I had known.
I can barely make out the Riley I remember in this photo from his obituary.
Two
Mary Wellman was Jerry Wellman’s wife. Jerry and I taught together at Cardinal Newman HS in the seventies. Jerry and Mary moved to Cherie Way, close to our house on Dutton Avenue. We saw them both from time to time, invited them to dinner once. We were eating when we heard a dreadful noise over our heads. “What’s that?” Mary asked, alarmed. “Oh, it’s probably just John falling down the stairs,” I replied nonchalantly, taking another bite. “Unless he cries he’s probably okay.” He didn’t. He was.
When Mary died, Linda Kammer called her “sweet.” She was that. Jadyne agreed, adding that “if anyone called me ‘sweet’ I’d bust em’.” We didn’t see the Wellmans much after I left teaching. I saw Jerry occasionally at breakfasts that Frank Guillen hosted for retired teachers at Cardinal Newman. We didn’t know until Jerry texted me that Mary had died that she had been battling cancer for twelve years. I photographed their wedding in 1981.
I won’t write again about Joel’s passing. I have a link to the blog entry I posted about both Joel and Linda Kammer
Three
A college friend, a fellow teacher, the wife of another teacher, three people who were a part of my life in the seventy-seven years I’ve been living it. By hiring me to work at the Wholesale Furniture Depot Riley was instrumental in shaping the direction my life took; Joel and Mary’s friendships added to it.
Getting back to Uncle Rowland. At a birthday party for him and his twin brother Andrew I asked Rowland how he was doing. “The shadows are lengthening,” he said. Indeed.
Four
Elizabeth Jovel was a neighbor and friend. The Jovel’s fence abutted ours in Santa Rosa, and their three kids often climbed over the fence into our backyard for evening summer games of soccer or baseball. I photographed the girls’ senior pictures, attended their weddings. We weren’t just neighbors, we were friends. Elizabeth was from Guatemala, and her third child, a son, either lives there now or in El Salvador, the home country of her husband, Efrain. They weren’t accountants, but America’s Income Tax, their business, was the place to go to have your taxes completed if you were Hispanic. We went to the daughters’ weddings. We’ll attend the mother’s funeral.